When we experience God...

.. what should we expect our experience to be like?

People sometimes stumble at this point. They expect that our (or others) experiences of God should be verifiable in much the same way as our sense experiences are.

We see a three-legged table in our room, for example. We can verify this by looking again, by touch, by asking others if they also see the same table, etc. We can leave the room and go back in, to see if the table is still there. We can consult a carpenter to see if such a thing is possible. We can research to see if other three-legged tables have been observed, and so on.


However, if we apply this exact same model to claims of an experience of God, in an attempt to see if that's evidence that God actually exists. we are making an error..

"God is too transcendent, too "wholly other" for us to expect to be able to predict, much less control, His behavior, however accurate our particular experiences of His presence. And it is part of that unpredictability that we cannot expect to ascertain lawful regularities in His manifestations to our experience. Even if our particular readings of God's presence were 100% accurate, we could not expect to discover the general conditions under which a human being would experience a certain divine activity if it were really taking place. Insofar as we have any idea of what conditions are required for an individual's being aware of God, they have to do with subtle factors like openness and purity of heart, factors for the presence of which we hardly have an effective test. Therefore, since there is no reason to expect these achievements, however reliable the practice, their absence is no reason to brand it as unreliable, or even to doubt its reliability."

William P. Alston

Which is not to say that all claims of God-experiences are in fact any such thing...