Under what circumstances and to what degree is it wise to rely on scientific and religious authorities?
(This is an excerpt from Psychedelic Christianity.)
Psychedelic Christianity is based on the empirical principle: try it and find out for yourself. It is a distortion of empiricism to think of it as belief in only what can be confirmed by what appears to the senses, or else we must expand our concept of “the senses.” If I feel joy, for example, is that something I know through sense experience? Out of all the people I know about, I know which one I am. Is that something I know through sense experience? Whose sense experience? Empiricists prefer belief in what is experienced by oneself directly over belief based on someone else’s claim to authority. Ironically, all too often people who think of themselves as believers in science betray empiricism by accepting unquestioningly the pronouncements of authority figures who claim to speak for science. If we are to accept a claim as based on scientific research, we must understand the claim and at least something about the research. Of course, we don’t always have the time or desire to look into it for ourselves, and so we accept the word of someone whom we regard as an honest expert. But we at least have to do a little thinking about whether there are other credible experts who disagree and about criteria for deciding who is more likely to be reliable. Otherwise, our acceptance of a supposed authority’s claim is worthless.
Similar considerations apply to supposed religious authorities. Psychedelic Christianity is not an appeal to the Bible as “the inerrant word of God.” The appeal is always and only to what rings true in the light of one’s own experience. This doesn’t mean that we should never rely on authorities or that we shouldn’t regard the Bible as authoritative. It just means that there is no escaping the fact that one has a choice as to whether or not to believe a particular source is a reliable authority; that when one does rely on an authority, one can only really do that by understanding what the authority says as it applies to one’s own experience; and that accepting that a person is an authority doesn’t necessarily imply that everything he or she says is correct.