As I attended church regularly even before committing myself to the Christian faith, I heard a lot of personal experiences, or called “testimonies”, that prompted people to put their faith in the biblical God.
Could we take personal experience as evidence for the existence of God in the bible?
It had always been a definite “No” on my head. Personal experiences were filled with personal feelings, and feelings were not reliable. How one felt often depended on one’s experiences before the actual instances, especially their personal upbringings. Furthermore, one could always dismiss the testimonies simply by calling them as “coincidences”.
However, as I saw more people and heard more of these testimonies, I found that there seemed to be something worthy of pondering.
One of the testimonies I heard was about drug addiction. A drug addict wrestled with addiction for years. He knew he had to quit, but he never quitted it successfully until he “met” Jesus. Encouraged by Christian friends, he joined a program called Gospel detox at the “Haven of Hope Hospital” at Hong Kong. He quitted addiction successfully with this program. In fact, there were many successful stories like his in that hospital.
I was told that people who quitted addiction from the Gospel detox program statistically had the best chance to quit addiction for good. However, I could not find the relevant data with a quick internet search today.
Could we take this drug addict’s experience as evidence for the existence of the God in the bible?
There were many ways to “explain” his success. It could include his Christian friends’ encouragement, a religious faith that psychologically helped, and the medical facilities that calmed down the addiction desires. These were all reasonable. However, why couldn’t he quit successfully before “meeting” Jesus? He had friends and family all along. As for psychological help, there were many well-trained psychologists in the government ready to help. Medical facilities were never a problem, as long as a drug addict requested.
What made the difference? Could it be really an encounter with the unseen Jesus that healed the body and stopped the desires from drug addiction, as the once drug addict claimed?
