The Value Of Testimony

The giving of testimonies, the relaying of personal anecdotes, is sometimes appealed to by evangelicals as if it is a crucial part of knowing oneself or someone else is a Christian.  They might recount stories of past experiences, especially conversions, as if these stories demonstrated anything at all about Christian theology or its veracity.  Such people have a faulty understanding of testimony, as testimony does have value, but never in the context of a serious contemplation of the truth of a religion.  The alleged experiences of some other person are of no relevance to whether or not an ideology itself reflects reality, and thus can never serve as positive confirmation that a religion is true.

The reason for testimony's lack of epistemic weight is that the testimony of another person can never be legitimately held up as anything more than mere hearsay: if I was not present to witness an event described by someone else, I do not truly know if it occurred or not.  I certainly cannot know if someone's story of their inner mental experiences is even factually correct to begin with, much less if their mental experiences affirm God's presence in his or her life.  The fact that testimony reduces down to hearsay places almost all historical events on uncertain grounds, for, oftentimes, the only evidence for them is some sort of hearsay (though there is certainly evidence for certain past events).

In the same way, the religious experiences of other people can never be rationally categorized as truthful.  Not only would this conclusion rest upon a non sequitur, it would also ignore the fact that a multitude of people--even within the Christian church--could offer very conflicting anecdotes, with each drawing mutually exclusive conclusions from them.  But testimony does have value.  It is simply not a tool for identifying if someone's beliefs are correct.

The value of testimony is not that the anecdotes of someone else can ever amount to proof that the events of a historical claim happened or that a religion is true.  The ultimate value of testimony comes from the encouragement it can provide to those who already know the truth, not from the fallacious persuasion of those presently unconverted to an ideology.  When I hear the stories of how other people came to truths, I celebrate their discoveries with them, but their stories are never themselves the basis for any part of my worldview.  Hearing how they abandoned false ideas and arrived at truths can be very uplifting indeed.  Encouragement, not epistemological significance, is the value of truthful testimonies.