Evidence and accessibility

«For a believer to wish to invoke the strength of scientific evidence in order to establish the truth of a religious worldview is understandable enough, and our contemporary culture puts such a premium on the bald scientific model of truth that departing from it can seem like abandoning any claim to truth whatsoever. Nevertheless, there are many reasons for being wary of such an approach. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who spent much time wrestling with questions of religious belief, was adamant in rejecting the idea that something like the Resurrection could be established or refuted by appeal to a "historic[al] basis in the sense that the ordinary belief in historic[al] facts could serve as a foundation". I take Wittgenstein's underlying point here to be that the role of evidence in religious commitment is entirely different from that which it occupies on the "Humean" model - a dispassionate scrutiny of empirical probabilities based on past instances. The kind of evidence which, for the believer, supports faith is not evidence assessed from a detached standpoint, but experience that is available only as a result of certain inner transformations. Saying this does not imply some kind of subjectivism about religious truth; it merely makes the point that there may be some truths the accessibility conditions of which include certain requirements as to the attitude of the subject.»

John Cottingham, Why Believe?