Religious experience
- 2. A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Religious Experience has been argued to be ground for belief in God. In general is defined by: 1. A sense of wonder 2. A sense of new insight and values 3. A sense of holiness and profundity It involves the whole person- mind, emotions, values and relationships. William James states that a religious experience ‘is the feelings, acts, experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider divine’.
- 3. TWO GENERAL APPROACHES There are two general approaches to interpreting religious experience: 1. The experiential: Concerned with the experience itself- it allows the experience to speak for itself without trying to define exactly what is experienced 2. The propositional: Extracts experiences from certain definite propositions- which are claimed to be religious truths
- 4. THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Religious experience is a way of putting particular, limited things in a new and eternal perspective. Rudolph Otto (The Idea of the Holy 1917) stated that a religious experience may be an encounter with something powerful, uncanny, weird, awesome but also attractive and fascinating. He spoke of this as an encounter with the numinous. He also pointed out that a religious experience cannot be described in ordinary language, since none of our words quite capture that special sense of something being ‘holy’.
- 5. TYPES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES 1. Near death experiences 2. Conversion 3. Group experiences 4. Mysticism 5. Meditation TASK: Read pages 54-59 and write a paragraph on each
- 6. MYSTICISM In his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James lists four qualities associated with a religious experience: - Ineffability (different from ordinary experience) - Noetic quality (a type of revelation) - Transiency (does not last long) - Passivity (the person feels passive)
- 7. REVELATION Is defined as God ‘revealing his will to humanity’ or ‘knowledge which is given through supernatural agency’. Revelatory experiences tend to be authoritative for those who have them, going beyond what can be known rationally. It is generally thought of as a gift from God- a moment when God chooses to reveal himself.
- 8. REVELATION RAISES PROBLEMS FOR PHILOSOPHY Knowledge can only be articulated using words that have a commonly agreed meaning, without that, it would not make sense. Once written down, revelation is inevitably reduced to a set of propositions that can be assessed rationally. It is this last process with which philosophy is traditionally concerned. Revelatory experiences are powerful- people who have received them might not be able to defend what they have experienced rationally, but for them it is authoritative.
- 9. THE ARGUMENT FROM RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE The main question- Can any experience of the divine be used as an argument for the existence of God? Every experience involves the interpretation of sensations – there is the thing that is experienced, and the interpretation and understanding of what is experienced. The former is objective and the latter subjective. Religious experience must therefore include both the objective and subjective elements.
- 10. PRIOR KNOWLEDGE If God is infinite, he cannot be located in a particular place, nor does he have boundaries. So arguments about whether or not an experience is of God, require a prior knowledge of what God is. In order for religious experience to be part of a logical argument about the existence of God, there needs to be an agreed definition of what is meant by the word God. Otherwise there will be no way of knowing how the person is interpreting their experience.
- 11. WILLIAM JAMES In the Varieties of Religious Experience, James took a psychological approach to his subject. He made no attempt to argue from his accounts of religious experiences to any supernatural conclusions- he was simply concerned with examining the effect of religion on peoples lives. He points to religious experience as a phenomenon that can have a profound effect- it is self- authenticating for the person who has it. James admitted that it did not offer any logical proof of the existence of God.
- 12. WILLIAM JAMES James did not speak of ‘God’ but o the ‘spiritual’. He was against any aspects of dogmatic theology. It is only in the most general terms that James can be said to offer any kind of argument for the existence of God. James simply points to religious experiences and the role they serve as filling people with love, happiness, humility and peace.
- 13. RICHARD SWINBURNE Swinburne offers a way to classify religious experience PUBLIC EXPERIENCES: • 1) Ordinary, interpreted experience – e.g. night sky (Wisdom’s Gardener) • 2) Extraordinary experience – Jesus walking on water PRIVATE EXPERIENCE • 3) Describable in normal language (Jacob’s ladder) • 4) Not describable in normal language (mystical – The Wind in the Willows – next slide) • 5) No specific experience (for instance when the whole of a believer’s life is seen in a certain way)
- 14. SWINBURNE CONTINUED • Richard Swinburne puts forward two principles: • 1) THE PRINCIPLE OF CREDULITY • maintains that it is a principle of rationality that (in the absence of special considerations) if it seems to a person that X is present, then probably X is present. What one seems to perceive is probably so. • 2) THE PRINCIPLE OF TESTIMONY • maintains that, in the absence of special considerations, it is reasonable to believe that the experiences of others are probably as they report them.
- 15. AS A LEARNED INTERPRETATION OF THE WORLD • If it is held that God cannot be experienced directly and, instead, that an individual learns to see the world in a religious way – then religious experience can no longer be held to underpin faith. • Rather, religious experience then becomes a product of faith. • A religious believer is educated or trained to see the world in terms of the religious form of life he or she occupies and in the categories endorsed by this form of life.
- 16. IT DEPENDS ON PRESUPPOSITIONS • If one believes in God, if God is real within the ‘form of life’ of the believing community’, then the whole world may be seen as being imbued with God’s presence. • St. Francis saw the whole world as reflecting the presence of God. • However this is NOT the same as saying that religious experiences establish the claims that God exists independently of the created universe….
- 17. SOME FINAL THOUGHTS • Many throughout the world are convinced that they have been in the presence of God. Many have staked their lives on such belief. • Such individuals are often intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate– not the sort of people who would lie or be readily dismissed. Their testimony may not constitute proof but, according to James and Swinburne it should, at the least, is deserving of being taken very seriously and not discarded. • Religious experience may well point to a divine ‘other’ the possibility of which, in a materialistic age, is too often ignored.
- 18. CRITICISMS The Vicious Circle Challenge • This holds that religious experience depends on the prior assumptions of those involved. Thus Catholics will experience Mary and Hindus are likely to experience Kali. • This implies that instead of religious experience being a BASIS for faith, they are more likely to be generated by existing faith commitments. They therefore have ’no epistemological
- 19. CRITICISMS The Conflicting Claims challenge • This argues that if Christian religious experiences underwrite Christianity, then Islamic experiences should equally be held to underwrite Islam and so on. • In other words, if one religion relies on their religious experiences to prove the truth of their religion then, philosophically, each religion can claim the same and this provides, as David Hume put it, ‘a complete triumph for the sceptic’ as it implies each religion is equally true.
- 20. CRITICISMS The Psychological Challenge • Some psychologists hold that religious experiences can be explained by psychological factors. For instance, (a) St. Paul’s experience on the Damascus road could have been due to an epileptic fit • HOWEVER it is one thing to say ‘Some religious experiences can be explained psychologically’ and another to say that ALL religious experiences can be explained like this. • Also, a religious believer can claim that if there is a God, God could work through one’s psyche.
- 21. CRITICISMS Kant took the view that human beings have only five senses and that all they know comes through one or more of them. Since God is not part of the phenomenal world of objects that is apprehended through the senses, we cannot have any direct knowledge of him. Kant would rule out religious experience as a way of demonstrating the existence of God.