2.2 the influece of religious experience as an argument for God Flashcards
Give an example of an argument for the existence of God using religious experience:
P1: experience of objects indicates that they exist
P2 : God is experienced by humans
C : God exists
What kind of argument is religious experience?
a posteriori - knowledge gained through the senses
What is meant by cumulative argument?
the weight of testimony is proof enough -> the number of people who claim to have had a religious experience has accumulated to such an extent that it is highly probable that RE are real
What are Swinburne’s 2 principles?
- Principle of Testimony
- Principle of Credulity
What is meant by the principle of testimony?
suggests that people normally tell the truth
What is meant by the principle of credulity?
suggests that our experience is normally reliable, unless we have overwhelming evidence to the contrary we should believe that things are as they seem to be
What are some weaknesses in Swinburne’s argument?
- If Atheists have an equally strong conviction that there is no God, then why shouldn’t we accept their testimony?
- People often have good reason to lie, there is no guarantee whether people are telling the truth about their RE
- We have no means of verifying non-cognitive experiences, so we cannot evaluate testimony about them in the same way.
- Swinburne makes the assumption that God wants to interact with his creation
What are psychological challenges to RE?
Freud = human religious behaviour is caused by childhood insecurities and the desire for a father figure, religion is an obsessional neurosis which results in delusions (RE)
What are physiological explanations for RE?
The limbic system in the brain has been linked to profound mystical experiences and this raises the probability that all RE has something to do with the way the brain functions
What does Persinger argue about RE as an argument for the existence of God?
The source of RE is the brain, specifically the temporal lobe
He devised the God Helmet to stimulate the temporal lobe which physiologically manipulated people’s brain waves, causing them to have “RE”
What did John Hick say about RE?
Anything we experience in life is interpreted by us according to what we understand about the world;it is shaped by our beliefs, culture and upbringing.
All experiences are subject to individual interpretation
What does Richard Dawkins say about RE?
in his work The God Delusion, Dawkins equates RE with what he terms psychosis
- religious experiences are just a psychotic mind set, they are illusions created by the mind to cope with the fear of the unknown
