2.5.2 Challenges of religious experience

Question 1

What are Freud’s main points?

Answer 1

• “religion is an illusion”
• “the religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind”

Question 2

Who is Sigmund Freud?

Answer 2

• 20th century psychoanalyst
• founding father of modern psychology
• human behaviour is explained by the subconscious mind

Question 3

Describe Sigmund Freud’s ideas

Answer 3

• Sigmund Freud argued that “religion is an illusion”
• he saw visions as ‘at best signs of immaturity, at worst symptoms of mental illness.’
• he investigated the role of the subconscious mind & believed that religious belief in God was the result of the infantile need for a powerful ‘father figure’.
• religion is the projection of our greatest hopes, fears & desires (e.g. for protection, security)

Question 4

What are Russell’s main points?

Answer 4

• “[religious experiences] are hallucinations”
• “There is no difference between someone who eats too little and sees Heaven and someone who drinks too much and sees snakes”

Question 5

Who is Bertrand Russell?

Answer 5

20th century mathematician, logician & philosopher

Question 6

Describe Bertrand Russell’s ideas

Answer 6

• religious experience have physiological/psychological explanations
• for example, they are hallucinations as a result of eating too little
• they do not prove the existence of God because they have a scientific explanation - they are delusions

Question 7

What are Charles Stross’s main points?

Answer 7

• “[religious experiences] are misinterpretations”
• “one ape’s hallucination is another ape’s religious experience”

Question 8

Who is Charles Stross?

Answer 8

British sci-fi & fantasy writer

Question 9

Describe Charles Stross’s ideas

Answer 9

• apparent ‘religious experiences’ are misinterpretations
• humans wrongly interpret physiologically originating experiences as divine; this is often as a result of social influences
• for example, someone from a Christian background may have a vision of Jesus; the cultural relativism of such experiences demonstrates their human origins

Question 10

What are Schweitzer’s main points?

Answer 10

• “Paul had an epileptic fit”
• “The most natural hypothesis is therefore that Paul suffered from some kind of epileptiform attacks … It would agree with this, that on the road to Damascus he hears voices during an attack, & suffers afterwards from a temporary affection of the eyesight, if his experience at his conversion really happened during such an attack”.

Question 11

Who is Albert Schweitzer?

Answer 11

20th century theologian, philosopher & physician

Question 12

Describe Albert Schweitzer’s ideas

Answer 12

• St. Paul is the best example of a ‘religious experience’ caused internally
• he finds the ‘most natural hypothesis’ is that Paul suffered from epileptiform attacks
• indeed, people with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) are sometimes prone to religious visions & mystical experiences

Question 13

What is Richard Swinburne’s argument of religious experiences?

Answer 13

Swinburne argues that, since people usually tell the truth, there are only three types of evidence that should be taken as rendering their testimonies unreliable, namely:

• if the circumstances surrounding the experience are unreliable, for example through hallucinatory drugs
• if there is particular evidence to suggest that the person is lying
• if the experience can be explained in terms other than God, for example if the person is suffering from a mental illness

Question 14

What does Swinburne interpret of religious experiences?

Answer 14

• since so many thousands of people have had an experience of what seems to them to be of God, then it is a basic principle of rationality that we should believe them
• he called this the principle of credulity - that unless we have overwhelming evidence to the contrary, then we should believe that things are as they seem to be

Question 15

What does Swinburne say about religious experience in his book The Existence of God (1979)?

Answer 15

• he wrote that: “How things seem to be is a good guide to how things are…”
• therefore, in his view, religious experiences provide a convincing proof for the existence of God: “I suggest that the overwhelming testimony of so many millions of people to occasional experiences of God must, in the absence of counter-evidence, be taken as tipping the balance of evidence decisively in favour of the existence of God’.

Question 16

What statistic supports Swinburne’s position?

Answer 16

empirical research undertaken in recent years has indicated that as many as 40% of people have, at some time in their lives, had an experience that could be classified as religious

Question 17

How does Peter Vardy oppose Swinburne’s position?

Answer 17

• in his book The Puzzle of God (1995), Vardy sounds a note of caution
• using the example of someone supposedly seeing a UFO or the Loch Ness monster, he argues that a person, having apparently seen such a phenomenon, could be mistaken & therefore would be right to remain sceptical, unless there were a great deal of evidence to support what he or she had seen: “The probability of all such experiences must be low, and therefore the quality of the claimed experiences must be proportionately high’.