Religion-The Argument from Religious Experince

Question 1

Who?

Answer 1

William James

• religious experience is the stepping stone to belief
• a personal encounter is what is at the heart of their faith-a cosmological argument could be developed without a belief in God.
• James is very interested in the impact religious experience had on individual lives.
• religious experience is also apart of people’s lives because of shared experiences-meditation and major religious scriptures- the bedrock of religious teaching
• the extent to which religious experience can be understood independently of religious traditions is problematic.

Question 2

testemony

Answer 2

-prima facie: on first experience
-an account of an event
-religious account: eg the apostles
-if someone tells us they’ve had a religious experience we should believe them
-why? Reid: we have a tendency to speak the truth and to trust each other-listen and believe
-we are inclined to believe others because otherwise we would have to prove everything and that would result in us not being able to know much. So we generally believe unless something suggests otherwise.
Competeing truth claims:
-problem: too many testimonies conflict eg Paul on the road to Damascus and Mohammed.
Paul: trinity the father son and the holy ghost. Mohammed: one god.
-How do we decide who we’re going to believe?
-should we look at their subsequent behaviour eg see how the trinity changed Paul.
-Problem: different rules of conduct so hard to compare eg Jewish people don’t eat pork.

Question 3

credulity

Answer 3

• from the outside it may be hard to take a particular religious experience as an authority. But from the inside could beliefs based upon religious experience be just as sustained as other beliefs from experience.
• problem over whether or not something is believable: I can’t be an impartial judge when it comes to my own experiences
• Swinborne: what one believes is probably so. How things appear to be is a good grounds for belief in how things are-we wouldn’t get anywhere if we doubted.
• Religious experience aren’t like normal sense experiences-outside of the norm-hard to explain-numinous-unable to put religious experience into words often too complex.
• Blake’ poetry-an attempt at expressing religious experience: “to see a world in a grain of sand”
• Ayer: if you can’t express what you are trying to say coherently then it is meaningless nonsense
• If god is beyond time and space how can we experience him eg Isaiah
• How much credulity should we grant? Could they be treated like ordinary familar sense-experinces and be accepted with the same prima facie authroity. If it is personal and we cannot express coherently we’re still more likely to trust our own epxeriences

Question 4

mere psychology

Answer 4

• prima facie: on first experience
• Descartes-dressing gown fire dream
• Hobbes-we should treat religious experiences like natural phenomena like dreaming
• Good Friday take hallucinogens and the others a placebo-those on drugs have vivid religious experiences, does this show religious experiences are caused by natural causes.
• Ayer religious experience give us information about the one who experienced them rather than a higher power.
• Ayer-cane see in some cases religious experiences aren’t real-they are a product of natural causes all could be meaningless
• not enough evidence to rule out the super natural
• although induced by natural causes doesn’t mean it isn’t truth disclosing
• its about what it means to you
• no evidence either way

Question 5

experiencing as

Answer 5

• Hick
• Elephant example: blind men all feel different parts of an elephant and believe it is different things. Thus when asked to explain what an elephant is like their descriptions all contradict each other.
• Like the various testimonies given
• we are all just experiencing different aspects of God
• easy for us to say we can see the whole elephant

Question 6

a nucleus of agreement

Answer 6

we’re able to say the elephant thing because we can see all the elephant however with God we cannot
like we are mislead over the nature of the elephant we can do the same over god? none of us can see the bigger picture?

Question 7

what are the 4 characteristics which enable us to identify religious experince

Answer 7

• ineffability: too great for words
  problem: too great for words-no comprehension-link to Ayer
• noetic: knowledge and information gained through revelation
  problem: subjective-got to have faith to get the empirical value
• transiency: the effects of religious experience are long lasting
• passivity: the experience is beyond the individuals control
  problem: subjective

Question 8

problems with religious experience overall

Answer 8

• if God reveals himself too much what happens to free will
• too subjective
• could be psychological or misjudged-does that matter
• psychological flaws as a motive-eg insecure person