Religious Experience

Question 1

Theism

Answer 1

The belief that God interferes in the universe even after creation

Question 2

Religious Experiences

Answer 2

A religious experience is an encounter with the divine, an experience of God as a personal reality. It is a non-empirical occurrence that brings with it an awareness of something beyond ourselves.

Question 3

Individual and subjective religious experiences

Answer 3

Where an individual is made aware of a transcendent reality

Question 4

St Teresa of Avila on Religious experiences

Answer 4

described religious experiences as when “God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a way, that when I return to myself, it is wholly impossible for me to doubt that I have been in God and God in me”

Question 5

Direct Experiences

Answer 5

Where the person having the experience (the experient) feels that they are in contact with God.

Question 6

Indirect Experiences

Answer 6

Where there is an inner experience of God’s action in creation (immanence) and ‘something other’.

Question 7

The Toronto Blessing

Answer 7

A room of people fell to the floor during a service. They felt weak, were trembling, laughing and crying. Many there believed that God was present in some way.

Question 8

Exodus 3

Answer 8

Moses sees a burning bush out in the desert in the location at which he is appointed by God to lead Israel out of Egypt

Question 9

Mark 9:2-13

Answer 9

Peter, James and John follow Jesus up a mountain where he transfigures. Elijah and Moses appear and talk with Jesus and they hear the voice of God saying “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!”

Question 10

Luke 24:13-35

Answer 10

Two disciples are walking to Emmaus and a man asks them what they are talking about. They say that Jesus was killed and mention women who had had a vision of angels telling them that Jesus was still alive. They said that their companions went to the tomb and didn’t see Jesus. Later, they eat with this man who broke bread and gave it to them. They then recognised him to be Jesus.

Question 11

Acts 9:1-9

Answer 11

Saul used to persecute Christians on behalf of the Sanhedrin. When travelling to Damascus to gather prisoners, a “light from heaven” flashed around him and he heard a voice telling him that, “I am Jesus whom your are persecuting”.

Question 12

Numinous

Answer 12

Inspires awe or wonder, is wholly other. Coined by Rudolf Otto

Question 13

William James

Answer 13

American Philosopher and Psychologist 1842-1910.

Wrote a key text on religious experiences, ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience: A study in Human Nature’
-recognised that they are likely to be the result of psychological phenomena but argued that this doesn’t mean that they are just that
-identified four core characteristics of religious experience

Question 14

William James’ characteristics of a religious experience

Answer 14

Passive: the participant doesn’t induce it

Ineffable: cannot be described in ordinary language. the experiencer is aware of what the experience means, in a sense, but cannot describe it

Noetic: the believer gains some kind of knowledge which could not have been reached by reason alone, only by the revelation of experience. It provides revelations of universal and eternal truths

Transitory: fleeting or momentary, meaning that the experiencer experiences time in a different way

Question 15

Dramatic or conversion event (Types of religious experience)

Answer 15

-considered a direct experience, described by Rudolf Otto as numinous. Refers to a religious experience that offers evidence of the other
-the person with the vision often has feelings of awe, wonder and humility

-In such experiences, the individual is both attracted and repelled by a sense of awe and wonder, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O lord” (Peter in Luke 5:8)
-Frequently linked to a search for faith a sense of guilt and sin and communication from God involving reassurance and certainty

Question 16

Two Types of conversion

Answer 16

Gradual: taking place over a length of time, conscious and voluntary called “volitional”

Sudden: takes place suddenly, when a clear decision is made, involuntary and unconscious called “self surrender”

Question 17

John Wesley on Conversion

Answer 17

“I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation…he had taken my sins, even mine”

Question 18

St Augustine and St Paul’s conversion comparison

Answer 18

-two very different experiences: Saul had a vision an d a supernatural experience while Augustine had been raised Christian and converted from his knowledge of the religion. Saul’s was a “self surrender” and Augustine’s was a “volitional” experience
-Saul used to persecute Christians while Augustine had weak faith and sinned
-Saul’s experience was involuntary while Augustine wanted an experience

Question 19

Near Death (Types of religious experience)

Answer 19

-occurs when someone dies and is resuscitated. Professor Kenneth Bing identified common aspects, including: out-of-body experiences, feeling of peace, entering darkness and seeing light.
-neuropsychiatrist, Peter Fenwick identified features which represents the ‘full syndrome’ of near death experiences, including: a tunnel, experiencing a barrier, a life review, a decision to return, a rapid return to the body and the removal of the fear of death.
Often dismissed as a lack of oxygen to the brain causing hallucinations

Question 20

Corporate Experiences (Types of religious experiences)

Answer 20

-those which happen simultaneously among a group of people
-an example is the Toronto blessing

Question 21

Mystic experiences (types of religious experiences

Answer 21

when the sense if the self is lost in an encounter with God. Becomes one with the divine. The subject feels on the same level of understanding and being as the divine while retaining the self awareness of a distinct entity.

Question 22

Extroversive Mystic experiences involve…

Answer 22

looking outwards to see God in the world.

Question 23

Introversive Mystic experiences involve…

Answer 23

the person looking within themselves to see their personal identity being merged into the divine unity.

Question 24

Theistic mysticism

Answer 24

involves an awareness of God

Question 25

Monistic mysticism

Answer 25

offers awareness of the soul, self and conscience.

Question 26

William James on mysticism

Answer 26

James’ case studies provide empirical evidence of the effect of religious belief. James concluded that mystical experiences in different faiths are essentially the same: subjects experience the same Ultimate Reality but only understand it in terms of their ‘second hand’ belief structure.

Question 27

Mystics actively seek religious experiences through three steps

Answer 27

-Purgation: ridding the soul/mind of unnecessary thoughts
-illumination: God opens the person’s mind to enable them to understand about him
-Contemplation: the mystic feels a unity with the divine and may experience perfect love and goodness

Question 28

St Teresa of Avila’s four stages to reaching God (for more information see knowledge organiser on GoodNotes)

Answer 28

-Devotion of the heart: through contemplation on the suffering of Christ
-Devotion of peace: a state of inner peace, coming from God
-Devotion of union: a feeling spiritual joy as the soul encounters the love of God
-Devotion of rapture: a trance like state in which the person has a great feeling of light and ecstasy

Question 29

Julian of Norwich

Answer 29

1342-1416 medieval writer. Suffered a severe illness in her late 20s and was given the last rites. Over a five hour period, she had a series of revelations, which she called “showings”. She recovered and dedicated her life to being an anchoress (someone who withdraws from the world to live a solitary life of prayer). She shut herself up in a small room, Twenty years later, she dictated her showing to a scribe. “One of the questions she asked Jesus was why there was sin and hell”

Question 30

Numinous experiences (types of religious experience)

Answer 30

(All from Rudolph Otto) An awareness of the greater, the person feels that they are in communion with another level of reality. God can be known only via sensory experience or logical argument: a numinous experience is where God reveals himself.
-mysterium fascinans (the mystery of fascination): the tendency that mystical experience have to attract, fascinate and compel

Question 31

Rudolf Otto

Answer 31

argued that all religious experience is numinous in nature. It produces a ‘sense of taste for the infinite’ (fear, trembling, a sense of dread, guilt). Believed that religious experiences are described in a way that places emphasis on the rational, ignoring how the reality of these experiences is beyond human reasoning.
Because this is hard to describe, he chose to “adopt a word coined from the Latin numen…numinous”

Question 32

Genesis 18:27 (Biblical Numinous experiences)

Answer 32

“Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes,”

Question 33

Job 40:3-4 (Biblical Numinous experiences)

Answer 33

“Then Job answered the Lord: “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth.”

Question 34

Isaiah 6:5 (Biblical Numinous experiences)

Answer 34

““Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.””

Question 35

Factors that might lead to a religious experience

Answer 35

Illness: Many famous experiencers (Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila) suffered from illnesses.

Drugs/Alcohol: Could lead to hallucination or misinterpretation.

Crowd Manipulation or Mass Hysteria

Question 36

Andrew Greeley on music and dance

Answer 36

Music offers a way of expressing shared beliefs, producing a communal and social experience, engaging hearts and minds.
Dance acts in a similar way, an example of dance in worship being the ‘whirling dervishes’ of Sufi Islam.

Question 37

Benny Hinn

Answer 37

An evangelist who uses music and atmosphere to create the right conditions for those in a high state of expectation to feel that they are receiving a religious experience.
He claims to have received visions of him preaching before crowds, believing that God spoke to him directly.
He is a controversial figure with critics finding inconsistencies in the information he has given about his early life and claim his teachings come from a false understanding of the Bible.
Has encouraged people to fall down, blowing on them or pushing them, critics claiming that this is a hypnotic technique.

Question 38

Andrew Greeley on Prayer and Meditation

Answer 38

Prayer is communion with God. can be prayers of thanks, asking for guidance, forgiveness and praise. Believers claim that answered prayers are evidence for God’s existence .

ArchBishop william Temple observed: “When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don’t, they don’t.”

One particular type of prayer involves glossolalia. The language is given to them by God as a sign of their “Baptism of the Holy Spirit”, proof that God lives within them. Commonly found in the charismatic movement and pentecostal church.

Meditation is a state (in theistic tradition) where a person seeks an understanding of and union with God. In non-theistic tradition (Buddhism) it is for the loss of the self.

Question 39

The main problems with religious experience

Answer 39

-They are subjective and personal and not subject to objective testing
-We cannot carry out a scientific experiment to determine wether the experiences are authentic
-The experiences can be interpreted in a variety of different ways.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein talked about seeing-as: people mistake what they have seen or experienced’
-If God doesn’t exist, there can be no experience of him
-The testimony of religious believers is questionable and cannot be counted as reliable evidence
-Mystical experiences may be the manifestation of of psychological needs
-The emotions and sensations that accompany religious experiences can be explained by biological or neurological factors

Question 40

Bertrand Russell on Religious Experience

Answer 40

Religious experiences are usually private experiences. May convince the individual of God’s existence but do nothing for those nearby. Russell then rejected the argument as it is impossible to confirm or deny what is happening inside someone else. Believers tend to interpret experiences in the light of their own religious beliefs and traditions, so if all prove to be the truth, they cannot all be right.

Question 41

Ludwig Feuerbach

Answer 41

God is a human projection. All the attributes of God are in our nature, they are human aspirations or desires. We create God in our image.
“God is man written in large letters”
Employed the notion of seeing-as: a random series of dots and lines are perceived differently by each person

Question 42

Sigmund Freud

Answer 42

Human religious behaviour was a neurosis caused by childhood insecurities and the desire for a father figure to protect us. Religious experiences are hallucinations that, like dreams, are caysed by deep desires we are unaware of, the product of our unconscious.

Question 43

Michael Persinger’s ‘God Helmet’

Answer 43

An electronic helmet which induced religious experiences by putting small electric signals and magnetic vibrations into the temporal lobes and front of the brain of the wearer.
By suppressing this part of the brain, the sense of individuality is temporarily lost; the left and right lobes feel separated from each other, with each part feeling that something else is there but not knowing what. Some who wore the helmet claim to have had mystical experiences

Question 44

Suggestive of an omni-benevolent God (Strengths of religious experience)

Answer 44

Religious experience as an argument for God’s existence is a posteriori as it relies on testimonies (evidence)
Its premise is the product if facts about the real world.
Believers would claim that religious experiences are not random, but suggestive of a benevolent God. It shows that God wants a relationship with us and so this is theism. Experiences should be keeping with the character of God and should have made noticeable differences in the life of the person receiving the experience.

Question 45

The inductive argument (strengths of religious experience)

Answer 45

those who believe that religious experiences are proof of God usually argue inductively, in that they look at subjective testimonies of individuals who claim to have had religious experiences, in order to fund similar characteristics and then draw the general conclusion that the experiences can only be explained in terms of the existence of God.

Question 46

Richard Swinburne’s inductive argument (strengths of religious experience)

Answer 46

Richard Swinburne in ‘Is there a God?’ argues inductively that it is reasonable to believe that God is loving and personal and would seek to reveal himself to humanity as an act of love and to enable people to bring about the good: “An omnipotent and perfectly good creator will seek to interact with his creatures and, in particular, with human persons capable of knowing him”.

Suggests that they can be experienced empirically (through our senses) and interpreted non-empirically through ‘religious sense’.

Thus, if we are told that someone had an experience, we should believe them even if someone else had a different experience or no experience.

Question 47

Swinburne’s five part classification

Answer 47

-a common ‘public’ sensory object.

-an uncommon public sensory object, such as the burning bush

-a private object that can be described empirically. Acts 10:10-16, Peter sees a vision of a cloth filled with non-kosher animals, teaching peter that all foods are clean

-a private object that cannot be described empirically, for example, Teresa of Avila and Julian Norwich’s respective claims to have felt the mystical presence of Jesus

-those not mediated through any empirical object. In the 15th century, Nicholas of Cusa claimed to have perceived God as an absolute non-bodily spirit.

Question 48

The subgroups of Swinburne’s five part classification

Answer 48

Public:

—ordinary experiences are where a person interprets a natural event as having religious significance
—extraordinary experiences appear to violate the normal understanding of the workings of nature

Private:

—Describable in ordinary language, can be dreams such as Joseph’s dream of God telling him to flee to Egypt (Matthew 2)
—Non-describable experiences are direct experiences of God in which God is revealed to people. These are ineffable.
—Non-Specific experiences could include things like looking at the world from a religious perspective.

Question 49

Swinburne’s principle of credulity

Answer 49

the principles that we should, in general, believe the evidence of our senses
-“How things seem to be is a good guide to how things are.”

Question 50

Swinburne’s principle of testimony

Answer 50

the principle that we should, in general, believe what others tell us
-“In the absence of special considerations the experiences of others are (probably) as they report them.”

Question 51

Strengths of Swinburne on Religious experience

Answer 51

-PofT, many people testify to having had a religious experience, so it is likely that some of them are telling the truth
-Can be felt empirically (it is an inductive argument)
-A posteriori, using evidence from the real world
-Proven to have had large impacts on people’s lives. Consistent with William James’ idea that experiences should be judged on their “fruits not roots”.
-Swinburne took into account “special considerations”
-Swinburne’s approach reflects actual human tendency as we could not get through life if we demanded absolute proof for everything.

Question 52

Weaknesses of Swinburne on Religious experience

Answer 52

-It is equally possible that people are lying
-God helmet proved that psychological factors could induce an experience
-Swinburne makes a dubious claim when saying that we can rely on our senses, and therefore our religious experiences.
-Personal testimony is not sufficient as an absolute proof, even if everybody who had had a religious experience believed that it was from God. Denis Diderot declared that even if the entire population of Paris were to assure him that a man had been raised from the dead, he would not believe a word of it.
-Plato said we cannot rely on the sense or empirical evidence, as “the body is an endless source of trouble for us”. Our senses can deceive us.

Question 53

Peter Vardy

Answer 53

‘The Puzzle of God’, he argues that, using the example of someone seeing a UFO or the loch ness monster, an experiencer could be mistaken and therefore we should remain sceptical unless there is strong evidence supporting what had been seen: “The probability of all such experiences must be low, and therefore the quality of the claimed experiences must be proportionately high”.

Question 54

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Answer 54

used the notion of seeing-as, suggesting that each person sees something as something other than what somebody else might see it as. Each person experiences everything differently.

Question 55

R.M. Hare

Answer 55

called religious experiences blik (unverifiable and unfalsifiable). The believer sees or feels something and claims it comes from God, but that is only their personal interpretation and cannot be proved true or false.
-Supports Peter Vardy, who said, “The argument from religious experience is…going to depend largely on one’s presuppositions.”

Question 56

John Hick

Answer 56

‘The Existence of God’ observes that testimonies of religious experiences might also be equally interpreted in non-religious ways: “any special event or experience which can be constituted as manifesting the divine can also be constituted in other ways”.

Question 57

Sam Harris

Answer 57

‘The End of Faith’: “We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them religious, otherwise they are likely to be called mad, psychotic or delusional”.

Question 58

Richard Dawkins

Answer 58

religious experiences are manifestation of the mental or psychological needs of the experiencer: “don’t expect the rest of us to take your word for it, especially if we have the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings”.

Question 59

Issue of consistency

Answer 59

If God is the source of all religious experiences, then they should all be similar. Why is it that Hindus never see Mary and Catholics never see Vishnu?

Question 60

Revelatory Experiences

Answer 60

are regarded as particularly untrustworthy, with Peter Cole observing that: “Only after thirteen years of examination by a commission …did the Catholic church pronounce the Fatima apparitions as worthy of belief”. Argues that glossolalia in the charismatic movement is theologically unsound, as it is, “not the same as speaking tongues in the New Testament, and natural explanations can explain today’s phenomenon”.

Question 61

Near Death Experiences

Answer 61

critics argue that these are mental phenomena, possibly caused by lack of oxygen to the brain, particularly the temporal lobe. (the centre of emotion).

Question 62

Richard Dawkins on Hallucinations

Answer 62

“if we are gullible, we don’t recognise hallucinations or lucid dreaming for what it is and we claim to have seen or heard a ghost; an angel; or God…such visions and manifestations are certainly not good grounds for believing that ghosts or angels, gods or virgins are actually there”.

Question 63

Douglas Steere in support of religious experience

Answer 63

“As long as it flourishes, it constitutes a continual challenge to what William James calls “a premature closing of accounts with reality”…The mystic’s witness to the accessibility of the living presence…has been an enormous encouragement to the religious yearnings of men”.

Question 64

Logical Positivists (includes Swinburne’s response)

Answer 64

claim the language of religious experience (as well as all religious language) is meaningless because no observations could verify its claims. A.J. Ayer claimed that the fact that, “people have religious experiences…does not in anyway imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge”. While the truth of an observation of a material thing is empirically verifiable, the statement that there is a God has no literal significance.
-Swinburne response: As there is no proof that God exists, there is equally no proof that he doesn’t. “our experience … ought to tip the balance in favour of God”.

Question 65

Anthony Flew

Answer 65

The testimony of religious believers cannot be regarded as meaningful because there is nothing that can count against it. He uses Parable of the Invisible Gardener to show how believers modify their beliefs in order to match the world, which often isn’t suggestive of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.