Religious Experience

Question 1

How did Aquinas describe his R.E

Answer 1

After it all his great learning was like ‘straw before the wind’

Question 2

What are the 3 types of visions?

Answer 2

Corporeal, intellectual, imaginative

Question 3

Describe corporeal visions

Answer 3

• A form of empirical religious experience
• Comes through the sense of sight. The believer sees a supernatural version of an object that is really present
• E.g Bernadette, who saw a vision of Mary at Lourdes and a spring of water appeared

Question 4

Describe imaginative visions

Answer 4

• The experiencer has no power to interact with what is seen and heard in imaginative visions and the experiencer has no power to direct the experience
• A sign that comes from God
• The vision is given to the believer without being perceived by the normal processes of sight
• Occur most frequently in dreams where the experience is seen with the eye of the mindD

Question 5

Describe intellectual visions

Answer 5

• has no image
• Those who experience this claim to see things as they ‘really’ are
• This is a difficult idea to grasp, mainly as intellectual visions are mystical visions and those who have them claim they cannot be described using ordinary language

Question 6

Describe numinous experiences

Answer 6

• Experiences of awe/wonnder in the presence of an almighty and transcendent god
• ## An awareness of human nothingness when faced with a holy and powerful being

Question 7

What did Otto try to do in his book

Answer 7

• in ‘the idea of the holy’, he tried to identify what it was about a R.E that made it religious rather than just an experience
• He wanted to show that it was fundamental to religion that individuals should have a sense of a personal encounter of nature, ‘mysterious tremendum et fascinans’
• this encounter would involve a sense of awe and mystery and a feeling of strangeness

Question 8

Numinous experiences - Otto: What were Schliermacher’s ideas that Otto built on?

Answer 8

• He reacted against the reduction of everything to reason and logic
• Believed the essence of religion was personal experience
• It is not enough just to agree to a religion and its rules
• Religious experiences are self authenticating
• We should formulate statements of belief around r.e

Question 9

Numinous experiences - Otto: Give a biblical example of the Idea of the Holy

Answer 9

• the holiness of god is a key feature of the prophet Isaiah who saw a vision of God enthroned in the jeruslalem temple surrounded by seraphim who call to one another
  ‘holy, holy is the lord of hosts the whole earth is full of his glory’
• Otto doesn’t focus on holy in the moral sense but rather the idea of god being transcendent and numinous

Question 10

Numinous experiences - Otto: The idea of the Holy

Answer 10

• The numinous is the feeling of being in the presence of something greater.
• MAny testimonies from those claiming to have had a religious experience refer to a sense of being in the presence of a power yet feeling distinctly separate from itn
  ‘non-rational, non-sensory experience’

Question 11

Numinous experiences - Otto: Describe what Otto said were the three main qualities of the divine

Answer 11

1) A mysterious quality, a realisation that God is incomprehensible and that we can never describe him or fully understand him
2) God isn recognised as a being of the utmost importance
3) God had a quality that is both attractive and dangerous - God cannot be controlled but at the same time the individual feels a sense of privilege during the experience

Question 12

Numinous experiences - Otto: Otto on knowing God

Answer 12

• god cannot be known through sensory or logical argument
• Ordinary language cannot do justice to religious experience because ti is an experience beyond normal sense experience
• religious language is a ‘schema’ and attempt to find clusters of words which describe an incomprehensible thing
• God is wholly other - distinctly different to humans
• humans are unable to know god unless he choses to reveal himself
• the numinous is where god reveals himself and he is felt on a spiritual level

Question 13

Numinous experiences - Otto: An apprehension of the wholly other

Answer 13

• He explores the idea of the numinous to describe n encounter with god/ an encounter with the wholly other
• the term wholly other signifies that god isn’t the same as humans
• Otto describes the meeting as a ‘mysterious tremendam et fascinans’
• The experience suggests he is extremely powerful and it is an experience which at its centre has the fascination which comes from loving something

Question 14

What does Ineffable mean?

Answer 14

• for James it is an aspect of a mystical religious experience which means it cannot be described in words
• It cannot be described to others as it is a direct experience

Question 15

What doe noetic mean ?

Answer 15

• for William James it is an aspect of mystical experience
  -such experiences are states of knowledge as well as feelings, but the knowledge is spiritual and non-transferrable as well as authoritative

Question 16

What does transient mean

Answer 16

• James: aspect of religious experience
• they generally last no longer than half an hour but the effects are long-lasting and often ahem recurrent consequences

Question 17

What does passivity mean>

Answer 17

• for William James it is an aspect of mystical religious experiences
• the experiencer doesn’t control the experience but rather is controlled by it

Question 18

What does James believe about mystical experiences

Answer 18

1) R.E is primary and comes from a factually existing God - organised religion is secondary. RE are primary as they re an interaction with god. they produce positive results and god is real because he has real consequences
2) Although God exists factually, he isn’t the being described by Judea-Christian teaching
- James isn;’t concerned with proving the existence of the god of classical theism
3) Experience teaches us that religious life involves three benefits
- life is given significance due to the existence of a higher, spiritual universe
- the true end of humanity is union with the higher universe - heaven
- prayer is purposeful because it makes people feel better
4) The psychological benefits of this kind of spiritual communion involve certain things
- life is given meaning and purpose and experience is assured and shown love and affection
5) This kind of religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness
- mystical experiences must be noetic, ineffable, passive, and transient

Question 19

describe criticism of William James

Answer 19

• Some critics James’ four marks (PINT) and have tried to demonstrate these are inadequate when describing RE
• some have tried to show ordinary experiences can have these qualities (eg giving birth/intense pain)
• if an ordinary experience can therefore share the qualities of a religious experience, James has then failed to capture anything specific about a religious experience
• other scholars try to show not all religious experiences have all of the marks

Question 20

What do Stace and James have in common?

Answer 20

• Both agree there is little point in trying to prove the existence of God through reason
• He set himself the task of proving that mysticism makes sense - State agrees with James and St Teresa of Avila that the goal of R.E is union with God

Question 21

How does State define mysticism/ what are his criteria for mystical experiences

Answer 21

1)’non sensuous and non intellectual union with the divine’. In its highest form the senses fail to work and the rational intellect is replaced by pure consciousness
2) It is unrelated to mystery/parapsychological phenomena
3)Visions and voices are not mystical experiences - genuine mystical experiences are non sensuous nd have no form/colour/smell
4) The central characteristic is that they involve the apprehension of an ultimate non-sensuous unity in all things, a one-ness which to neither the senses nor the reason can penetrate - it transcends our consciousness

Question 22

Describe how Stace differentiated between introvertive and extroversive visions

Answer 22

• Extrovertive mystic still sees the world of normal objects with physical senses but these objects are transfigured so that the non-sensuous unity shines through them
• The introvertive mystical experience involves complete suppression of the senses and ordinary consciousness is replaced by another kind of consciousness - mystical consciousness. This is non-intellectual as the normal intellect is not functioning and it is replaced by mystical consciousness

Question 23

Give challenges to religious experience from philosophy/theology and the responses

Answer 23

1) Challenge - we only have the word of the experiencer that it took place. Response: some are group experiences so the evidence is wider, and James claimed that the transforming effect f those miracles was testimony to their genuineness
2) the experiences are highly subjective and personal so aren’t objectively real - however, people who ahve had religious experience are likely to claim they are real
3) The inability to describe experience means they aren’t real - however, ineffability is a key characteristic of religious experience in all religions. They are difficult to investigate but that doesn’t mean they don’t happen
4) RE are alien to most people so can’t be believed - many people have reported having some kind of R.E
5) Mystical experiences are elitist and only occur if you have an intimate connection with god - however, according to Vatican II mysticism is a gift available to all

Question 24

Describe the challenges to R.E from science/psychology

Answer 24

1) Freud claimed that visions were just illustrations of subconscious desires/fears. Religion is just wish-fulfilment by the unconscious mind. The idea of God helps us to control fear of the unknown/death but these fears are infantile/neurotic. Where people claim to have R.E and visions they are just our need to have control over our helpless state - Response: Jung argued that the visions of sane people weren’t necessarily delusions
2) TLE - people who suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy are sometimes prone to having religious visions/mystical experiences - suggests they are nothing more than abnormal states of the brain - response: this doesn’t mean they aren’t real
3) neurotheology uses neuroscience to explain that experiences can be stimulated through devices like Persinger’s ‘God helmet’ - its stimulation of the temporal lobe leads to experiences similar to religious experiences and suggests they are due to particular states of the brain. Drugs can also stimulate responses like these. Response: The evidence of neurotheology and hallucinogenic drugs doesn’t mean that religious experiences are simply just states of the brain - God could be choosing to communicate this way as all communication must go through the brain anyway
The believer has no difficulty in accepting that as well as receiving religious experiences the mind can generate him and interact with god

Question 25

Swinburne on the possibility of God not existing

Answer 25

Swinburne says that our experiences of the world suggest god probably exists and religious experiences are part of the probability of this argument

Question 26

Describe Swinburne’s principle of Credulity

Answer 26

• If it seems to someone that ‘x’ is present it probably is’
• Swinburne moves from ordinary sense experience to talking about religious experience - interesting leap - having an experience of seeing a chair is good evidence that it exists
• ‘What one seems to perceive is probably so’

Question 27

Describe the special considerations for the principle of credulity

Answer 27

1) reliability of the claim - if someone has lied in the past there is good evidence they are lying again
2) truth of the claim - if someone makes unlikely perceptual claims it is unlikely the R.E happened
3) The third is he difficulty of showing god was present in the experience - the believer needs top be able to show this
4) The possibility that what happened can be accounted for in other ways -= eg TLE

Question 28

Describe Swinburne’s rejections of the special considerations of the principle of credulity

Answer 28

He rejects them all
1) Just because someone has lied in the past doesn’t mean they are lying now
2) making one false claim doesn’t mean any claim to an r.e isn’t true
3) God is presumably everywhere, so rather than it being the experiencer’s responsibility to show he was there, it is the doubter’s responsibility to show he was not
4) As Creator, God underpins all processes including those that go on in the brain so The believer has no difficulty in accepting that as well as receiving religious experiences the mind can generate him and interact with godD

Question 29

Describe the principle of testimony

Answer 29

• Counterpart to the principle of credulity
• Swinburne: ‘the experiences of others are probably as they report them ‘
• We should believe what people tell us provided there are no real; reasons we shouldn’t
• if someone is normally reliable and honest we should believe them when they say they ahvehad an r.e
• It is the skeptic’s job to show they should be rejected rather than the experiencer’s job to show it is true

Question 30

Describe Swinburne’s conclusions

Answer 30

1) Someone who has had a religious experience has good reason , by the principle of credulity, to believe there is a god
2) The testimony of others who report such a claim supports this
3)Without religious experience, the probability of the existence of god is about 50/50 - if we add the testimony of the r.Eit becomes greater and we can conclude that god probably exists

Question 31

Explain the challenges to Swinburne

Answer 31

1) Swinburne seems to be saying that since normal sense experience is reliable, religious experiences are reliable evidence for the existence of god - this seems dubious, can we really move from being convinced about the reliability of what people claim to have observed from sense experience to the reliability of claims about mystical experience?
2) To explain this further, accounts of normal sense experience are third-person public - this means that someone else can confirm your claims whereas r.e are first person private and unverifiable by anyone else
3) even if everyone else who had a religious experience believed completely it ws the experience of god, it wouldn’t prove ;god; was the right explanation

Question 32

Explain Vardy’s criticism of Swinburne

Answer 32

• ’ a great number of people have claimed to have seen a UFO, but most are rightly skeptical about these claims’ - most woudl try and think of other explanations
• We woudl have to be very sure to believe in it
• The principle of credulity is attractive but a lot less straightforward than it appears

Question 33

Describe the strengths of Swinburne

Answer 33

1) his argument that an r.e would make a major change to his life is strong - his approach to prayer/treatment of others woudl change - we see this change often
2) This conclusion is supported by the testimony of others
3)uses the cumulative argument - suggests that if we consider all the arguments for the existence of god, altogether they are stronger so the argument that r.e show the existence of god strengthens that positions

Question 34

Describe the value of religious experiences

Answer 34

• They confirm faith and can be foundational, inspirational and life changing
  -for some the only certainty they have comes from faith and this certainty is based on a religious experience where god is encountered personally
• this raises the key point that whilst RE confirm faith for christians they also do it for other faiths - this is a key issue for those who believe only their faith holds the truth

Question 35

Describe Price’s differentiation between ‘belief in’ and ‘belief that’

Answer 35

• Difference between them - belief ‘in’ is an attitude towards a person whereas belief ‘that’ is just an attitude towards a proposition
• those who have no belief tend to trivialise it, but whether they like it or not it is an important phenomenon they should try to understand by paying attention to the accounts of those who have it
• belief in - confirms RE and the personal encounter with god that they bring, belief that - they happen

Question 36

Describe the influence of religious experiences

Answer 36

1) They are foundational - direct cause of founding of religions so are the basis for faith and organised religion - eg in Judaism god makes a covenant with Abraham which creates the faith
2) They are inspirational - experiences of martyrs inspire belief in others like Joan of Arc who stood up for faith.
3) They are at the heart of pilgrimage - eg Bernadette at Lourdes
4) They are life-changing: Swinburne argues they are life altering and the ‘fruits’ of such experiences include emotional and spiritual growth. James: religious experiences give a ‘zest for life’ and have psychological benefits and make people inspired to do good deeds