Religious Experience Flashcards
Richard Swinburne on personal testimony.
Principle of credulity argues is someone has had a religious experience, then they probably have.
Principle of testimony, we believe the testimony of others unless someone is a liar or disturbed.
If out default position to doubt everything then conversation becomes impossible.
You must be able to prove the testimony wrong, if they cannot do this, then the description of a religious experience should be believed.
What are the criticisms of personal testimony?
A testimony about a religious experience is not like the testimony of an ordinary experience.
God is not reducible to an ordinary experience, nor definable, there are opportunities to describe it mistakingly.
Claims that everyone is honest.
An example of a corporate religious experience:
The toronto blessing.
Issues with corporate religious experiences
People do not behave in groups the same way they do as individuals.
The kind of people attracted to evangelical worship are already predisposed to this sort of behaviour.
What do some religious believers believe a corporate religious experience suggests?
Some religious believers have suggested that the behaviour demonstrated in the Toronto blessing might be the work of demons, keen to make fun of believers.
How does the Acts of Apostles contradict corporate religious experience?
Acts of the Apostles speaking in tongues during pentecost, there is no sense of people behaving like animals or hysterically.
What may God be telling us through making people look like fools? There must be some sort of logic in a God who delivers the ‘gift of the holy spirit’.
Rudolf Otto and religious experience
There are no adequate words to describe this event.
The holy cannot be described in language taken from ordinary lives, language is based on experience of our earthly lives, it is unlike anything in our earthly lives.
Ineffability (William James)
Ineffability refers to being beyond the ability of out words to express.
Noetic Quality (William James)
Refers to a kind of knowledge unlike the knowledge of any other human experience.
Transience (William James)
The experiences are very short, but the effects are life-changing.
Passivity (William James)
People have no will of their own because they are under the influence of a superior power.
How does ineffability create further problems?
The ineffability of religious experience creates further problems as we are likely to misinterpret that which cannot be clearly expressed.
How can religious experience be understood as a union with a greater power?
People feel a sense of closeness, even though in doing so, they report a sense of being overwhelmed by something infinitely greater.
Refers back to James’ ineffability and passivity.
How can religious experience be understood as a psychological effect?
As they are so unusual they may be interpreted as illusions. Sometimes people want to fear something to happen, they imagine it as reality.
We are prone to so many perpetual errors, perhaps those who want to see God see him in their imaginings.
How can religious experience be understood as a physiological effect?
Bertrant Russel explains through Beatrice Webbs fasting that is you drink, take drugs, tired, ill, depressed etc, these change the way you think and experience the world.
Our physical states deeply affect our mental states.
