Religious Experience

Question 1

What did William James claim about Religious Experiences?

Answer 1

Claimed that religious experiences occur in different religions and have similar features. People who have and try to have religious experiences are often called ‘Mystics’ and their experiences are intense and totally immersive.

Question 2

What is the definition of ineffability?

Answer 2

The experience is beyond language and cannot be put into words to accurately described.

Question 3

What does the term Noetic mean?

Answer 3

Some sort of knowledge or insight is gained.

Question 4

What is the definition of Transient?

Answer 4

The experience is temporary.

Question 5

What is the definition of Passive?

Answer 5

The experience happens to a person; the person doesn’t make the experience happen.

Question 6

What is the quotation taken from William James’ claim about Religious Experience?

Answer 6

The most useful descriptor of a mystical experience is that it “defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words”. It is ineffable. It has to be directly experienced to be appreciated.

Question 7

What did William James suggest Religious Experience is like?

Answer 7

It’s like music or love in that regard. If someone has never felt love or heard music, they might find a musician or lover weak-minded or absurd, but that’s just because they lack the required experience. James saying this is true of those who dismiss religious experience too.

Question 8

What is William James’ pluralist argument?

Answer 8

James’ explanation is that religious experiences really are coming from a higher spiritual reality. Writers such as W. Stace developed this argument much more explicitly, claiming that the universality of certain features of religious experiences is good evidence that they are real.

Question 9

What is the Naturalist approach to Religious Experience?

Answer 9

Cross-cultural similarity of the features of religious experiences could have a naturalistic explanation, however. It could be that all human brains hallucinate similarly because they evolved similarly.

Question 10

What is James’ Pragmatic argument?

Answer 10

James was most interested in the effects religious experiences had on people’s lives and argued that the validity of the experience depended upon those effects.

Question 11

What was James’ argument on Conversion experiences?

Answer 11

Conversion experiences are clearly a strong example of James’ point about the life-changing impact of religious experiences. He viewed conversion experiences as a transformation from an unhappy divided or imperfect self with a guilty conscience to a more unified happy state.

Question 12

What is a counter argument to James’ Pragmatism?

Answer 12

The reason for it being life-changing would only be because of their beliefs about its significance which their own mind is supplying. It’s not coming from some higher spiritual reality, it’s just a hallucination. This does seem like a simpler explanation.

Question 13

What is Swinburne’s view on Religious Experience?

Answer 13

Religious experience can be evidence for God that justifies belief in God, so long as it survives standard empirical testing. Swinburne doesn’t favour any particular type of religious experience. Any type could be valid evidence for God, so long as there is no reason to not believe it.

Question 14

What does Swinburne consider to be evidence?

Answer 14

If we experience something or someone tells us they have experienced something, then that is evidence for that thing probably being true.
Of course, this doesn’t prove God, but it is evidence that by itself does give a rational reason to believe in God.

Question 15

What is the Principle of Credulity?

Answer 15

The principle of credulity argues that you should believe what you experience unless you have a reason not to.

Question 16

What is the Principle of Testimony?

Answer 16

The principle of testimony argues that you should believe what others tell you they have experienced, unless you have a reason not to.

Question 17

Why does Swinburne believe it to be irrational when dismissing evidence for God?

Answer 17

All the other religious experiences that we have no evidence against are evidence for God. If someone dismisses those experiences, when there is no reason to not believe them, then they are irrational because they are dismissing evidence without reason.

Question 18

Why does Religious Experiences require extraordinary evidence?

Answer 18

However, is a mere experience of God sufficient evidence to justify belief in God? Arguably the existence of God is an extraordinary claim which therefore might require extraordinary evidence.

Question 19

What is Freud’s psychological challenge to religious experience?

Answer 19

Freud called religion an ‘obsessional neurosis’ and said it ultimately derived from two main psychological forces.

Question 20

What is the first psychological force proposed by Freud?

Answer 20

The first is the fear of death. We have an instinctual animalistic fear of death which we can’t control but we can control our human thoughts and cognitions. While animals only have their fear of death triggered when in a dangerous situation, humans are the only animal that constantly are aware that they are going to die. So, the solution is to manipulate those to believe that death is not the end.

Question 21

What is the second psychological force proposed by Freud?

Answer 21

Freud argued that the reason Christians call God ‘father’ is because they have a desire to be a child forever. It’s a desire for eternal innocence in the face of the painful reality of the world. Freud thought these psychological forces were so strong that they resulted in delusions which could explain religious experience.

Question 22

Why does Freud’s theory fail to explain Religious Experiences?

Answer 22

Mystical experiences are ecstatic, immersive, and totally unlike any ordinary sensory experience, making them harder to dismiss as hallucinations caused by delusory wishful thinking.

Question 23

What did Freud argue intense Religious Experiences were a result of?

Answer 23

It is the reliving childhood experiences before the ego or ‘self’ had formed. This explains the dissolving of the sense of self and resultant unity with everything in mystical experiences. Freud argued that reliving experiences of selflessness is simply a feature of the mind and only later came to be arbitrarily associate with religion, but in essence has nothing to do with it.

Question 24

Why is Freud’s argument overly reductive?

Answer 24

The problem with psychological arguments is that while they could be true for many maybe even the majority, it’s hard to argue they are true for all and even if they don’t work for one person, that’s one person they can’t explain.

Question 25

What is Persinger’s psychological challenge to Religious Experience?

Answer 25

Persinger is a neuroscientist who created a machine dubbed the ‘God helmet’ which physiologically manipulates people’s brain waves and sometimes caused them to have a religious experience where they felt the presence of unseen beings.

Question 26

What does Persinger’s ‘God Helmet’ explain?

Answer 26

This seems to show that religious experiences originate from the brain, not anything supernatural like a God. Religious experiences are just an unusual state of the brain. Regular religious experiences could just be examples of that caused by some unknown brain process(es) that can happen without a machine.

Question 27

What is a Religious response to Persinger’s ‘brain helmet’

Answer 27

Brain manipulation is simply the mechanism by which God creates religious experience. Also, we know we can cause hallucinations by manipulating the brain with drugs like LSD.

Question 28

What does Persinger demonstrate?

Answer 28

That religious experiences could have a naturalistic explanation. Therefore, supernatural explanations are unnecessary. His God helmet cannot rule out the possibility of supernatural causes for regular religious experiences, but it can show that they could have a naturalistic cause.

Question 29

What is a Conversion Experience?

Answer 29

Conversion experiences are those which influence a person to join a religion. Any type of religious experience could also be a conversion experience.

Question 30

Describe St Paul’s conversion experience?

Answer 30

He was a Jew called Saul who persecuted Christians. Yet, on the road to Damascus, he had an experience which converted him to Christianity. He changed his name to Paul and became an Apostle, spreading the Christian faith. His theology and teachings found in his letters to different Christian Churches became a very significant portion of the New Testament.

Question 31

What is a key quotation taken from St Paul’s Religious Experience?

Answer 31

“As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

Question 32

Why is Freud’s argument of Religious experience insufficient when applied to St Paul?

Answer 32

Conversion experiences from one religion to another can’t be explained away as wishful thinking or a fear of death. The person having the experience already believed in a God and an afterlife, so whatever wishful thinking for an afterlife they might have had would already have been satisfied by the religious beliefs of the religion they were already in.

Question 33

What is a Corporate Religious Experience?

Answer 33

Corporate experiences are when multiple people all have same religious experience together.

Question 34

What is the Corporate Religious Experience mentioned in the Book of Acts, by the Apostles?

Answer 34

“All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues” – Acts 2:3

Question 35

What is the example of the Toronto Blessing?

Answer 35

The congregation of a Toronto church felt unusual emotions, some falling around crying, others laughing hysterically. They attributed this to the presence of the holy spirit, which they claimed to feel. The strengths of corporate experiences is that they can’t be explained by physiological or psychological causes that could only apply to individuals – like mental illness, drugs, alcohol, fasting

Question 36

What is a counter argument to Corporate Religious Experience?

Answer 36

There are peculiar psychological dynamics to crowds or groups of people such as mob mentality, mass hysteria and social compliance. So clearly group delusion is possible. This is clearly the simplest explanation in the case of corporate religious experience.

Question 37

What is the Multiple Claim issue?

Answer 37

If all religions have religious experiences and yet most religions cannot be true, then they must be generally unreliable.

Question 38

What does the Multiple Claim issue conclude?

Answer 38

So, evidence for one religion must be taken as evidence against all the others. Therefore, claiming that a religious experience is evidence for the supernatural beings of a particular religion must make it evidence against the beings of all other religions. Any principle that identifies a religious experience as evidence, inevitably also brings far greater evidence against it. Claiming that a religious experience is as evidence for a particular religious belief only creates more evidence against it.

Question 39

What is Hick’s pluralistic response to the Multiple Claim issue?

Answer 39

They each report they are feeling something different, yet that is because they are just too blind to see how they are really part of the same thing. For Hick, differences between religions are just part of the cultural ‘lens’ through which we see the world.