Religious Experience

Question 1

According to Copleston, a religious experience is…

Answer 1

awareness of some object that transcends the self.

Question 2

What is a direct and an indirect experience?

Answer 2

Direct - in contact with God himself e.g. prayer
Indirect - a feeling of God acting on the world e.g. during meditation

Question 3

What are Caroline Davis’ 7 types of religious experience?

Answer 3

Awareness - see God in the world
Quasi-sensory - vision
Numinous - experience God’s holiness
Regenerative - conversion
Interpretive - prayers answered
Mystical - sense of an ultimate reality
Revelatory - enlightened

Question 4

What 2 types have been added to Caroline Davis’ 7 types of religious experience?

Answer 4

Corporate - more than one person
Near-death

Question 5

Talk about Saul of Tarsus’ religious experience.

Answer 5

He hated christianity but then became Paul when he was convinced of Jesus as the Messiah and died a martyr! His experience was a direct, quasi-sensory, numinous, and regenerative.

In the book of Acts!

Question 6

What does William James have to say about religious experience?

Answer 6

He proposes the idea of pragmatism - that what is true is practical/works.

He also says there are 4 characteristics of every religious experience:
Passive - uninvited, unbidden
Ineffable - unable to be described
Noetic - gain knowledge from experience
Transitory - only momentary

Question 7

What does Rudolph Otto have to say about a numinous religious experience?

Answer 7

All religious experiences are numinous in nature - it is what defines them!

There are 2 elements to a religious experience:
Mysterium tremendum - they are terrifying
Mysterium fascinans - they are fascinating

During the experience, the person feels in communion with another level of reality e.g. God.

Question 8

What are the two types of revelatory experiences?

Answer 8

Propositional - God communicates his divine message to a human.
Non-propositional - come to realisation about a divine truth.

Question 9

What are Swinburne’s 5 types of religious experiences and an example?

Answer 9

Mediated through a common public object e.g the ocean

Mediated through an uncommon public object e.g. Moses

Mediated through a private object that can be empirically described e.g. Peter’s vision of non-kosher animals coming down from heaven.

Mediated through a private object that cannot be empirically described e.g. Teresa of Avila

Not mediated through any object e.g. Nicholas of Cursa

Question 10

What are Swinburne’s 2 principles about religious experience and their weaknesses?

Answer 10

Principle of testimony - people normally tell the truth so we should believe people’s testimonies of religious experiences

Principle of credulity - we can trust an experience, they are reliable! Experience is more probably to be true than not true so we should trust perceptions from our experiences with God

Weaknesses:
Atheists would deny that it is more probable than not that God exists in which case both principles cannot verify religious experience as experiences of God. If atheists have an equally strong conviction that there is no God, why should we reject their testimony?

People are not as trustworthy as Swinburne assumes and often have good reason to lie.

We cannot compare statements about everyday empirical experiences with statements about non-cognitive, mystical experiences. We have no means of verifying non-cognitive, mystical experiences, so we cannot evaluate testimony about them in the same way.

Question 11

How does Swinburne’s cumulative argument support religious experience and what is its flaw?

Answer 11

No argument alone can prove Gods existence but put together they make an overwhelming argument which cannot be denied.

Logically flawed - many low probabilities and adding them together does not make something more probable.

Question 12

Who is Michael Persinger and how does he challenge religious experiences?

Answer 12

An american scientist who studied neuroethology (how religious beliefs are affected by brain structures)

He produced the God-helmet to prove that religious experiences can be physiologically explained.

Question 13

What is the God Helmet?

Answer 13

A study in the 1980s that claimed to show how religious experiences can be created artificially (induce a ‘presence’ sensation) = challenges God’s existence based on religious experience using psychology.

Question 14

Evaluate Persinger and the God Helmet.

Answer 14

Limitations:
Granqvist couldn’t replicate study with participants that didn’t know what was supposed to happen…Persinger had fake results!
Real religious experiences can happen anywhere, not in controlled settings.

Strengths: Does make a convincing challenge to God’s existence through religious experience.

Question 15

Who is Sigmund Freud and how does he challenge religious experiences?

Answer 15

Freud is a neurologist and psychoanalyst who explained how religious experiences can be challenged with psychology.

He suggested human religious behaviour is caused by childhood insecurities and the desire for a father-figure. Religious experiences are hallucinations. In the same way dreams are cause by our deep desires, religious experiences are a product of our subconscious need for security and meaning.

Question 16

What is Kant’s objection to challenge religious experience?

Answer 16

He argued we can only experience things in the empirical realm. There may be a reality beyond our experience but we cannot logically prove the existence of God.
Therefore, as religious experience is undermined by empirical evidence (physiological and psychological), it cannot provide satisfactory evidence for Gods existence.

Question 17

What is the problem of interpretation and religious experiences?

Answer 17

Religious experiences are interpreted differently by everyone.
Pre-existing faith may lead a Christian to interpret an experience as religious whereas an atheist might see it as a hallucination.
All our experiences are interpretations and are all valid… however the subjective nature of a religious experience makes it hard to test as it is not based on objective truths.

Question 18

What does Hick have to say about religious experiences?

Answer 18

People see things in different ways depending on how they interpret what is in front of them. He argued in his paper ‘Religious Faith as Experiencing-As’ that perception is not simply registering what is there (that is seeing) but interpreting what is there (seeing-as) - an idea first drawn by Wittgenstein.
Anything we experience in life is interpreted by us according to what we understand about the world and how we’re shaped by belief, culture and upbringing. All experiences are subject to individual interpretation, especially when it comes to religious experiences and the emotions around them.

Doesn’t help us clarify if religious experiences are in fact true manifestations of the divine or not though.

Question 19

Who is Dawkins and what does he have to say about religious experiences?

Answer 19

Most famous atheist in the world!
For him, religious experiences are just a psychotic mindset: the mind is immersed in what it thinks is true, but an observer without mental illness can clearly see the belief as untrue. Religious experiences are not logical or valid proof for the existence of God.