Religious Experience

Question 1

WilliamJames

Answer 1

‘the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men.’
effects
verification
self-verifiable
psychological phenomena

Question 2

RichardSwinburne

Answer 2

Swinburne
a priori probability argument,
cosmological God
five types of religious experience

Question 3

Problem of other minds

Answer 3

telling the truth
interpreting your experience correctly,
sincere beliefs are not necessarily valid.

Question 4

Principle of testimony

Answer 4

It makes sense to believe what people tell you, since the majority of people tell the truth. He says we tend to believe what people say because otherwise everyday conversation would be very tough.

Question 5

Principle of credulity

Answer 5

If someone appears to be present, it makes logical sense to say that they are so, unless the observer is under particular circumstances (intoxicated, has a mental illness etc). In the same way, testimonies of religious experiences should be taken at face value, unless there is significant evidence that they would be wrong.

However, some argue that religion itself is a particular circumstance, and that you are more likely to see things which aren’t there if you belong to a religious group.

Question 6

BertrandRussell

Answer 6

‘From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes’.

This encapsulates the key claims that such experiences:
- Can be explained by scientific principles and require no supernatural causation
- Can be simulated by natural causes, either in real life or under experimental conditions

Question 7

Corporate

Answer 7

Corporate experiences are experiences that happen in public places to a group or several people. One of the best examples of this is theToronto Blessing of 1994, whereby many people who visited apentecostal churchwent through strange religious experiences, from speaking in tongues (glossolalia), to laughing hysterically, to barking like dogs.

Question 8

Personal

Answer 8

Personal experiences are self-explanatory, they relate to the Swinburne and James view. These could be numinous or something like glossolalia.

Question 9

Rudolf Otto

Answer 9

Otto argued for numinous experiences, saying that God is transcendent and so he can only affect us by filling us with a sense of awe.

‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’

Numinosity is a sense of being in the presence of an awesome power, yet feeling distinctly separate from it – where religion derives from.

Otto wanted to show that it was fundamental to religion that individuals should have a sense of a personal encounter with the divine.

Question 10

Teresa of Avila

Answer 10

Teresa of Avila had a mystical experience. She was accused of it being the result of sexual frustrations so she self-examined to try to understand. She argues if they were sexual frustrations she would have been left disgusted, but she was not. ‘I was at prayer…when I saw Christ at my side’