Religious Experience Flashcards
What is a religious experience?
An encounter of the divine, a non-empirical occurrence that brings awareness of something ourselves.
Who describes religious experience as ‘God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a way, that when i return to myself, it is wholly impossible for me to doubt that i have been in God and God in me.’
St Teresa of Avila
What is a direct religious experience?
where the experient feels they are in contact with God
What is an indirect experience?
an inner experience of God’s creation
List 3 of the 7 categories of religious experience that Caroline Franks Davis came up with
Regenerative - conversion
mystical - sense of the ultimate reality
revelatory - receiving knowledge through revelation from God
What are corporate experiences?
where a large number of people share the same experience
What does Greeley say are common themes of religious experiences?
feeling of deep, inner peace
emotional intensity
sense of joy
How does Schleiermacher define religious experience
one that offers a sense of the ultimate and an awareness of wholeness, a consciousness of and dependence on the infinite
Who says that God reveals himself to people on a personal level as they experience him in life and in the world through interaction with people and nature. Everyday human relationships are on an I-it level but…..
Buber
serious and more meaningful relationships go much deeper and become I-thou relationships, it is in these which we experience God.
Who says that religious experiences draw on the common range of emotions; happiness, fear and wonder but they are directed at the divine
James
What is James’ quote?
‘God was present in me, he fell not under one of my sense, yet my consciousness perceived him’
What does Dawkins say about religious experience?
they are expressions of a person’s psychological need
‘the argument from religious experience is most convincing to those who claim to have had one. But it is the least convincing to anyone else, especially anyone knowledgeable about psychology’
What does St Teresa of Avila say about her religious experience?
‘i wish i could give a description of at leas the smallest pat of what i learned, but, when i try to discover a way of doing so i find it impossible’
How does Otto describe a conversion experience?
numinous - referring to experience offering evidence of the wholly other nature of God.
what happens in a conversion experience and give an example of one
often a person sees a vision, accompanied by feelings of aw and wonder
e.g. Paul who converted to Christianity and stopped killing Christians.
Hoe does Wesley describe his conversion experience?
‘i felt my heart strangely warmed. i felt i did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation.’
What does Lewis claim about indirect experiences in response to the world?
‘not just a feeling.. but a conviction or insight, a sense that something must be.’
Who does Cole sight in his example of revelatory experience and what does he say?
Benny Hinn - ‘before you leave this stadium tonight, every person in here will receive a fresh flowing of God’s power on your life.’
What are the 2 types of revelatory experience and what are they? Give examples
propositional revelation - God communicates his divine message to a human being. e.g. moses
non-propositional revelation - through religious experience a person comes to realise diivine truth. e.g. Buddha gained enlightenment
What is a near death experience?
when a person dies and is resuscitated and recalls an experience of what happened after they died
What did Moody find in study of near death experiences?
That there were a number of core experiences; feeling of peace, going through a dark tunnel and having to make a decision about crossing a barrier and returning to life
What is a mystical experience?
Sense of unity and communication with the divine, intensely personal and transcendent.
What did St John of the Cross say about the mystical union with God?
‘Human language is unable to express the mystical union with God’
What is Sufism?
Mystical aspect of Islam, it is the belief that you can become close to God through meditative and other techniques
What are the two types of Mysticism?
Theistic mysticism - involves awareness of God - extrovertive
Monistic mysticism - involves awareness of the soul, self and conscience - introvertive
How does Kung describe mysticism?
mysticism is characterised by the closing of the senses to the outside world and seeking personal loving union with God
What characteristics do mystic experiences have according to james?
ineffability, noetic quality, passivity
Give an example of a corporate experience
Toronto Blessing 1994 Airport Vineyard Church where people shook and wept uncontrollably, laughed hysterically and made unusual barking sounds
What did Greeley suggests were the most common triggers for religious experiences?
Music, prayer and meditation
explain why music may be a trigger for religious experiences and how does charasmatic christianity depend on music and atmosphere?
offers ways to express shared beliefs together e.g. sufism
music and atmosphere can generate the right circustances in which those in a high state of expectation feel that they receive religious experiences. e.g. Benny Hinn adopted the technique of getting people to fall down which critics claim is a hypnotic technique used to persuade people to fall by the power of suggestion.
What is glossolalia?
where a person speaks during a prayer in a language that is not known to them
what did Archbishop temple say about prayer?
‘when i pray coincidences happen, when i don’t, they don’t’
What does the inductive argument look at?
subjective testimonies of individuals who claim to have had religious experiences in order to find similar characteristics
Who argues inductively that it is reasonable to believe God is loving and personal and would seek to reveal himself to humanity as an act of love. he suggests religious experiences can be felt empirically through our senses and interpreted non-empirically through our religious sense. Give a quote
Swinburne
‘an omnipotent and perfectly good creator would seek to interact with his creatures and, in particular with human persons capable of knowing him.’
What does Davies argue inductively about religious experience? (quote)
‘we certainly do make mistakes about reality because we fail to interpret our experience correctly, but if we do not work on the assumption that what seems to be is sometimes so, then it is hard to see how we can establish anything at all.’
What is the cumulative argument and a criticism of it
Different arguments about religious experience used together
however lots of weak arguments cannot make a strong one as the weaknesses of one aren’t directly met with the strengths of the others
How did Hume criticise religious experience (miracles quote)?
‘there is not to be found in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against delusion.’
What are Swinburne’s principles of testimony and credulity?
unless we have evidence of the contrary we should believe people’s testimonies since people usually tell the truth, we should only consider them unreliable if the circumstances surrounding the experience are unreliable, evidence they are lying or if it can be explained in terms other than God.
since thousands of people believe they have experienced God, then it is rational to believe things are as they seem
According to empirical research how many people have had, at some point, an experience that can be classified as religious?
40%
Who uses the example of someone claiming to have seen the lockness monster who could be mistaken so we are right to remain skeptical, unless there is a great deal of evidence to support what they had seen
Vardy
Who used the notion of seeing-as and what does it mean?
Wittgenstein
it suggests each person sees their experiences differently some may think they have experienced God and others something else. This means that testimonies are unreliable
Hare talks of religious experiences as bliks which are?
unverifiable and unfalsifiable ways of looking at the world, so when a believer feels something is from God it is their personal interpretation which cannot be true for anyone else so testimonies are unreliable
What is Hick’s quote as an argument against religious experience?
‘any special experience which can be constituted as manifesting the divine can also be constituted in other ways, and accordingly cannot carry the weight of proof of God’s existence.’
Who argues that people can not experience God the way they experience other people and give a quote
Cole
‘God is not material, nor does he have a definite location.’
Freud suggests religious experiences are unreliable because..
they could be a psychological reaction to a hostile world - we feel helpless so create God as a father and protecter
Explain the issues of consistency
many different types; if god is the source of them all why isn’t their more similarity? why don’t catholics see vishnu
Give a criticism of near death experiences
could be caused by lack of oxygen to the brain
What is Dawkins’ criticism of religious experience?
if we are gullible we do not recognise hallucinations and may claim to see God, such visions are not good grounds for believing God is actually there
Explain why logical positivists like Ayer think it is meaningless to talk about religious experience
the language is meaningless since there could be no observations that would verify these claims
What does Ayer say about the problems of talking about religious experiences?
‘The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from a psychological point of view, it does not in any way imply that there is such thing as religious knowledge.’
if someone has seen God, they tend to make the claim as if it were along the same lines as seeing a yellow patch. the sentence ‘there exists here a yellow coloured material thing’ expresses a genuine synthetic proposition which could be empirically verified. while ‘there exists a transcendent God’ has no literal significance.
What does Swinburne have to say about whether religious experience is meaningful to talk about?
‘in so far as other evidence is ambiguous or counts against but not strongly against the existence of God, our experience ought to tip the balance in favour of God’
Why is it illogical to assume that all religious interpretations are incorrect?
if it is possible to have an experience of God, then it is reasonable to assume some alleged experiences of God are actual
What could be one empirical test of validity?
the effect the experience had on a persons life
Why might it be said that religious believers are more able to testify for validity of religious experience?
as they know what to expect.
What does Flew argue about religious experience?
cannot be regarded as meaningful as to a believer nothing can count against it. he asks ‘what would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of love of or the existene of God’
What does Dawkins say about the validity of religious experience?
‘if you have had such an experience you may find yourself firmly believing that it was real but do not expect the rest of us to take your word for it, especially is we have the slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings’
