Religious Experience Flashcards
challenge of mystical experience argument, freud
• The psychological challenge – Freud its chief proponent – asserts that religious experiences are no more than illusions constructed by the psyche most fundamentally to satisfy neuroses
counter to freud, james challenge of RE
- It can be extrapolated from James’ work that religious experiences are not illusions, despite being “psychological phenomena”.
- It is vital to present the characteristics accredited to religious experiences to give further insight into James’ thesis: he argued vehemently that they were passive and arguably elevates the credibility of the experience as it is not willed by the individual, contrary to the assertions made by the likes of Freud. Equally experiences are ineffable, meaning the recipient cannot articulate their feeling of the transcendent or divine.
timothy o’leery response to william james
• Irrespective of whether our anatomical understanding is sound, the evidence proposed by Timothy O’Leary implicates the difficulty one has in accepting the veridicality of religious experience – in defense of the psychological challenge Leary’s research corroborates the argument that religious experiences are illusory; he recorded the experiences of both LSD users and those who’d claimed to have a religious experience and found the results were almost indistinguishable from each other
william james pragmatism argument?
- The noetic revelatory nature of the experience appears to contravene the notion that religious experiences are illusions; James postulated that the “good disposition” of the knowledge revealed points to the existence of what he called “something larger”, an assertion which can be corroborated by reference to Teresa of Avila whom argued that a religious experience is only “religious” if the recipient is left feeling at peace, thus analogous to James’ insistence for a “good disposition” pragmatism – value judged on its effects, not its validity; fruits not roots
- “The only thing it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find the greatest peace” (William James, Varieties of Religious Experience).
swinburne argument for RE
• Richard Swinburne made a ground-breaking contribution to the religious experience debate in his proposition of the two principles of credulity and testimony – the former essentially proposes that we have good reason to believe what we experience is true, insofar as our empiricist view of the world demands us to do so – this is a logical assertion to make, since reliance on the senses has been instrumental to our functioning for centuries
michael martin criticism of swinburne
- Swinburne’s point is predicated on a question of whether people are truthful – just because one is truthful in their claim, it certainly does not follow that they have correctly grasped the truth of their perception… The issue is Swinburne’s claim about testimony of experience is very different to testimony of a religious experience, which is open to varying interpretation There is a difference between honest accounts and accurate accounts of a transcendent, ineffable being.
- Michael Martin – if testimony is treated as veridical (accurately representing the world), then one can use the POC to construct an argument on the absence of religious experiences
rudolf otto and smart defence of swinburne
• The experience Otto suggests, using the phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a mystery tremendous and fascinating), is an immensely powerful encounter or awareness of something wholly other, which cannot be described in normal language. The holy cannot be described in language from ordinary lives as, after all, the wholly other is unlike anything in our normal lives “religious language has its own kind of logic… so we have good reason to accept Otto’s thesis that religious language cannot simply be reduced to other forms of discourse” (Ninian Smart
john cottingham issue with corporate
• Critics of corporate experiences suggest that the kinds of people attracted to evangelical/ charismatic worship are already pre-disposed to behaviour such as mass-hysteria, thus the experience is more of a group hallucination brought about by the atmosphere of the Church)
John Cottingham, believers may find proofs “reassuring as formal confirmations of the intellectual respectability of their religious outlook”
value of conversion to individual argument
• One perhaps should not be asking whether the experience is genuine, as one can never overcome the epistemological problem of other minds – instead accept that religious experiences are highly valuable and powerful (suggesting the existence of a higher power but not proving it) – St Paul on the road to Damascus
counter to individual argument
• Most religious experiences fit into the culture of the person’s worship – religious people are predisposed to religious experiences, attracted to the unusual and the bizarre, people search for conversions!
language games defence of individual experience
• Wittgenstein’s notion of “seeing-as” in his ‘Philosophical Investigations’ has been developed by John Hick to explain how people interpret the same things in different ways, demonstrated by the duck-rabbit picture. John hick uses the phrase “experiencing as” to demonstrate that the world and everything in it can be experienced in different ways ultimately the veridicality of religious experiences is not something anyone other than the experiencer can comment on.
corporate experience
• Corporate experiences arguably more reliable than individual, as a multitude of people are claiming to experience the same thing e.g. Toronto Blessing, “holy laughter”, barking, all seen as signs of the presence of the holy spirit
