religious experiences Flashcards
ineffability
elements of experience go beyond human understanding and language.
cannot be put into human Language
surely if you had met god you would be able to put it in a way that could be understood by people.
Noetic
get an understanding that was not previously understood learning something that was not already known.
transverse
brief experience but effects can last a life time. can last seconds but impacts the rest of your life. for example you have an experience where you are told to stop drinking because you may end up dying.
passivity
experience happens to then and chose not to understand it.
you understand that it has happened but you choose not to act on it changing your ways or understand it.
Richard dawkins
he was in the highlands and there was a sound that he could only describe as the devils voice and said that that was what it was, it was later discovered that it was the sound of the devil bird the Manx
said that this was an argument made out of human ignorance. if he had known what the bird had sounded like he would not have assumed. (ignorance)
the god helmet
this was by Micheal petinger and he said that he had a helmet and when you placed it on your head that you could have a religious experience.
(this would mean that the cause of the experience was not god but could instead be science).
problems with the god helmet
poor metholodigy as people knew what was expected to happen could have had effect on the results of experiment
this was repeated and not the same result as before
there was a doctor that tried it out and he did not have a religious experience.
this reduced god down to a helmet. piece of science this would mean that god was the cause.
placing re’s down to mental illness
we can see this is Pauls visions it was suggested that he could have had epilepsy but the mental state of Paul was not know
due to temporal epilepsy and not god.
would this mean that all people that have had an experience can it be placed down to epilepsy. wrong to suggest this.
cumulative argument
this means that it is using more than one piece of evidence and relying on a combination of factors. more than one persons account of the same event bringing arguments together.
the principle of testimony
this means that if someone tells us that we have a religious experience then we have no reason not to believe them we don’t have reason not too
if a person that we trust tells us that they went to the shop this morning then we have no reason not to believe them so why do we make the exception for religious experiences.
weaknesses of re’s individual
- there is no one to bear testimony
- can not be repeated or revisited.
-no numerical strength.
- could be down to a hallucination or a mental illness
-could be prone to lying or on a substance.
strengths of individual re’s
- personal between you and god
- can not be down to mass hysteria.
-in mass audiences people can adapt to fit the crowd.
strengths of corporate experiences
- this has numerical strengths this means that there can be a testimony to it to strengthen the claim. if 8/10 people in a group have one how are the other 2 going to go against this as the minority.
-there can be people to give testimony and it can rule out mass hysteria and hallucination.
weaknesses of corporate experiences
-these can be mass hysteria and people or hypnosis
-these can be people following along with the crowd due to not wanting to be left out.
-William sergeant says that people can be conditioned to act a certain way
example of a corporate experience
the Toronto blessing this was in Canada and people were laughing in spirit and they were acting like animals in spirit there was one man that was drunk in spirit
why would god reveal himself to people acting like this is this how he wants to be known could this be down to people acting to fit the crowd.
