Religious Experiences

Question 1

What are the three categories for visions?

Answer 1

• Corporeal
  o Empirical, involving sense experience of vision and hearing.
  o Eye sees supernatural vision that is really present, and the experiencer can interact with what is seen and herd.
  o Bernadette Soubirous, ‘Immaculate Conception’ at Lourdes.
• Imaginative
  o See by the eye of the mind rather than by direct sight, usually in dreams.
  o Beyond the control of the experiencer.
  o Pharaoh’s dream, in Genesis 41.
• Intellectual
  o Have no image, yet what is experiences is ‘seen as it really is’.
  o The light of an intellectual vision is through the illumination of the soul.
  o Teresa of Avila, claimed to see Jesus as he really was, not as an image but as a presence.

Question 2

What did Otto say about religious experiences?

Answer 2

• Religious experiences are encounters with the Holy as in the call experiences of Moses.
• Encounters with the Holly are numinous.
  o Numinous feelings are sui generas, in a class of their own.
  o Numinous feelings are non-rational.
  o Numinous feelings are mystereum tremendum et fascinans, a tremendous and fascinating mystery.

Question 3

What did James say about religious experiences?

Answer 3

• Object of mystical experiences is union with God
• Mystical experiences are ineffable, noetic, transient and passive.

Question 4

What did Stace say about religious experience?

Answer 4

• Stace defines mysticism as a non-sensuous and non-intellectual union with the divine.
  o Non-sensuous, sense no longer work at this level.
  o Non-intellectual, conscious ‘I’ of intellect is replaced by ‘pure consciousness’.
• A mystic is someone who has had a mystical experience.
• Two types of mystical experience.
  o Extrovertive, ‘half-way house’ to introvertive, since sense experience is still active and sees the non-sensuous unity that shines through normal objects.
  o Introvertive, sense experience is totally suppressed and the conscious ‘I’ ceases to exist.

Question 5

What are the challenges to religious experience?

Answer 5

• Challenges from science
  o Freud’s argument from wish fulfilment
  o Temporal lobe epilepsy
  o God helmet
  o LSD
• Religious responses to challenges from science
  o The brain simply processes information from God
  o James, makes no difference how RE are generated.
• Swinburne’s Principles of Credulity and Testimony
  o Principle of Credulity
   If it seems to a subject that x is present, then x is probably present.
   How things seem to be is good ground for how they are.
   RE are probably true.
  o Principle of Testimony
   In the absence of special considerations, the experiences of others are probably as they report them.
   If reliable witnesses report them we should therefore believe them.
• Arguments against Swinburne
  o Difference between reliability of claims to claim that RE are true.
  o Cannot verify first-person.
  o Does not prove God is involved.
• Arguments for Swinburne
  o Visible difference in lifestyle
  o Testimony of the collective
  o Cumulative argument, greater than 50 percent with RE.

Question 6

What influence do RE have on the value of faith?

Answer 6

• RE can be foundational
• Inspirational
• Heart of the pilgrim tradition.