The challenges to religious experience Flashcards
Richard Swinburne’s main 2 arguments for religious experience are?
Principle of credulity
Principle of Testimony [Where he argues the testimony of others provides good reason to believe that the experiences actually happened]
Who wrote ‘the evidential force of religious experience’ in 1989?
Caroline Franks Davis
Is Davis for or against religious experience?
Against, she listed 3 distinct challenges to religious experiences.
What were Davis’ 3 challenges?
Description-related challenges
Subject-related challenges
Object-related challenges
Waht is a description related challenge?
When an event is described as an experience of god or the divine, a claim is being made where there is no proof. The description is thus invalid. The claim is inconsistent with everyday experiences and so should be rejected.
What is a subject related challenge?
The person who claims to have had a religious expereince is under suspicion.
They maybe an unreliable source.
They maybe said to be suffering from a mental illness or suffering illusions possibly brought about by substance misuse.
In such cases they are not in a position to properly understand what they experienced
What is an object related challenge?
Focus is on the alleged object of the experience.
This challenge is that it is highly unlikely that the object of the recipient’s claims is true.
The claim that the divine had been experienced is no more likely than a claim of having seen an 8 foot green alien on a flying spaghetti monster [Russell]
What mistake may have past cultures done?
Accounts of religious experiences in ancient religions or cultures such as accounted by famous mystics may have seemed mystical to them at the time but in todays world they seem natural and explainable through science.
Why is it hard to explain a religious experience today?
We live in a time dominated by empiricism, science, rationality and evidental proofs.
You cannot empirically explain what goes on inside you head during a religious experience unless you have alien technology.
Along with this skepticism towards the claim tends to creep in as well.
Why is it hard to establish some criteria for religious experience?
Most philosophers agree that such criteria are nearly impossible to verify due to the fact that these experiences are subjective and not objective.
What does subjective mean?
If something is subjective then it tends to be based on opinion, personal judgment, belief or assumption and is more difficult to verify.
How does a religious experience being subjective make it less reliable?
If a religious experience is subjective then it is likely to be interpreted in different ways by multiple people. These views may change according to time and context.
E.G. This is the best car, you can only say this is the best car for you.
