Religious Experience

Ninian Smart

A religious experience involves some kind of ‘perception’ of the invisible world, or a perception that some visible person or thing is a manifestation of the ‘invisible world’.

Edward Schleiermacher

A sense of the ultimate and an awareness of wholeness, a consciousness of the infinite and an absolute dependence

William James (Religious Experience definition)

1. If someone experiences an entity, then the entity must exist

2. Some people have experienced God

3. Therefore God exists

Peter Cole

• Not universal

• Difficult to describe

• Gives an awareness of the divine

• Subjective

• Cannot be verified

• Chosen by God

• Unseen world insight

• Varying interpretation for cultures

Al-Ghaib

The unseen

Theistic views

Religious experience that is focused on the awareness of God

Monistic views

Religious experience that focuses on the awareness of the soul, self & conscience

Materialist

Someone who believes that humans are just humans and nothing beyond that

Michael Persinger

• Argues that religious experience is just t he brain reacting to stimuli

• What we believe to be is religious experience is just the way our body normally functions

David Hume

• Naturalistic explanation

• Large amount of evidence to show that the laws of nature do not change themselves

• He claims there is more evidence to suggest that laws do not suspend themselves

Richard Dawkins

• Religious experience is more likely to be a mistake

• He would associate it with mental illness instead of religious experience

• Also happens to be people in hopes of gaining something such as fame, power or personal authority

Sigmund Freud

• Viewed it as nothing more than illusions linked to our mind and mental state

• Refers to religious experience as a mass delusion or paranoid wish fulfilment

William James

• Passive → out of the person’s control

• Ineffable → difficult to put into words

• Noetic → Valuable lesson is learnt

• Transient → experience is temporary

Norman Habel

• Religious experiences are preternatural (out of the ordinary) & mentions two types

• Mediated → experience is through rituals, special people/ritual groups

• Immediate → Immediate experience occurs without any external helop

Richard Swinburne

1. Public → believer sees it as God’s work

2. Public → unusual + abnormal event

3. Private → easily described through normal language

4. Private → Not easily described through normal language

5. Private → non-specific, general feeling of God’s work

Rudolph Otto

• All religious experiences are numinous (arousing spiritual or religious emotions)

• Mysterium tremendum → tendency to invoke dear + trembling

• Mysterium fascians → tendency to attract, fascinate + compel

Conversion

• Conscious + voluntary → gradual + through their own will

• Involuntary + unconscious → self-surrender + sudden

Objectivist

The view that if a religious experience truly happens, it proves the existence of God

Subjectivist

The view that religious experience can be true for the believer

Swinburne → Principle of credulity

• If there is no reason to not believe it, one should deem it to be true

• ‘What one perceives is probably so.’

Swinburne → Principle of testimony

• If there is no reason to not believe it, people should accept that bystanders + believers are telling the truth when they testify about religious experiences

Prior Probability

Many arguments for God’s existence which gives the high probability that he does exist

Michael Martin

• Swinburne’s Principles can lead to the conclusion that there is no God

• An atheist might experience the world as Godless + with a strong absence of God

Caroline Francis Davis

• Absence of God + religious experience

• Those who only have a definite experience of God may feel that God doesn’t exist or has abandoned them

Bertrand Russell

• There are multiple cases of people who believe that they’ve heard satan speaking to them in their hearts in the same way others hear God

• The same way the argument applies to God, it can be applied to satan

Religious experience

Non-empirical occurence that may be perceived as supernatural

Synthetic

Based on personal opinion/experience

Ineffability

Limitation of language

Conflicting claims

Different religions claim different experiences of different deities

Deists

Rejects the idea of religious experiences as for them, God does not exist

Transcendent

Independent + beyond physical laws

Immanent

Present in the physical world + accessible to creatures in many ways

David Hume Quote

“A sudden and temporary breach of natural law by a supernatural agent.”

Galatians 5:14 - The Bible

“For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: Love your neighbour as yourself.”