context

what are rel exp?

• Religious experience is an encounter with the divine -> non-empirical occurrence that brings with it an awareness of something beyond ourselves 

• Theists believe that god interacts/ intervenes with his creation 

• William James describes religious experiences as the individual’s experience of the ‘divine’ 

• Martin Buber talks of an encounter with God as an “I/Thou” encounter 

• God is encountered as a ‘Thou”, a personal reality → believers may claim that their encounter with God is so real and so immediate that no justification is required 

• Paul Tillich 

• Feeling of ‘ultimate concern’ that demands a decisive decision 

judaism

• Part of normal world order 

• OT contains many incidents of God revealing himself through natural and supernatural phenomena (e.g. Moses + burning bush) 

christianity

• God contacts humans with direct + personal revelation 

• Conversion of Saul 

• Saul was a Pharisee who lived after JC’s crucifixion 

• Was a massive christian hater and went to Damascus to find christians to bring them ‘bound’ back to Jerusalem 

• Had a rel exp -> became blind, and heard JC ask him ‘why do you persecute me?’ 

• Only when he was saved by Ananias (JC’s disciple) did he believe JC was the Messiah 

• Became St Paul 

sihkism

guru nanak had a rel exp whilst bathing in a river in india

monist exp

• C Stephen Evans, in Philosophy of Religion, argues that religious experience is a term we use for particular events which have been interpreted as encounters with the divine. 

• Evans believes that these religious experiences generally fall into one of two types: 

• Monist experiences -> individuals become intensely aware of the essential oneness of all things, feeling that they are in union with the divine and the God can be found in the South and in the natural world. This sort of experience is particularly typical of Hindu mysticism. 

• a sense of the separateness or otherness of God, in which the individual becomes aware of the greatness and mystery of God and aware of their own smallness in comparison. 

objectivist view

• an objectivist view of religious experience is that if a religious experience is true. It's evidence of the existence of a God who exists independently/ outside the human mind, who can be counted through experience. 

• some argue that objective religious experiences are impossible as we Have no way of knowing whether the object of someone's religious experience is actually God, or whether it just seemed like God to that person. They ask how can we know enough about what God is like to recognise him if we met him? 

subjectivist view

• A subject of this view of religious experience says that what is important about religious experience is the fact that it has on the believer it's not necessary to think in terms of an actual objective being, which we call God. 

• The meaning of a religious experience is the meaning given to it by the believer. If someone genuinely believes that they've had a direct encounter with God, then the experience of God is true for that person. 

• HOWEVER: The subject of This views dilutes religious experience AS it does not matter whether there really are encounters between people and God or not.