Religious experience test

What is William James' 4 criterias for religious experience?

• Ineffable - The experience is beyond language and cannot be put into words.

• Noetic - Some sort of knowledge or insight is gained

• Transient - the experience is temporary

• Passive - the experience happens to a person

What is William James’ arguing for in religious experience?

Religious experience is real and they always follow the 4 criterias.

What is William James’ arguement?

There are a possible common core to these experiences and that we should take them at face value instead of dismissing them like a product of our brains.

How did Steven Katz counter William James’ arguement?

The fact that we don’t know if we are living in the same ineffable reality (eg. Allah and Nirvana) hence there is no common core.

How did Newburg and Waldman’s experiment counter Katz’s arguement?

Their research found that the parietal lobes decreases when both christians pray and buddhists meditate, leading to the feeling of becoming one with reality.

What was William James’ pragmatistic arguement?

The impact the experience has on the individual is more valid.

James’ pragmatistic arguement case study

An alcoholic was unable to give up on alcohol, but then had a religious experience and afterwards it gave him the willpower to give up on alcohol.

What was Freud’s stance on religious experience?

That religious experience is just ‘obsessional neurosis’ and says that these experiences come from two psychological forces.

What are Freud’s two psychological forces?

1. Fear of death - this is triggered from our animalistic sides but since we humans have a cognitive process, we are always afraid.

2. Desire for eternal innocence - in the face of the painful reality of the world, hence we get these delusions like a mirage.

What is a religious response to Freud’s arguement?

He fails to explain mystical religious experiences because the sense of unity is infinite and unbounded which isn’t the same as visions for self-fulfilment, which makes it harder to dismiss.

What would Freud’s counter claim be?

Intense religious experiences are just reliving the childhood before the ‘self’ was formed. This explains the dissolving of the sense of self with everything in the religious experience. This is just a feature in the mind.