RELIGIOUS EXPIERIENCE -> summary notes

AO1

bertrand russel a man who drinks and sees snakes and a man who sees God

  • what is it → religious experience is an expierence of God or the divine

  • mystical → a direct experience of God or ultimate reality a sense of oneness with all things

    • example of terrsa of avil who was periced by a golden spear leaving her with an overwhelming sense of love and julian of norrich whom on her death bed saw jesus bleeding out

  • numinous → an expierence of awe and wonder in the pressence of an allmightly God

  • conversion → an experience which causes a sudden or gradual change in someones belief system

    • these are the strongest evidence for james as they are the most observable (pragmatic and empircal) they involve a change in the centre of ones energy and acknowledgement of pyschological factors. describes how the inner self is divded and unhappy but then becomes unfied and happy

    • example of saul’s conversion and nicky cruz

  • corporate → an experience which is shared by a group

    • e.g the penticost in the bible, children of mejoruge and tronto blessings

  • william James → a prominate scholor in this field, he defines a religious experience as ineffeiable, transceint, passive and noetic. He highlights how it is less about the validity of the experience itself and more about what we gain from them; known as the fruits. the fruits are a feeling of freedom, change, self sacarfice and something beyond this world

  • pyschological cause → stems direclty from brain activity

  • physociological cause → external factors e.g drugs


AO2

  • MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE are reliable → although there a psyschological elements they all have similar experiences leading to them all needing to come from the same source. they are passive and undesired, ineffable so pressents how contact with the divine has occured transiendent meaning they have signifcant fruits. F schlieremacher argues that there must be more to our human existance

  • MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE aren’t reliable → they cannot be impirically tested, they are too personal. they could all just be from the mind (as other scholors such as freud, feuerbach, persinger and starbuck claim). ineffeabitly actually shows how the expeirences aren’t relaible because we cannot explain them. bertrand russel a man who drinks and sees snakes and a man who sees God, -there is no difference-

    • note: can use the same for numinoul experiences too

  • CONVERSION EXPERIENCE are reliable → the efffects of the conversion inderacte that divine action has taken place and even if people do not believe, james highlights how one should focus on the fruits rather than the force behind them. swinburne furthers this through his principles of credulitly and testimony, highlightning how unless we have a definitive reason as to why we shouldn’t believe someones expierence we should.

  • CONVERSION EXPERIENCE aren’t reliable → kant pressents how we cannot understand the numiounal therefore if an expeirence were to occur we couldn’t gain a noetic quailty nor change because of it jung crtiques the view that sauls conversion occured from God, as he displayed either syptoms of a stroke or a mental breakdown due to guilt of killing christains, similarly endorsed by freud who argues thaht guilt within our superego’s leads to expierences as such

  • PYSCOLOGICAL AND PHYSOCIOLOGICAL are the reason → the emprical evidence which james highlights could instead be down to other factors. starbuck highlights how it is normative for young people to expierence these phenominons because of their hormonal change and seeking out their own idenity. further, what we percieve is rooted in our minds, feuerbach argues this as humans only believe in God because they crave power and to freud they look for a father figure and ‘wish fufil’ these expierences too occur, Persingers God helemet also acts as a way in which these claims are destroyed as he sitmilated similar expirences in the brain. Drugs and acholol but also vitim b defincies and isolation could be the reason for julian and terrsas expierences

  • PYSCOLOGICAL AND PHYSOCIOLOGICAL aren’t the reason → james does not deny that there could be other reasons apart from God which cause these expeirences, but instead we must overall focus on the fruits of the expeirnece rather than what one gains from it. God could also be interacting in a pyschological way using our biology to project himself. john wisdoms parable of the gardner

  • CONVERSION EXPERIENCE are reliable→ emprically there are more people and more testimonies aviable. the fruits are also more obseravble as there are more people invovled. swinburnes principle of credbibilty can be highlighted here too as we should believe lots of people.

  • CONVERSION EXPERIENCE aren’t reliable → starbuck argues that adolsecnes are more likely to expirence this as they search for who they are. it could be down the mass hysteria or social confromity to believe what they saw

  • IS IT God → the expeirences must be geuine and God must be the force behind these expeirence. many claim that it too steep of a claim to suggest that God is the driving force behind these expierences

    • interpretation and conflicting truths - we may encounter the same thing yet interpret it completely differently

    • particualrity → God is causing these expeirences it leads to a theological question over whether he is showing his favourites (and does this deny every other religion)

    • logical problems → God is so wholly other that we could never try and fully understand him, so if he revealed himself how could we make sense of what he is trying to say to us

    • martin buber and personal knowledge → we have an ‘I it’ relationship with God as we do not know him directly but this can turn into an ‘I thou’ if we understand God