Religious Experience

Religious Experience

1. Direct experience

   • God reveals himself directly

2. Indirect experience

   • experiences, thought of feelings about God that have been prompted by daily events

3. Rudolph Otto

   • Direct experience referred to as the 'wholly other'
     • completely outside our possible knowledge and experience

4. Richard Swinburne

   • Public experiences
     • 1. ordinary experiences
       • interpreting a natural event as a religious experience
     • 2. extraordinary experiences
       • appear to violate normal understanding of the world
   • Private experiences
     • 1. describable in ordinary language
       • e.g. dreams
     • 2. non-describable experiences
       • beyond human powers of description - ineffable
     • 3. non-specific experiences
       • e.g. looking at the world from a religious perspective