Religious Experience 1

Religious Experience 1

1. Types of Religious Experience

   • Innefability
     • Cannot be described in words
   • Noetic Quality
     • Knowledge of God is received in illumination/ revelation that could not be discovered otherwise)
   • Transiency
     • Temporary mystical states
   • Passivity
     • "the mystic feels as if his own will was in abeyance"

2. Public

   • Extraordinary: experiences that appear to violate normal understanding of the workings of nature/ physical laws. For example, Jesus walking on water (unless he was a lizard person)
   • Ordinary, interpreted experience: a sunset being interpreted to have religious significance because of its beauty
     • Parable of the Invisible Gardener
       • John Wisdom's story about a beautiful unexplained garden, one person assuming the existence of a gardener

3. Examples

   • Conversion 1: Acts 9:4-8
     • Outside account of Saul being blinded and spoke too by Jesus (public experience)
   • Conversion 2: Acts 22:6-10
     • Saul's own account
       • Noetic, passive

4. Private

   • Describable in normal language
     • A dream, for example, Jacob's Dream- Jacob dreaming about the connection between heaven and earth
   • Non-describable experiences
     • Ineffable experiences of God being revealed
   • Non-specific experiences
     • Seeing the intricacy of God in the universe

5. "the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine

   • Varieties of Religious Experience, William James

6. Swinburne

   • Principle of Credulity
     • Maintains that it is a principle of rationality that (in the absence of special considerations) if it seems to a person X is present, then X is probably present
       • You must accept the evidence of a religious experience unless you have evidence to prove the contrary: maybe a vision was a hallucination (the person, intoxicated)
   • Principle of Testimony
     • Maintains that, in the absence of special considerations, it is reasonable to believe that the experiences of others are probably as they report them
       • "other things being equal, we usually think that what others tell us that they perceived, probably happened"