Challenges to religious experience

Challenges to religious experience

1. Problems with verification

   • They are often ineffable - making them difficult to verify- can't confirm an experience when the experienced can't describe what happened.
     • Swinburne's principle of credulity: we should trust our senses - because " how things seem to be is good grounds for a belief about how things are" - so religious experiences ought to be taken by their subjects as genuine.
   • Personal and we only have the word of the experiences as evidence- especially true of imaginative visions that occur in dreams .
     • Thomas Hobbes asks what the difference is between saying "God spoke to me in a dream " and " I had a dream that God spoke to me".
       • Swinburne's cumulative argument- while some individual experiences may not be convincing - when we take into account the vast number of religious experiences they provide strong evidence for the existence of God.
       • Swinburne's principle of Testimony - we should trust what others tell us - " in the absence of special considerations the experiences of others are probably as they report them " - so we should trust people who claim to have had a religious experience.
     • We also have the impact of the religious experience as evidence - e.g. Joseph Smith who started the Mormon faith after his experience , or Paul who after his vision on the road to Damascus converted to Christianity .
     • Some religious experiences are experienced by more than one individual - E.g. At Lourdes- have been 57 recorded miracles since Bernadette's visions .

2. psychological

   • Feuerbach argues religion ( and religious experiences ) are created by a process called 'wish fulfilment' - where we want something to be true so much that our unconscious mind makes us believe it is true .God is a projection of the strongest desires of humanity .
   • Freud also argues that religious experiences are hallucinations caused by lour desire for security and meaning - ( a father figure) - if man "creates for himself the Gods" , as Freud says, suggests religious experiences are not real- just projections of our thoughts and desires.
     • Just because something happens when we wish I doesn't mean it isn't genuine- Eduard Von Hartmann " it is perfectly true to say that nothing exists merely because we wish it , but it is not true that something cannot exist if we wish it ".

3. Physiological

   • Inducing religious experiences - suggests God is not behind them if we are able to recreate them - there is a natural explanation.
     • Dr Pahnke: did an experiment where he administered drug psilocybin to 10 theology students in the setting of a good Friday service - found they " experienced phenomena which were indistinguishable from" the features of a mystical experience.
     • Persinger's 'God helmet'- Persinger created a device that stimulated the temporal lobes- people who have tried the device have felt a fear they can't explain and sensed a presence.
   • Temporal lobe epilepsy - Dr Ramachandran - carried out research into TLE - measured patients skin resistance when they were shown different types of images- found when they were shown religious imagery - their bodies produced a dramatic change in skin resistance - suggests religious experiences are linked to the temporal lobes - religious experiences could be caused but TLE.
     • Supported by Dr Landsborough - who argues Paul's conversion experience , with bright lights , loss of normal bodily posture & religious message - suggests an attack of temporal lobe epilepsy.
       • People with TLE - may still be having a genuine religious experience- stimulating temporal lobes might just help people see God.
         • God might choose people with mental conditions to communicate through- William James - God may find an "incomplete mind a more suitable instrument " to communicate through.
       • Even if some religious experiences are caused by TLE - doesn't mean all religious experiences are fake- not all people who have religious experiences have TLE.