Flashcards
Religious Experiences
Cards in this deck (26)
- 1What is Schleiermacher's characterisation of religious experience?"a feeling of absolute or total dependence on a source or power that is distinct from this world"
Note:
1. Non-conceptual
2. Infallible/ self-authenticating
3. Affective - 2Rudolf Otto characterises religious experience in terms of the 'mysterium tremendum'. What does this mean?"mysterium": the wholly other; the ineffable
"tremendum": awe; absolute unapproachability/overpoweringness; majesty
Otto's word for God is the "numinous"—religious experiences get us closer to an understanding of the numinous than do concepts. - 3What is Swinburne's classification of religious experiences?Experience of God mediated through:
1. Common, public sensory object
2. Unusual, public sensory object
3. Private sensation that can be communicated in common language
4. Private sensation that cannot be described in normal sensory language
5. Unmediated through any sensation
These classes are taken to be mutually exclusive and exhaustive. - 4What features characterise mystical experience?1. Altered or higher consciousness
2. Experience of absolute oneness or unity
3. Feeling of peace, sense of bliss
4. Sense of reality, truth, ultimate understanding
5. Timelessness - 5What kinds of mystical experience did Ramanujan have?Ramanujan reported having dreams sent to him by the Hindu goddess Namagiri. He routinely attributed his mathematical inspiration to these dreams, conjuring up formulas, modular equations, continued fractions etc.
- 6According to William James, what are the four necessary and sufficient conditions for a religious experience?1. Ineffable: “it defies expression…its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.”
2. Noetic (knowledge): they are epistemic states, not mere feelings. You learn about/ understand the divine.
3. Passive: you do not have control over the experience (though you can be open or closed to it)
4. Transient
Religious experience might be like gaining an extra sense—hence why ineffable. - 7What is the Practical Postulate, who came up with it, and how is it justified?If there is a) intersubjective agreement about the content of experiences, and b) no reason to think the subjects delusional, then we should accept the experiences as being of something objective.
C. D. Broad
It is the only real ground for trusting ordinary perception. - 8Broad argued that the two conditions of the Practical Postulate hold for religious experiences. How would he respond to the claim that we have reason to think the subjects of religious experiences are delusional due to poor physical or mental health?Not generally true—"Aquinas could have been a high functioning beurocrat".
Additionally, most people of extreme genius are abnormal physically or mentally, and some such abnormality might be exactly what is required to perceive the divine. Moreover, abnormalities might well be a consequence of experiencing the divine. - 9What are Swinburne's two principles?Principle of credulity: we ought to believe that things are as they seem to be in the absence of counter-evidence.
Principle of testimony: other things being equal, we ought to believe what others tell us - 10What, according to Swinburne, are the consequences of not following his principles?You become an extreme sceptic, and are left with nothing more than Descartes at his most doubtful point. The basis for learning and science is removed.
- 11What are some arguments against Swinburne's principle of credulity?1. It must be admitted that we selectively apply the principle. For example, we apply it to ordinary sense perception, but not to dream experiences. But a plausible argument can be made that religious experiences are more like dream experiences.
2. What does this principle add? Are we not better off just using Bayesian reasoning?
3. Given the conditional clause, we have the following dilemma: if one's prior in God is very low, then the principle cannot help; if one's prior in God is very high, then the principle is not needed. [Swinburne can respond—the principle is intended as a "top-up" to belief.] - 12What is C. B. Martin's argument?Religious experiences are not subject to the same checks, or verification, as other experiences. This makes them more similar to claims about subjective consciousness than claims about the objective world. Therefore, "the unassailability of religious experiences had been bought at the price of making no claim about the world beyond claims about the mind of the experiencer?"
- 13What was the idea of the Logical Positivists?Verificationalism: a statement is only meaningful if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable. So what can we make of ethical or religious statements? Perhaps they are more like supporting a football team than making claims that could be true or false.
- 14Name one person who objects to C B Martin, and state on what grounds.William Wainwright: religious experiences can be verified in other ways, such as (1) coherence with other people's experiences, or (2) coherence with revealed theology.
- 15What is the Pragmatist view of truth?Something is true in virtue of its usefulness.
William James: "the 'true' is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the 'right' is only the expedient in our way of behaving." - 16What is Occam's razor, and how is it justified?The principle that one ought not multiply entities beyond necessity in explanation.
Justifications:
1. Basic/fundamental/intuitive principle (like the axioms of maths)
2. The greater the number of entities, the higher the probability of being wrong
3. Inductive argument: when the principle has been applied in the past, it had been successful. - 17What is the Shroud of Turin?A length of linen cloth bearing the image of a man who some believe to be Jesus. The cloth is believed by some to be the burial shroud that Jesus was wrapped in after the crucifixion.
- 18What is neurotheology?The study of the neurological underpinnings of religious experiences.
Does finding correlations between certain religious experiences and neural activity in the brain undermine the insights gained through the experience? (After all, ALL experiences have a corresponding neurological account.) - 19What are the three different states of mind?1. Cognitive: have propositional context; can be true or false.
2. Conative: relating to tendency, impulse, drive, or effort.
3. Affective: feelings/emotions - 20What neurological change is observed when mediumistic practitioners do their work?Activity is seen to increase in the thalamus and decrease in the frontal lobes.
- 21What are some objections to Swinburne's classification of religious experiences?1. Why should we accept that religious experiences are real? We could never check if (4) and (5) happen.
2. "Experience of God" begs the epistemic question. What does it mean to experience God. - 22What are some criticisms of a non-cognitivist conception of religious experiences?1. In order to give their accounts, Schleiermacher and Otto must be trying to characterise their own experience. But this is paradoxical, given the non-cognitivist view.
2. Popper's criticism: non falsifiable, therefore not scientific.
3. Proudfoot's criticism: no such thing as non-conceptual experience. All our experiences are mediated through concepts (Laurel vs Yanny).
4. Non-conceptual experiences are of no use for justifying our beliefs. There is an inferential gap between feelings and knowledge. - 23What is Proudfoot's objection to non-cognitivist conceptions of religious experiences?Religious experience is just an experience that the experiencer takes or interprets to be religious. But such interpretation is always conceptually mediated by the theoretical framework of concepts and beliefs of the experiencer. Religious experience can never be completely non-conceptual.
- 24What is a possible reply to Proudfoot?Buddhist religious experiences are precisely aimed at overcoming the conceptual. It is not about finding truth from another world, but it is not obviously mere feeling either.
- 25What is Alston's account of religious experiences?At least some religious experiences have the same structure as ordinary empirical or sensory perception.
Structure: There is the perceiver, the perceived object, and the phenomenon.
And just as normal experiences inform us about the object of perception, so too do religious experiences provide us with knowledge about God. - 26What are some objections to Alston?Religious experiences differ in many respects from ordinary perceptual experience:
1. Not so frequency; not everybody has them; do not deliver even nearly as much knowledge.
2. Perceptual experiences inform us of sensory qualities, religious experiences don't.
3. Perceptual experiences can be intersubjectively verified; religious experiences cannot. Perceptual experiences are susceptible to corroboration by other perceptual experiences, whereas religious experiences are too diverse for this.
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- Pre-U Philosophy Pre-U (Paper 2) Flashcards on Religious Experiences, created by muon neutrino on 23/04/2018.
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