Flashcards
Challenges to Religious Experience
Cards in this deck (10)
- 1Why are religious experiences hard to prove true?They are;
- unsupported evidence of individuals
- subjective
- 'ineffable' so cannot be understood
- sometimes contradictory - 2What was Freud's challenge to religious experience?Freud: religion is wish-fulfillment by unconscious mind. The idea of God helps us to control fear of unknown. Religious experiences are just hallucinations we use to justify our belief in God.
- 3What do scientists say about temporal lobe epilepsy?It gives hallucinations which often cause what are described as 'visions'.
- 4What does the fact that 'religious experiences' seem to happen through drugs and epilepsy lead scientists to argue?That religious experiences are nothing more than the product of brain states.
- 5What is the response to Freud's challenge?This is just a hypothesis and it can't be tested.
Whilst some may be wishing for a religious experience, it doesn't mean that all religious experiences are fake. - 6What is the response to the challenges that religious experiences are the product of brain states?It doesn't necessarily mean God didn't make it that way in order to communicate with us.
- 7What did Swinburne's Principle of Credulity state?In the absence of 'special considerations' we should believe in religious experience claims.
- 8What were these 'special considerations'?- Reliability (e.g if they usually lie)
- Truth of the claim (if it is impossible)
- Difficulty of showing that God was present in experience
- Whether it can be explained as due to something else - 9What did this mean?If there isn't a good enough reason to not believe in a claim of religious experience, it should just be believed.
- 10—
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- A level Philosophy and Ethics (Religious Experience) Flashcards on Challenges to Religious Experience, created by Jack Lynch on 16/12/2019.
- Created by
- Jack Lynch · Dec 2019
- Updated
- Feb 9, 2020
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