Religious Experience

Religious Experience

1. Characteristics of Religious Experience

   • Voices
     • Disembodied Voice - will not come directly from a person but from heaven of inanimate object
     • Authoritative - will give a command and compel them to act based on that experience
     • Noetic - will reveal some knowledge or information to the recipient that they could not gain any other way
   • Visions
     • Corporeal - these are of a person in the appearance of flesh and can be interacted with
     • Imaginative - these appear within dreams and may receive particular knowledge or prophecy through it
     • Intellectual - these are more awareness of the presence of some being, seen with minds eye not physical form
   • William James PINT
     • P - Passive: The recipient does not seek out the religious experience
     • I - Ineffable: must either be beyond human powers to describe or must be of such a nature as they go beyond everyday experiences
     • N - Noetic: reveal some knowledge that the recipient could not gain by themselves
     • T - Transient: the effects are long lasting and often involve conversion
   • Richard Swinburne's direct or indirect distinction
     • Public ordinary - the interpretation of an ordinary experience as something spiritual or meaningful
     • Public extraordinary - being present during a miracle that goes beyond human powers of explaination
     • Private describable - Direct experience that can be fully described and understood
     • Private non-describable - Direct experience that cannot be fully described or understood
     • Private non-specific - Indirect experience where the individual sees the world in a different way to help them understand God

2. Veridicalness of Religious Experience

   • William James
     • Are psychological phenomena - operate through psyche therefore anyone could have a religious experience
     • Drugs and alcohol can open the recipient up to the divine
     • Testimonies as well as biblical experiences all share the same four characteristics (PINT) which show that they do take place and affect the individual directly, if they were not genuine they would not have such an impact
   • Richard Swinburne's Two Principles
     • Principle of Credulity - we accept the genuineness of the experiences unless we have compelling reason not to
     • Principle of Testimony - we should accept the genuineness of people's testimonies of religious experiences as we do testimonies of everything else

3. The Case Against Religious Experiences

   • Psychological Neurosis
     • Sigmund Freud - religion is stemmed from childhood neurosis, belief in God was the projection of need for an eternal father figure
     • Timothy Leary - mystical accounts mixed with accounts of drug users and were indistinguishable from each other - suggests both are products of the psyche
     • JL Mackie - argued that if religious experiences were in any way psychological then those who accept that they have any authority are insufficiently critical of them, we should not accept the authority of the accounts if they could be accounted for by the psyche
   • Physiological Influences
     • Harlow - case study of Phineas Gage, brain was damaged and his personality changed
     • D Lansborough - argued that St Paul may have suffered temporal lobe epilepsy, which caused his temporary blindness and the voice he heard
     • Many Catholic mystics suffered severe sicknesses before their experiences, St Theresa of Avila, St Bernadette
   • Sociological Influences
     • Karl Marx - a person's society directly affects the kind of experiences they have, for example a Christian will see Jesus but a Hindu will see Vishnu. "religion is the opium of the people"

4. Strengths

   • Friedrich Schleiermacher - we all have a consciousness for the divine, supporting James' point that religious experiences are natural to us
   • Rudolf Otto - religious experiences were the apprehensions of the wholly 'other', responds to Marx' challenge as the wholly 'other' is ineffable to us we have to translate them into a language that we understand which would be influenced by our society
   • Richard Swinburne - argued that accounts or religious experiences were evidence in themselves - principle of testimonies
   • William Alston - argued that if we accept our senses with regards to ordinary experiences there is no reason to stop relying on them in terms of religious experiences

5. Weaknesses

   • Sexual repression - from a Freudian perspective St Theresa of Avila's encounter contains a lot of sexual imagery, supports that religious experiences are suppressed sexual tension
   • Outdated view of mind - modern understanding of the mind has gained us more information regarding the mind making us more critical of religious experiences
   • Lack of rigour - Anthony O'Hear argued we should apply checks to religious experiences; check over time, check with other senses and check with other checkers, if it cannot be checked it is not scientifically verified