Religious Experience

Religious Experience

1. Types of Experience

   • Visions
     • St Teresa
     • Moses & ten commandments
   • Voices
     • Speaking in tongues
   • Conversion
     • A change from nothingness or from one religion to another.
       • Emergence into a new life, with new beliefs
         • Saul on the road to Damascus,
       • Voluntary or unvoluntary
   • Coporate
     • Experience occurs in a large number of people
       • Toronto Blessing
   • Miracle
     • Events have a supernatural or divine cause
       • Hulme definition
       • Jesus miracles
         • Lordes healings
   • Numinous: Sense of awe
     • Beauty of the world
   • Revelation
     • Moses/Burning bush
     • Buddhist enlightenments

2. a spiritual reality, this can include God speaking to someone, or feeling Gods presence.

3. William James

   • 'Feelings, acts and experiences of individual men'
     • Experiences are: (PINT)
       • Passive: No control
         • Ineffiable: Cannot be described
           • Noetic: Reveal something beyond human understanding
             • Transient: Temporary
     • BONUS
       • Paul Tillich
         • An objective experience followed by revealing of religious significance
       • Martin Buber
         • 'One to one conversations with God'
   • Something is real if it has effects
     • As they influence lives, they are real
       • Proof for Gods existance
   • PROBLEMS
     • Experiences are non-sensory
       • God can't physically affect people, only spiritually
       • We cannont sense God in the 'Phenomenal world'
         • Kant

4. Richard Swinburne

   • Principle of Credulity
     • What appears to be present we can say to be logically present
       • Those who believe are more likely to experience
   • Principle of Testimony
     • People typically want to tell the truth
       • People lie for self gain
   • Priory Probability Argument
     • The probability for experience being God is more likely than that of aliens etc...
       • Simply adding theories together for a 'cumulative cause'
         • Anthony Flew
           • Leaky Bucket analogy
       • Large number of examples indicates truth