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Religious Experiences - Coggle Diagram
Religious Experiences
Types of Religious Experience
Richard Swinburne
5 categories
Public experience
Everyday occurrences that people see as the work of God (e.g. a sunset)
Extraordinary occurrences or miracles (e.g. resurrections)
Private experience
An unusual experience with religious significance that can be put into words (e.g. a dream)
An unusual experience with religious significance that cannot be put into words (e.g. Teresa of Ávila)
When people come to feel the presence of the divine in their lives, but not due to a specific experience (e.g. C.S. Lewis)
Corporate experiences
More convincing than individual experience due to number of similar/same testimonies?
Sam Harris says 'there is sanity in numbers' - in isolation, the experiences may be a sign of insanity
Toronto Blessing
People experience 'holy laughter,' where the Holy Spirit acts through them - personal evidence of God?
Has caused personality changes - and not all positive ones
Stephanus Pretorius wrote a paper, which concluded that the Toronto Blessing could be due to psychological effects like hypnosis
Pilgrims at Fatima, Portugal
70,000 pilgrims all saw the sun fall from the sky and crash to Earth in 1917
How can this be explained logically?
Richard Dawkins used Hume's pithy test, and said that it would be more likely for it to happen than not
Everyday examples
Being part of congregation or religious community in any way could be seen as a corporate religious experience
This shows the experiences' realities cannot be denied
But doesn't this just prove there are religiously influenced cultures, not prove the truth of what they believe?
Conversion experiences
Gradual experiences
C.S. Lewis felt the increasing presence of God in his life over the course of a year before he fell prostrate on the ground and gave his faith to God
Sudden experiences
Nicky Cruz was part of gangs in New York, whose life was turned around when a pastor told him that he loved him
Davey Falcus was involved in drugs and violence before he had a vision of Jesus who forgave him for his sins, so he could live life anew
Saul persecuted Christians before having a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus. He lost his sight before a Christian named Ananias restored it. He converted to Christianity and changed his name to Paul
Evidence of conversion
Teresa of Ávila said that there must be a genuine change in the individual for the conversion to be genuine (e.g. someone who profited financially from their conversion may not be genuine)
William James said conversion would result in a wholeness and integration in the individual - still true for converting for atheism?
In H.D. Lewis' 'Our Experience of God,' there is a pattern of conversion experiences described, which suggests that they start with a sense of dissatisfaction and looking for answers
Visions
Sensory visions
When a physical being, form or image is witnessed
For example, St Bernadette's vision of the Virgin Mary
Intellectual visions
When someone becomes aware of a presence or being without sensual experience of them
Teresa of Ávila said she could sense Christ's presence without physically seeing Him
Dreams
When someone has a dream in which a truth is revealed to them
They feature throughout the Bible. For example, Joseph is told to not be afraid of marrying Mary though he is not Jesus' father (Matthew 1:20)
Prayer
People feel a personal connection to God through prayer
Glossolalia (speaking in tongues)
The Holy Spirit speaks through people, a form of connection with the divine
Teresa of Ávila
Autobiography
In her Garden Analogy, she shows how building and maintaining a connection with God becomes easier over time by comparing it to irrigating a garden - progressing from the hard work of drawing water from a well to the little effort of the rain watering the garden for you
The Interior Castle
She describes how prayer can progress you through 7 stages to be spiritually unified with God - with each represented through a 'morada' ('mansion' or 'dwelling-place')
Mystical experience
Transcendent
Experiences that take the practitioner beyond normal experience - 'other worldly' experiences
Sufism (a mystical group in Islam) focuses on divine union with Allah through meditation, dance and other practices
Ecstatic
The mind is focused on one subject with the supension of normal sense activity, giving a sense of 'ecstasy'
Meditation in Eastern tradition or feeling of being in the presence of God in Christian fath
Unitive
Experiences where any barrier between the individual and the 'other worldly' is removed, creating a sense of spiritual union
Teresa of Ávila's 7th 'morada' of 'Spiritual Marriage' in her Interior Castle
Authenticity of Religious Experience
William James
Based on his three principles (see Nature of Religious Experiences), he concluded that religious conclusions are a 'reasonable hypothesis' though not 'proof' of anything
Can test to see if religious experiences have the four characteristics that James describes
Richard Swinburne
Principle of Credulity
If someone thinks they have experienced something then they probably have, unless there is some reason to doubt it
Principle of Testimony
People are generally truthful about their experiences, so unless they are a liar or are disturbed, there is no reason to disbelieve them
Criticisms of Swinburne
Religious experience is not like ordinary experience
The possibility of observational errors is high - nobody knows what God is, only what they believe is true
Caroline Franks Davis
Description-related challenges
Any event described must have empirical evidence to support it. If the event contradicts everyday experience and has inconsistencies, it must be rejected
Subject-related challenges
The experiencer may be unreliable - physiological events can cause dreams, hallucinations and visions
Object-related challenges
The being experienced may be unlikely - a Godlike figure seems as likely as the Loch Ness Monster. Some entities experienced may seem improbable - Yorkshire Ripper thought God told him to commit murder
Psychological Causes?
Richard Dawkins
He points to how the 'simulation software in the brain' is very good at constructing faces and voices when there are none
People with religious influences may be more likely to interpret something as religious experience (Hick's 'experiencing as')
Richard Dawkins experienced nothing religious when subject to 'Persinger's helmet'
Feuerbach
God is an invention of the human mind, where people transfer all their highest ideals and hopes on to this made up God and imagine Him to be all the things they wish they were themselves
Freud
Believed that belief in God was 'infantile neurosis' as people could not cope with being an adult in the world so invent an imaginary parent figure
People that have religious experiences require psychological treatment
Physiological Causes
Physical and mental wellbeing may influence religious experiences
Teresa of Avila seemed unwell
Persinger's study found that stimulating the temporal lobes with magnetic fields induces 'religious' experiences - Tibetan monks reported a feeling similar to meditation
St Paul may have been epileptic or been unwell in some way - he refers to a 'thorn' in 2 Corinthians
Lack of sleep and dehydration can lead to hallucination
Near-death experiences may be the result of endorphins or other emotion-altering hormones, or be the result of a brain losing consciousness/function
Nature of Religious Experiences
Notes on Experience in general
Thomas Hobbes
What is the difference between a man saying God spoke to him in a dream and a man dreaming that God spoke to him?
Wittgenstein
Seeing-as: we interpret our experience in particular ways, which may be correct or incorrect
Used images, like one of a duck/rabbit, to illustrate his point
Hick
Experiencing as: everything can be experienced and interpreted in different ways
If two people watch a film, one may find it entertaining and the other boring
Vincent Brümmer
The duck/rabbit picture is not a duck or a rabbit - it is a line drawing
People want to claim that their interpretation is the correct one
Peter Vardy
'the line between religious experiences and experiences in religious contexts is not a solid one'
Kant
We interpret the world in ways that fit our understanding of it
W.L. Craig
Personal experience is grounds for basic belief in what we experience
William James
Characteristics of mystical experiences
Ineffable: beyond describable in words
Noetic quality: experience gives new knowledge or truth
Transient: short-lived experience, long-lasting effects
Passivity: recipient is not in control of the experience
Religious experiences are 'much more convincing than results established by logic ever are'
Any experience is religious 'so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in whatever they may consider the divine'
Claims that religious experiences are 'psychological phenomena' show that the experiences are natural
His conclusions rest on 3 principles
Empiricism
Religious experiences are empirical evidence, we all interpret our own experience
Pluralism
Everyone experiences the same ultimate reality, but we interpret it differently due to our beliefs
Pragmatism
Truth is in practical results, if religiious experiences hold truth with those they affect, there is truth in it due to the personal value it has
Rudolf Otto
Numinous
'The deepest and most fundamental element in all strong and sincerely felt religious emotion'
The numinous is something 'wholly other' than the natural world, and beyond apprehension and comprehension
Inspires feelings of awe, majesty, fear and dread
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans
Mysterium
Wholly other - outside normal experience
The mystery inspires fascination - the subject is drawn to it, they are 'caught up in it'
Tremendum
Awefulness - inspiring awe or terror
Overpowering - inspires a sense of humility
Energy/urgency - gives an impression of immense vigour
Experiences can be very powerful, as they come from loving something
As experiences are 'wholly other,' they cannot be described within our language
C.S. Lewis
'Uncanny'
Something 'uncanny' was unsettling due to its nature
We may fear a tiger, but we dread a ghost as it is 'uncanny'
In the presence of mighty spirit, the dread increases and also creates a sense of awe - this is the numinous
Summary of religious experiences
For
Religious experiences are evidence of the divine through their nature (Otto, Lewis)
Individual accounts are empirical evidence of the divine (James, Swinburne's Principles)
Corporate experiences give more validity to the claim that the 'other worldly' exists (Toronto Blessing, Fatima)
Conversion experiences are evidence of divine inspiration as we see personal change (James, Teresa of Avila)
Visions and feeling personal connections to the divine give foundations for basic belief (James, Craig, Teresa of Avila)
Against
There may be physiological causes of religious experience (Persinger, Davis)
There may be psychological causes of religious experience (Dawkins, Feuerbach, Freud)
There can be description-, subject- or object-related challenges that make evidence questionable (Davis)
'There is sanity in numbers' - Sam Harris (backed by Dawkins)
There are other explanations for corporate experience (Stephanus Pretorius, Dawkins, Hume's pithy test for miracles)
There may be false conversions (noted even by Teresa of Avila)
The situation may be misinterpreted as religious (Dawkins, Hick)
Religious experience may hold subjective truth, but is far from objective for everyone else (Dawkins)