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! religious experience ! - Coggle Diagram

- - - - awareness experience
        
        seeing the work of God when looking at the world
        
        e.g. the sunset is really the 'hand of God'
        
        the blooming flower is a 'miracle of God'
      - quasi-sensory experience
        
        having a vision or other inner experience of God
        
        e.g. St Teresa of Avila having 'inner vision' of Christ
        
        e.g. the prophet Muhammed receiving the Qur'an from the Angel Jibril was a vision experience
      - numinous experience
        
        encountering the holiness of God
        
        Blaise Paschal had a numinous experience in 1644 "from about 1/ past 10 in the evening until 1/2 past midnight, Fire! ... God of Abraham ... Certainty, certainty, heartfelt joy, peace .. joy, joy, joy ... let me never be cut off from him!"
        
        Moses' vision of the burning bush
      - regenerative experience
        
        a conversation experience
        
        a change in belief on region topics which in turn leads to changes in the motivation for one's behaviours within the social environment
        
        St Paul on the road to Damascus
      - interpretive experience
        
        having prayers answered
      - mystical experience
        
        a sense of ultimate reality
      - revelatory experience
        
        receiving enlightenment & knowledge (perhaps through a revelation from God)
        
        Muhammed on the mountain
        
        mediation
- - - - the person feels that they are in contact with God
    - - the person has an inner experience of God's action in creation
  - - - experienced by an individual in private
    - - experienced by a large number of people at the same time
- - - - RE are "something akin to sensory experiences" they're perceived through signs similar to experiencing other people
  - - - thought that the heart of religion lay in personal experiences which for the individual are "absolutely authoritative" - sees experiences as personally persuasive, rather than as hard evidence to prove God to others
      - identified 4 key features of an RE (PINT)
        
        ineffability
        
        the experience is beyond human words & cannot be adequately described
        
        noetic
        
        the experience imparts special knowledge that cannot be known by other means
        
        passivity
        
        the experience cannot be achieved by effort its a gift & comes unexpectedly
        
        transiency
        
        its a short lived experience which has life long positive effects on the subject
      - didn't think his study proved existence of GOD it has been used by supporters of the argument
  - - - principle of Credulity (POC)
        
        those experiencing God's should believe intuitively what their senses tell them - it is rational to trust what we experience, unless there's strong evidence you've been mislead
      - principle of testimony (POT)
        
        we should trust those who give accounts of REs, if there's no reason to doubt them - known liars, those influenced by drugs, etc shouldn't be trusted. But if the individual is morally improved by the encounter there's even more reason to believe them
    - - claims its reasonable to to suppose that God would seek to engage & interact with his creation as it fits with his nature & attributes: omnipotent & omnibenevolent, if God exists we should expect religious experiences to take place
    - - claims theres reasonable probability of God's existence if all the other arguments are taken into account. None of these other arguments prove God's existence but they make it more probable than not
  - - - often they are transformed morally, e.g. John Newton - slave ship captain turned Priest & hymn writer
  - - - 2 - the experience must be consistant with scripture
      - 3 - Church leaders must test & examine the experience
      - 1 - the experience must bring about godly change
- - - - the argument involves assumptions which must be accepted as true (inductive leaps - Hume)
      - they can't be compared to ordinary sensory experiences because they're different, the argument is based on an analogy with sensory experiences (J L Mackie)
        
        criticism
        
        his claim that RE are disanalogous with normal experiences is harsh... William Alston suggests there's continuity to our experiences informing on our ability to check perceptions, detect regularity, share experiences & have common views of public objects between cultures. Religion might well fit into this scheme C.F Davies says RE are "akin to sense experiences"
      - they cannot absolutely prove the existence of an external divine source, only make God's existence possible
    - - 2) cultural conditioning (J L Mackie)
        
        believers are educated to see the world in terms of their beliefs, this form of influences how they interpret everything they experience, religious experiences are the product of faith - therefore the testimony of believers are unreliable
      - 2) Anti Realist Challenge
        
        this claims there are no direct experiences with God - instead RE are the way the world is seen by a religious believer. One 'leans to find God in all things' & this learning process depends on your frame work (view of the world)
        
        R.M Hare describes these ways of seeing the world as 'BLIKS' - groundless (not based on rational evidence), but meaningful for the individual
    - - Ayer's partially critical of mysticism cause it tries to ascribe significance to a being (God) who cannot be meaningfully described. If there's no possible way to check what's meant by 'God' then why should we accept the validity of religious experience
      - there's no way RE can be tested scientifically, therefore they cannot provide any proof for God
      - the 'verification principle' is the principle that a proposition can only be meaningful if it could be verified analytically of synthetically (scientifically or mathematically)
      - counter argument - eschatological verification (Hick)
        
        the believers experience of God will be verified at the end of the world, therefore in theory they are verifiable, just not right now
      - In 'Language, Truth & Logic' Ayer claimed that statements about God can't be verified in any way, but can RE really be criticised as meaning less for lack of verification?
        
        many normal everyday experiences can't be verified either; in social interactions we are used to taking things on trust unless we have any reason not to.
        
        the whole concept of trust assumes that we don't require people to verify everything they say - a key part of Swinburne's 'Principle of Testimony'.
        
        the verification principle itself has been subjective to criticism, as its not a principle that can be verified analytically or synthetically. in the since is this statement about the nature of knowledge really in any better position than statements about RE
    - - how can 2 opposing & different experiences of the divine both be right, there is so much variety, they undermine each other & can tell us nothing
      - counter argument - the pluralistic hypothesis (Hick)
        
        RE are different human responses to the 1 divine reality. The divine transcends human ideas & therefore each religious tradition represents he Real as they experience it
  - - - drug/alcohol
        
        hallucinogenic drugs used by Rastafarians
      - simple mistake (Hume & Darwin)
      - mental illness/brain condition/phycological explanations
        
        St Teresa of Avila - manic depression? St Paul - epilepsy?
    - - RE as 'delusion' or 'paranoid wish fulfilment'
      - criticism
        
        its not reasonable to assume all these these people are suffering from some form of mental deficiency, you-re making an inductive leap that none of them are true, that all of them are products of mental neurosis
    - - the manifestation of phycological needs to help humans cope with the idea of death or because humans are gullible
      - the devil bird example
        
        a friend of Dakin's went camping & heard horrible shrieking & concluded it was the voice of the devil, however locals told him it was a bird nicknamed the 'devil bird' - they were mistaken
      - "clearly there is sanity in numbers"
        
        when discussing the large amounts of religious experiences he says that beliefs that with no ration justification which would otherwise label people delusional are deemed normal & just region when the belief is common
        
        allusion to Feud's mod theory
      - "formidable power of the brain's simulation software"
        
        based his criticism of the idea that the brain is essentially filling in the gaps when it can't work out fully what it is experiencing. It is perfectly & easily capable to construct faces, figures & other delusions of the upmost believability
      - criticism
        
        his use of a personal anecdote is not revealing of RE as a whole. in most cases, testimonies or personal experiences are not easily deconstructed in natural or psychological terms