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Religious Experience - Coggle Diagram
Religious Experience
Verifying religious experiences
The challenge of verifying religious experiences
Only one person's testimony
Empirical testimony is useless
Subjective
Open to interpretation
Drugs or alcohol can produce many similar effects to a religious experience (eg. dmt)
The challenge to religious experience from science
Freud
Saw religious experiences as illusions
Believed they were projections of the ultimate, oldest, and most profound ideas that people had
Mass delusion or paranoid wish-fulfilment
Psychosexual theory of development and religious experience
Infantile neurosis: human children need to be protected and loved by its parents, leading to a projection of these parental figures onto a divine entity
Illusion and wish-fulfilment: expressions of underlying psychological needs and desires
Oedipus complex: the child's feelings of ambivalence towards the father are resolved by identifying with religious figures who represent a kind of idealised father figure
Coping mechanism for anxiety
Collective neurosis: religious rituals and beliefs are symptomatic of neurotic compulsions in individuals
Psychological relief and social cohesion
Freud's analysis of St Teresa's visions
Sublimated/ repressed sexual energy
Symptoms of hysteria
Projection and wish-fulfilment: expressions of internal desires and psychological needs
V. S. Ramachandran
Carried out extensive research related to temporal lobe epilepsy from which he concluded that there is important evidence linking the temporal lobes to religious experience
When the temporal lobe patients were shown any type of religious imagery, their bodies produced a dramatic change in their skin resistance, much greater than people not suffering from the condition.
Ramachandran is not unwilling to accept that it may be God that exists and has placed the temporal lobe within the brain as a means of communication with humans
Michael Persinger
Agrees that temporal lobes have a significant role in religious experiences
Religious experiences are no more than the brain responding to external stimuli
'The God Helmet' / The 'Unique Machine'
Produces weak magnetic fields across the hemispheres of the brain, specifically the temporal lobes
900+ people who were experimented on claimed a 'religious' experience
The brain 'defaults' to a sense of infinity
Near death experiences
1/3 experience near death experiences
Cultureana age may influence different near death experiences
DMT is released
The 'dying brain hypothesis'
at death, the brain released chemicals which induce religious experiences/hallucinations
Temporal lobe epilepsy
'A doorway to different ideas that just wouldn't exist in m normal mental state'
Revealing the true meaning of the universe
Ramachandran
There's a group of neurons that is firing in a normal manner, which makes you more prone to religious belief
The 4 challenges to religious experiences
Psychological explanations
The idea of God is a human projection / human aspirations or desires
Freud: neurosis caused by childhood insecurities and the desire for a father-figure to protect us
Hallucinations have simple psychological explanations
BUT
Carl Gustav Jung accepted the reality of numinous experiences and argues that development of the spiritual aspect of us was essential to psychological wholeness
Physiological explanations
Neuropsychological mechanisms which underlie religious experiences
'Casual operator' ad the 'holistic operator' within the brain
BUT
The fact there is a physical dimension to religious experiences need to lead us to reject the experience completely.
Some argue our brains are constructed in such a way that we are almost wired to experience God
Difficulties in interpretation
Religious experiences tend to be described in terms of people's prior religious faith
BUT
All our experiences are interpretations
It is logically impossible to experience God
Our senses can only experience things in the empirical realm (phenomena)
It is impossible for us to experience the noumenal realm as a matter of logic
BUT
God may choose to reveal himself to certain people
There may be an aspect of our human minds hat is able to experience God
C. D. Broad gave an analogy of a society of blind people where some evolve the capacity to see, and thus some may remain sceptical
Religious responses to those challenges
Countering the 4 challenges to religious experiences
Psychological explanations
Carl Gustav Jung accepted the reality of numinous experiences and argues that development of the spiritual aspect of us was essential to psychological wholeness
Physiological explanations
The fact there is a physical dimension to religious experiences need to lead us to reject the experience completely.
Some argue our brains are constructed in such a way that we are almost wired to experience God
Difficulties in interpretation
All our experiences are interpretations
It is logically impossible to experience God
God may choose to reveal himself to certain people
There may be an aspect of our human minds hat is able to experience God
C. D. Broad gave an analogy of a society of blind people where some evolve the capacity to see, and thus some may remain sceptical
Swinburne's principle of credulity and testimony
Principle of credibility
The way things seem to be is the way things really are.
2 objections to the principle of credibility & Swinburne's responses
The difficulty of showing that God was present in the experiencer and how can the experience do this?
Swinburne's response: God is presumably everywhere, so rather than the focus being on the experiencer to show that God was present, the focus is on the douber to show that he was not.
The possibility that what is claimed can be accounted for in other was (eg. TLE)
Swinburne's response: As the Creator, God underpins all processes, including those that go on in the brain, so if God causes an experience through the temporal lobes, that would be perfectly normal.
Principle of testimony
We should believe what people tell us, provided that there are no particular reasons not to
2 objections to the principle of testimony & Swinburne's responses
The reliability of the claim (eg. someone who is a known liar)
Swinburne's response: It cannot be shown that all such claims are unreliable. just because someone has lied in the past, does not mean they must be lying now.
The truth of the claim
It cannot be shown that all such claims are untrue. Again, someone making one claim that is false does not mean that any other particular claim to a religious experience is likely to be untrue.
Swinburne's overall conclusion
Someone who has had a religious experience of what seems to be God has, by the principle of credibility good reason for believing that there is a God
The testimony of others who report such experiences supports such a claim
Without religious experience, the probability of the existence of God is about 50/50. If we add the testimony of religious experiences, it becomes greater than 50/50.
The nature of religious experience
Visions: corporeal, imaginative, and intellectual
Corporeal
We see objects in the material world
Eg. St Bernadette's visions of Mary, Mother of God, at Lourdes
Imaginative/spiritual
We see images in the mind, either as memories, past sense experiences, or products of the imagination
Eg. St Teresa's visions
Intellectual
Sees things that have no connection with physical objects or their image; includes a wide range of cognitive activity, including insight or intuition
Eg. St Peter's realisation of Jesus' true identity (Matthew 16:13-20)
Numinous experiences: Otto, an apprehension of the wholly other
Classified religious experiences as encounters/interactions with a deity and described it as the profound/ overwhelming feeling of being in the presence of 'the wholly other'
'The wholly other': something beyond all understanding or perception
While the object of the experience is indescribable, the unique/powerful nature of the feeling the experience invokes cane be classified as a district type of experience
Sui generis: of its own type/ unique
'Mysterium, tremendum, et fascinans'
The three components to the 'numinous' experience
Mysterium
Entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life
The 'wholly other'
Provokes a reaction of silence
Tremendum
Provokes terror
Presents overwhelming power
Fascinans
Merciful
Gracious
Potent charm; attractiveness in spite of fear
God
God is so far removed from humanity that we have no choice but to approach God with numinous awe. dread, fear, and terror
Focuses on God as transcenden
The creature is so overwhelmed by its own nothingness by comparison with the Holy Spirit
Calls the experience 'numinous'
Best thought of less in empirical terms, than as powerful emotional reactions to the presence of a divinely perfect bieng
Otto's analogy
'A degraded offshoot and travesty of the genuine numinous dread and awe': fear of ghosts
The ghost captivates us because it is a thing that doesn't really exist at all
The ghost is uncanny because its ontological status remains ambiguous between the common division of the living and the dead/ being and non-being
Why is this limited in helping us understand the such experiences?
We must remember that the uncanniness of the ghost is a means for Otto to gesture toward to ineffable experience of mystery located at the centre of religion
Father Yves Duboi
He experienced twice 'the presence of the Mother of God', unlike anything he had ever felt before
'Her holiness would have been frightening but for the strong feeling of love and compassion'
How does it fit with Otto's definition?
Describes numinous religious experiences as provoking terror ands awe
Mystical experiences: William James; non sensuous and non-intellectual union with the divine as presented by Walter Stace
William James
The 3 key principles on which James' analysis rests
Empiricism
We must examine before drawing conclusions
James examined thousands of cases and was able to generalise common features
Pluralism
Accepting the legitimacy of diversity
All religions were based on religious experiences of the same supernatural reality, just interpreted differently
Pragmatism
The consequences of a belief are more important than their objective truth or falsehood
We can never know if someone's experience was based on an actual interaction with supernatural reality, but we can examine the impact of the experience on someone's life
The 4 characteristics of mystical experieces
Ineffable
Can't be described/ put into words
It can be empathised
Noetic
Reveals knowledge that was not evident to the senses
Transcient
Passes eventually (but its effects last a long time)
Passive
Can't be stopped
Has to be experienced
James' conclusion about the religious experience argument
Quantity
Have been a universal phenomenon in human history
Significant part of human experience
Similarities
Enough similarities to conclude they have not been made up
It's rational to accept they probably have a divine/non-natural source
Effects
Powerful and largely positive
People and communities change their lives on the basis of such experiences
Referring to an eternal source for them must make sense
'There are religious experiences of a specific nature ... point...to the continuity of our consciousness'
Walter Stace
Stace's classification of mystical experience disagrees with James' definition
Distinguishes between extroversive and introversive experiences
Only introversive experiences are truly mystical
Extroversive experiences
Have sensory and/or intellectual content
kataphatic (can be described)
Only partially mystical
Introvertive experiences
Genuine mystical experiences
Non-sensory/non-intellectual
Actually achieving union with the divine, rather than just awareness of
Apophatic (only say what it is not/can't be described in positive terms)
The influence of religious experiences and their value for religious faith