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Religious Experience - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Especially convincing due to life-changing effects
      - Cannot only be hallucinations because it has positive and profound life-changing effects
      - Transformation from an unhappy divided/imperfect self with guilt conscience to a more unified happy state
      - e.g. St Paul was called "Saul" and was a Jew who persecuted Christians but had a conversion experience where he saw Jesus who spoke to him. He then became a Christian and wrote a lot in the Bible
      - Could still be hallucinations and hallucinations could still be life changing
      - Matter of perspective: only beliefs is significant which their own mind is supplying; does not come from spiritual reality
        e.g. an atheist hallucinates a person walking down a road won't change their life, but if a theist hallucinates an angel, it might be life changing. Yet, this would still be hallucination.
      - Ockham Razor tells us that we have no reason to accept unnecessary complex supernatural explanation when we have naturalistic/scientific explanation
      - Much of Paul's description e.g. seeing bright light, falling to the floor, being paralysed are symptoms of seizures
      - Hard to diagnose people based on writing from thousands years ago. Conversion experiences can also be explained by wishful thinking.
    - - Religious experiences are evidence of union with a higher power
      - He studied religious experience from different cultures and believed that they had 4 criteria in common:
        
        Ineffable - beyond language
        
        Noetic - provides knowledge
        
        Transient - short duration (but effects can be long/permanent)
        
        Passive - not something you can actively make happen, beyond control
      - Pluralism argument - mystical experiences are found in all religions and have these 4 criteria in common - can't be a chance - there must be an objective cause of that cross-cultural similarity
      - Weaknesses
        
        Persinger's "God helmet" machine showed that religious experiences cold be produced by unusual brain activity
        
        There are physiological causes of hallucination e.g. drugs, mental illness, fasting, sleep deprivation that can cause random unusual brain activity
        
        If we have naturalistic explanation of cross-cultural similarities in religious experiences, supernatural cause is unnecessary
      - Strengths
        
        James' theory is possible, cannot prove it false
  - - - too much emphasis on the subjective, reducing religion to emotion and removing the possibility of showing that religious claims are based on facts
  - - - Difficult for Otto to rule out alternative naturalistic explanations of religious experience e.g. mental illness, random brain hallucinations, drugs, alcohol, fasting, sleep deprivation...
- - - - Fails to explain mystical religious experiences because of its unity with something infinite and unbounded, that seem to go far beyond wish-fulfillment and hallucinations of a neurotic
      - Overgeneralised and overly reductive
      - There are plenty of non neurotic religious people
      - Regarded by psychologists as being too unempirical as he studied a small sample size - not representative of society and no method of experiment
  - - - Could be argued that brain manipulation is the mechanism by which God creates religious experiences
      - Least demonstrates that religious experience could have a naturalistic explanation, thus, supernatural explanations are unnecessary
      - However, his "God helmet" cannot completely rule out the possibility of supernatural causes for regular religious experiences
    - - In cases where we have naturalistic and supernatural/metaphysical explanations competing, we can use Ockham's razor.
      - Naturalistic explanation is the simpler option
  - - - Lack evidence, this is only a hypothesis
      - Doesn't take account that there is historical evidence for religious experience e.g. the resurrection and Teresa of Avila
      - Breaks the genetic fallacy: explaining why someone would want to believe something doesn't equal to dismissing the claim