Religious Experience God exists – I spoke to him this morning

Religious ExperienceGod exists – I spoke to him this morning

What is a religious experience? (Cole) • Wholly other from what is customary or usual • Not usually describable • Not universal to human beings • Different interpretations in different cultures • Subjective experience • Cannot be verified • Gives insight into the unseen • You cannot experience God unless he allows you to

Or…. • Any experience that is interpreted as religious.

Eat this sweet • Write down what it tastes like. • I can never experience things as you do – I do not even know whether when we both call something ‘sweet’ that it is the same taste for both of us. Similarly, I cannot share your religious experience – I can only feel mine.

Bertrand Russell ‘Some people drink too much and see snakes, whilst others fast too much and see God’. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) When a man says God spoke to him in a dream it ‘…is no more than to say that he dreamed that God spoke to him’.

Religious Experience and the argument • A religious experience may be understood as any encounter with God, or what is ultimate. It is an experience of transcendent reality, seen in many different ways in different faith traditions. • There are actually a number of different types of argument. For instance, some argue from ‘direct awareness’ – the view that God can be known intuitively (directly) by the person perceiving him. This is very personal however, and has limited capacity to persuade others. • Most commonly, theistic philosophers have preferred to talk about an argument from religious experience: an inductive and a posteriori argument based on the evidence of witnesses and testimonies.

A summary of the inductive argument • If an entity is experienced, it must exist • God is the sort of being that it is possible to experience • People claim to have experienced God directly Conclusion: God exists

Other forms of argument • A few other types of argument based on religious experience might also be considered, although they are less favoured by modern philosophers. • The ‘historical argument’ states that the experiences of key individuals have been so great and impressive that they must be true: Mohammed, St. Paul, etc. Such individuals had enormous influence after receiving religious experiences. • The ‘cumulative argument’ states that so many people have had religious experiences in the past that they simply cannot all be making it up. God must be the cause of (at least some of) this. St. Paul – vision of Christ knocked him off his horse The trouble with these arguments is that they’re very subjective and ambiguous. Who’s to say whether Mohammed has had a ‘great’ impact or not? Also, it’s implausible that God would be evident in all of these differing experiences, since so many are so different. Surely they rule each other out.

Read and annotate God and Human Experience • Draw up a table • Reasons to support the argument from religious experience • Reasons to refute the argument from religious experience.

Is religious experience widespread? 31% of British people and 5% of Americans have felt close to a powerful spiritual force or have had an experience they consider to be religious’. They experience may last for a few seconds but may last a lot longer. Those having the experience perceive it to be different from any other kind of experience. They produce a change in both behaviour and attitudes.

Types of Religious Experience - Swinburne Public Experience Ordinary Experiences – where a person interprets a natural event as having religious significance Extraordinary Experiences – experiences that violate normal understanding of nature (ie turning water into wine) Private Experiences Describable in ordinary language – (ie a dream) Non Describable – experiences of God/wholly other that cannot be explained using words. Teresa of Avila Non Specific – looking at the world from a religious perspective

Visions – 3 types • Teresa Alvila – intellectual vision (more of an experience) • Bernadette of Lourdes – corporeal vision (seen as a physical person) • Joseph speaking to angels in a dream – imaginative vision.

How would you categorise these? • Awe and beauty and intricacies of God’s creation, such as DNA • A young girl seeing a vision of Mary • John Wesley feeling that his heart had been ‘strangely warmed’ and his sins ‘removed’ by Jesus • The Qur’an being revealed by Muhammad (pbuh) by Allah • Moses receiving the 10 commandments

John Hick – ‘experiencing as’ • John Hick developing from Wittgenstein’s ‘seeing as. Hick interpreted Religious Experience similarly. It is not that people are experiencing different things – but they are experiencing the same thing differently.

William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience The Varieties of Religious Experience • A significant aspect of religious experience is the considerable variety of types: conversions (like that of St. Paul), corporate experiences, near death experiences, or mystical encounters. • The philosopher and psychologist William James was impressed by this great variety. He thought that the heart of religion lay in personal experiences which for the individual would be “absolutely authoritative”. James sees experiences as personally persuasive, rather than as evidence to prove God to others inductively. • James regarded mysticism as a significant state of mind or awareness, identifying four key features of such important experiences: (1) Ineffability – they cannot be explained (2) Noetic Quality – they impart knowledge, (3) Transiency – they are over quickly, (4) Passivity – they come upon the individual without being sought after. Key mystic: Teresa of Avila

Evaluating William James • Ineffable– they cannot be explained • Noetic - they impart knowledge • Transient - they are over quickly • Passive- they come upon the individual without being sought after • How could William James’ four characteristics be applied to the St Teresa extract? • How could William James’ four characteristic be applied to another case study you have considered?

Criticisms of William James • Logical Positivists would argue against this • Bases his understanding on a subjective understanding of religious experience. • If we took David Hume’s approach to the Cosmological and Teleological arguments – there may be another reason for religious experiences – a whole committee of gods, demons or perhaps telepathic forces…

Philosophical Problem: Cultural Differences In Christian Europe, it is common to hear of religious experiences that involve the Virgin Mary In India, Hindu experiences are likely to experience Ganesh How do you account for this?

Options…. • Both experiences of the divine are objectively true • One experience of the divine is objectively true and others are objectively false • All experiences of the divine are subjectively true, but none are objectively true

All are objectively true • It is possible that all these experiences are objectively true. This means that in Christian Europe, the Virgin Mary is actually encountered and similarly in India, Ganesh is encountered. • But this causes problems – denies the truth claims of major religions • Denies the NECESSITY proposed by the Ontological and Cosmological arguments. The world seems to be shared by several Gods who all claim to have created it.

One is true, and one is falseParadise Lost (Milton) • Argued that the Christian God is objectively true and other religions are objectively false. Whilst the Indian may have perceived himself as experiencing Ganesh – it is infact a demon. • However, if Demons can imitate religious experience that well, who is to say that all religious experiences have not been created that way.

Both are subjectively true John Hick • The pluralistic hypothesis. • If the PH is true, then nobody has a direct experience of the divine. Hick calls this ‘the real’ – not even Moses. Everyone ‘clothes’ the divine in symbols ,images and forms that are personally or culturally meaningful to them.

Read Swinburne • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqE6dDmZBwA&list=PLhnJwJaSqqiOv6Rp9UmgZ8fK8mlNxDPeK

Criticism of Swinburne • JL Mackie (Credulity) In the balance of probabilities, it is more likely that a person is mistaken than God is the explanation. • Gale – religious experience is not the same as other types of experience and therefore normal rules do not apply. Whilst normally we should trust our senses. However, if we dream we have seen monsters under our bed, then in a sense, we have ‘experienced’ a monster under the bed. Yet wouldn’t argue that it was veridical.

More criticisms • Davis argues that whilst normally we should accept what people say as a matter of course, however ‘God’ is not a trivial matter that we would be happy to take someone else’s word for. Swinburne needs to make a much stronger argument.

More Criticisms • Michael Martin suggests that Swinburne’s credulity and testimony can be used to suggest that God doesn’t exist. • An atheist may have a strong sense of the absence of God; using Swinburne’s argument perhaps we should assume that the world is as the experience suggests – there is NO God. that the world is probably.

Weaknesses of the argument The problem with an inductive argument is that it only ever gives probable explanations for states of affairs. This can lead to questionable ‘leaps’ in the evidence. Claims to experience God can never amount to proof as there are many alternative explanations: states of mind can be chemically or drug induced, or they might be part of a natural and sub-conscious healing process, or they might result from activity in the temporal lobes. Philosophical critiques A number of philosophers have also made criticisms of the argument from religious experience. J.L. Mackie has argued that it is wrong to draw evidence from people’s claims to religious experiences on the grounds that there are ‘disanalogies’ between these and other normal experiences. Mackie states that religious experiences have different characteristics from other perceptions, so they should not carry the same degree of authority. They are not part of the same scheme of shared and verifiable experiences common in daily life. Mackie: ‘Disanalogies’ between experiences

Ayer, verification • The argument from religious experience is also challenged by the ‘verification principle’, supported by the British philosopher and atheist A.J. Ayer. This is the principle that a proposition can only be meaningful if it could be verified analytically or synthetically. • That is, we could only regard religious experiences as meaningful if we could check their truth through the logical sense of the terms (analytically) or through gathering some body of supporting evidence (synthetically). • Ayer is particularly critical of mysticism, because it tries to ascribe significance to a being (God) who, by definition, cannot be meaningfully described. If there is no possible way to check what is meant by ‘God’, then why should we accept the validity of religious experience?

Richard Dawkinsalso has something to say about this debate. In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins tells a story from his student days. He recalls that a fellow undergraduate was camping in Scotland and claimed to have heard “the voice of the devil – Satan himself”. In fact, it was just the call of the Manx Shearwater (or ‘Devil Bird’), which has an evil sounding voice. For Dawkins, this highlights the key problem with personal experiences. They are often used in an appeal to God because people are ignorant of more straightforward physical or psychological explanations for what the perceive. It is an argument based on ignorance. not convinced

Possible responses to criticisms • Mackie’s claim that religious experiences are disanalogous with normal experiences seems harsh. William Alston suggests that there is continuity in our experiences, focusing on our ability to check perceptions, detect regularity, share experience, and have common views of public objects between cultures. Religion might well fit into this scheme. • Dawkins’ use of a personal anecdote is not revealing of religious experience as a whole. In most cases, testimony or personal experience are not easily deconstructed in natural or psychological terms. Contrary to Scooby Doo, there isn’t always a ‘perfectly straightforward explanation’.

Burden of proof: do the religious have to prove their experiences are genuine, or must sceptics disprove them? Can we verify religious experiences? What would a good method be like? Final Evaluation Should God be something we can experience for ourselves? Are religious experiences really different from normal experiences?

Alternatives to Religious Experience • Using Page

Religious Experience God exists – I spoke to him this morning