The challenges of verifying religious experience
- Created by: daisybalsh
- Created on: 26-05-18 18:21
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- Challenges of verifying religious experience
- Subjective or objective?
- For something to count as evidence, it must be publicly accessible so that it can be tested
- Religious experiences - not publicly accessible and so cannot be tested & therefore cannot count as evidence for religious belief
- Subjective - difficult to use to justify objective claims about the world
- Mental events private - may be able to make some inferences about what people are thinking by their behaviour - cannot directly observe mental processes. Undermines evidential value of religious experiences
- Often ineffable - cannot describe their experience at all - makes it even harder to verify
- For something to count as evidence, it must be publicly accessible so that it can be tested
- Can I verify someone else's experience
- AJ Ayer - if a mystic admits experience cannot be described, then he must also admit he is bound to talk nonsense when describing it
- Verifying own experiences can be just as problematic as verifying someone else's.
- Hobbes asked what the difference is between saying 'God spoke to me in a dream' and saying 'I dreamt God spoke to me'
- Merely mental events
- We could doubt our own experiences, asking Was I hallucinating?Am I putting my own interpretation onto something mundane? “Was it alcohol/drugs
- We can never be sure enough of a religious experience to prove anything objective about the world.
- Subjective or objective?
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