Religiou experience

Swinburne identified 5 types of religious experience

• Having a private expericne that can be described through everyday language
• Having a private experience that can't be described using everyday language
• Percieveing a perfectly normal phenomena such as a sunrise
• Percieving an abnormal phenomena in public such as ressurection
• Feeling the presence of God despite lack of public or private phenomena

William James identified 4 aspects of Religious experience 

• Passivity - having a sense of powerlessness and being overwhelmed in the presence of a great being
• Ineffibility - the experience is so far from anything previously experienced it cannot be described using normal everyday langauage
• Noetic quality - the giving of some greater knowledge from a transcendent being
• Transciency - the experience only lasts a short amount of time and memory can fade shortly afterwards.

Rudolf Otto

• Identified the idea of numinousness - feeling and being in the presence of a much greater being, being both terried and in awe at the same time. Feeling almost crushed by something so much greater. An awesome power - religion comes from another world and numinous is the holy, innefiable cause of religion

Criticisms from Freud

• Religion is simply wishful thinking, an illusion created by the mind to desal with the 'outside world'. It addresses fear about the world and society
• Saw religion as a neaurotic illness and that religious experience was simply repressed unconcious thoughts arising from the mind.
• The precipitent is simply projecting their ultimate beliefs

Criticisms from Flew

• Proof for the believer may not be proof for everyone 'true for you, true for me'
• What one person may think is a religious experience or a visit or presence from God, another may have exactly the saem experience and imagine it was anything else. 
• Those who have religious expereicnes portray them quite differently, often portraying their own cultures God (Hick and pluralism)
• No way of verifying religious experience

Swinburne defined a religious experience as 'an experience of God or some other supernatural being'

Swinburne uses 2 argument's that support religious experience:

Principle of testimony:one should accept what other people say at face value, as we do this on an everyday basis, when they can't be disprovedf.

Principle of credulity: if someone thinks that X is present, then X is most likely to be present. Normally we trust our senses in life, so why not when we have a religious experience?

However Swinburne does accept that there are exceptions to these rules

Other explantions for religious expericnes may be: drugs, lyes, misunderstood by a child etc.

• A change to the religious way of life becuase of some experience of divine truth
• There is a great change in the mind of the person and all priorities are replaced by just one
• There is both moral and intellectual conversion
• Religious aims will become central to a person's life

Biblical example is of St Paul who originally persecuted early Christians but after a religious conversion he became a missionary, spreadng the word of God.

• There are probelsm distinguishing God from other experiences
• Michael Persinger - the God helmet. Using electrical signals running through the brain he was able to recreate the exact feeling of reiligius experience, showing it was just the brain
• Another scientific explanation is temporal lobe epilepsy
• Since we have no a posteriori knowledge or experience of God, how are we supposed to recognise an experience with him?

• Swinburnes 2 principles
• Yandell - During a religious experience God projects certain qualities onto a person and it is that perosns reaction to something that cannot be seen and must be coming from somewhere else. Yandell argues that Religious experience cannot be a result of the brain
• William James - Religious experience has such profound effects it can't be caused by hallucinationa. Causes of religious experience are undoubtedly real and f that cause is God, then God must exist.