Religious Experience

An encounter with the divine

• Individual - by yourself
• Corporate - with other people
• Objective - empirical, if others were there they could experience it
• Subjective - only you can experience, like a vision 
• Conversion - convert to the religion after RE
• Visions/Voices - hearing or seeing something divine
• Near Death Experiences - common phenomen experienced after death, then come back to life
• Revelation - experience acquires new knowledge a)propositional: God communicates his divine message to a human being b)non-propositional: through a RE a person comes to a moment of 'realisation of divine truth'
• Meditation - calming the mind, becoming aware and at one with the truth (Buddha)
• Prayer - 
• Mysticism - a direct experience of God, personal, transcendent = sense of unity with the divine (e.g. whirling dervishes in Sufi Islam)
• Numinous (Otto)- in the presence of God: experience of awe + wonder 
• Miracles - something out of the ordinary, believed to be divine intervention

• Trying to prove the existence of God from Religious Experience
• RE's are an experience of the divine, many people have testified to having this experience; therefore God exists. (cumulative argument)
• Theologian, but rejects all the other arguments for the existence of God. Is not interested in philosophical reasoning "feeling is the deeper source of religion", argues we should turn to feeling/experience to prove existence - this is backbone of rleigion, philosophy is simply an addition.
• Definition of a RE: PINT 1. Passive (happens to you, you can't cause it) 2. Ineffible (cannot be described in words) 3. Noetic (give us knowledge about something else, usually knowledge of another presence) 4. Transient (momentary, an experiance which lasts for a short amount of time)
• Mystical experiences are authoratative to those that have them, and no authority extends to those who have not had them = an individual religious experience is valid enough in itself, and does not need to be proven by someone who has not had an RE. 
• Experience is authentic if the RE has had an effect on your life - not interested in proving it empirically because the route to get there is not important (e.g. if you take drugs and experience an RE; if you convert to christianity afterwards this is still authentic) "that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself" 

claims the 'numinous' is a mysterious (other worldy, never before experiencedbut real object of experience which evokes feelings of awe, wonder and fascination (we are drawn to it). Tremendous (provokes terror and an overhwhelming power).

experience of the holy is outside of yourself...feel something greater than yourself. 

Comes as a result of intuition NOT rational thinking; people just know God is there. 

Subjectivist approach: dependent of personal opinion

Objectivist approach: dependent on external facts 

Belief in god is reasonably possible and therefore we should employ the POC and POT when someone has a religious experience. 

Principle of Credulity - accept something as real unless we have valid reasons to not believe this  (i.e. they are under the influence of drugs). 

Principle of Testimony - usually people tell the truth, so we should assume they are being genuine unless we have valid reason to not believe them.

John Hick: had a religious experience which converted him to Christianity and argued that the faith is based on RE and rejects it as a form of propositional belief. Religious knowledge is gained through RE, like how much of our knowledge is gained through an a posteriori approach. 

James comes up with the term, meaning when someone tries to explain RE's through biological or medical factors 

Persinger - 'The God Helmet' - makes a helmet which has a weak magnetic fields onto the head which induces experiences like RE's. Trying to prove RE's are just the brain reacting to external stimuli. 

Ramachandran - people with epilepsy are more likely to have RE's because the temporal lobe is a particular focus for these types of experiences 

- there is a scholarly argument that his vision on the road to Damascus was a result of an epileptic fit 

- St Theresa, her RE is a result of starvation which in turn effects her brain functions

--> WJ rejects this because the cause is not important. All thoughts and feelings are organic and we should not explain away their products. 

Freud

• believes religion is a psychological illness, so RE's are a symptom of this illness/neurosis.
• Complete illusion, symptom that we crave a father figure, and we are scared of death so we create the figure of God to provide comfort. --> e.g. St Theresa - experience is of repressed sexuality (being stabbed with darts over and over)
• Argues that because people from different cultures and different religions have RE's proves that this is a universal psychological fantasy --> WJ instead says this proves there legitamacy "an eternal unanmity"

Dawkins

• 'The God Delusion' would support Freud, argue its psychosis. Psychotic states are when the mind is immersed in what it thinks are true; but all the 'sane' people can look at them and say they are insane and what they believe is wrong. Same for religious experience!

Nicholas Lash - can't have an experience of God outside of religious tradition. God is a transcendent being and can only be experience indirectly through a community of a believers. God is not an object that can be experienced directly. (e.g. the eucharist, through drinking wine and bread, we can indirectly experience God's grace as a community)

NDE'S - people say they saw a surgeon being angry as they were dying but they were clinically dead - proves they had an outer body experience?

A posteriori - in theory, it is based on empirical experience

Examples of Co-orporate RE's - Toronto Blessing. Toronto airport church, speaking in tongues, crying, dancing around the room. God communicates with us psychologically - The words of the Qu'ran were placed into the prophet Mohammad's mind 

Swinburnes cumulative argument + similarities: many people exepriencing the same thing gives it more proof. There is a huge number of testimonies, and similarities between them (e.g. NDE's the Greyson scale)

Ockhams Razor: the simplest answer is that the RE was caused by God

Prinicipple of Credulity: no reason to doubt someones experience and we use this to validate things every day, why change for RE?

James, Otto, Swinburne, Hick 

Non-empirical nature: we all 'see' the world in a different way so all testimnoies are subjective and there is no one objective truth (anti-realism, subjective) --> Kant

Subjective nature: there is always a alternative non-religious explanation

Wittgensteins 'seeing-as': the world can accomodate different perspectives which can be seen as optical illusions. What we see is shaped by our experience e.g. if you have not been taught the idea of God you may not experience it

The Negative Principle Of Credulity: Martin Criticises Swinburne's Principle Of Credulity because it means an atheist is justified when they experience an abscence of God --> Swinburne replies: if explorers go into a jungle and see a lion, then another team goes in afterwards and does not see the lion this does not mean the lion was not observed by the first team! Just because you don't experience God, doesn't mean someone else hasn't.

Kant: as god is transcendent, we do not have the sense to experience god (like a blind woman not being able to see a rainbow)

Hare: a religious experience may just be part of a rleigious believers blik - therefore the testimony is unreliable

Hinduism: the cow miracle, 1995 - Hindu statues appeared to drink milk offered by devotees, 10,000 claimed to see this. 

Sufi Islam, Whirling Dervishes: perform a dance called the sema which aims to achieve the wisdom and love of god. 

Christianity, Sauls conversion: Saul had a vision of God and converted to Christianity then and there, becoming apostle Paul (who wrote much of the New Testament)

Pentacostialism: Lakeland revival: Toronto blessing 1994, in an airport people shook uncontrollably, and spoke in tongues. Miracles and healings claimed to have taken place.

Saint Teresa: private meditation, had a religious experience "I have been in God and God in me"