2.5.2 Challenges of religious experience

Question 1

What are Freud’s main points?

Answer 1

• “religion is an illusion”
• “the religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind”

Question 2

Who is Sigmund Freud?

Answer 2

• 20th century psychoanalyst
• founding father of modern psychology
• human behaviour is explained by the subconscious mind

Question 3

Describe Sigmund Freud’s ideas

Answer 3

• Sigmund Freud argued that “religion is an illusion”
• he saw visions as ‘at best signs of immaturity, at worst symptoms of mental illness.’
• he investigated the role of the subconscious mind & believed that religious belief in God was the result of the infantile need for a powerful ‘father figure’.
• religion is the projection of our greatest hopes, fears & desires (e.g. for protection, security)

Question 4

What are Russell’s main points?

Answer 4

• “[religious experiences] are hallucinations”
• “There is no difference between someone who eats too little and sees Heaven and someone who drinks too much and sees snakes”

Question 5

Who is Bertrand Russell?

Answer 5

20th century mathematician, logician & philosopher

Question 6

Describe Bertrand Russell’s ideas

Answer 6

• religious experience have physiological/psychological explanations
• for example, they are hallucinations as a result of eating too little
• they do not prove the existence of God because they have a scientific explanation - they are delusions

Question 7

What are Charles Stross’s main points?

Answer 7

• “[religious experiences] are misinterpretations”
• “one ape’s hallucination is another ape’s religious experience”

Question 8

Who is Charles Stross?

Answer 8

British sci-fi & fantasy writer

Question 9

Describe Charles Stross’s ideas

Answer 9

• apparent ‘religious experiences’ are misinterpretations
• humans wrongly interpret physiologically originating experiences as divine; this is often as a result of social influences
• for example, someone from a Christian background may have a vision of Jesus; the cultural relativism of such experiences demonstrates their human origins

Question 10

What are Schweitzer’s main points?

Answer 10

• “Paul had an epileptic fit”
• “The most natural hypothesis is therefore that Paul suffered from some kind of epileptiform attacks … It would agree with this, that on the road to Damascus he hears voices during an attack, & suffers afterwards from a temporary affection of the eyesight, if his experience at his conversion really happened during such an attack”.

Question 11

Who is Albert Schweitzer?

Answer 11

20th century theologian, philosopher & physician

Question 12

Describe Albert Schweitzer’s ideas

Answer 12

• St. Paul is the best example of a ‘religious experience’ caused internally
• he finds the ‘most natural hypothesis’ is that Paul suffered from epileptiform attacks
• indeed, people with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) are sometimes prone to religious visions & mystical experiences

Question 13

What is Richard Swinburne’s argument of religious experiences?

Answer 13

Swinburne argues that, since people usually tell the truth, there are only three types of evidence that should be taken as rendering their testimonies unreliable, namely:

• if the circumstances surrounding the experience are unreliable, for example through hallucinatory drugs
• if there is particular evidence to suggest that the person is lying
• if the experience can be explained in terms other than God, for example if the person is suffering from a mental illness

Question 14

What does Swinburne interpret of religious experiences?

Answer 14

• since so many thousands of people have had an experience of what seems to them to be of God, then it is a basic principle of rationality that we should believe them
• he called this the principle of credulity - that unless we have overwhelming evidence to the contrary, then we should believe that things are as they seem to be

Question 15

What does Swinburne say about religious experience in his book The Existence of God (1979)?

Answer 15

• he wrote that: “How things seem to be is a good guide to how things are…”
• therefore, in his view, religious experiences provide a convincing proof for the existence of God: “I suggest that the overwhelming testimony of so many millions of people to occasional experiences of God must, in the absence of counter-evidence, be taken as tipping the balance of evidence decisively in favour of the existence of God’.

Question 16

What statistic supports Swinburne’s position?

Answer 16

empirical research undertaken in recent years has indicated that as many as 40% of people have, at some time in their lives, had an experience that could be classified as religious

Question 17

How does Peter Vardy oppose Swinburne’s position?

Answer 17

• in his book The Puzzle of God (1995), Vardy sounds a note of caution
• using the example of someone supposedly seeing a UFO or the Loch Ness monster, he argues that a person, having apparently seen such a phenomenon, could be mistaken & therefore would be right to remain sceptical, unless there were a great deal of evidence to support what he or she had seen: “The probability of all such experiences must be low, and therefore the quality of the claimed experiences must be proportionately high”.

Question 18

What is the main difficulty of religious experiences?

Answer 18

• they cannot be verified by objective, empirical testing i.e. we cannot carry out a scientific experiment to determine whether they have, in fact, proved the existence of God
• scholars have suggested that they are, at best, ambiguous & can be interpreted in a number of different ways

Question 19

1. Arguments against religious experiences as proof for the existence of God - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Answer 19

• Ludwig Wittgenstein used the notion of seeing-as, suggesting that, in fact, each person sees their experiences differently; some may think they have experienced God, others may think they have experienced something else
• this means that all testimonies concerning religious experiences are unreliable

Question 20

2. Arguments against religious experience as proof for the existence of God - R. M. Hare

Answer 20

• R. M. Hare talks of religious experiences as a blik - that is, an unverifiable & unfalsifiable way of looking at the world i.e. the believer sees or feels something and claims it comes from God
• it is their personal interpretation & they believe it to be true
• but it cannot be proved true for everyone else & therefore the testimony is unreliable

Question 21

3. Arguments against religious experience as proof for the existence of God - Peter Vardy

Answer 21

“The argument from religious experiences as proof is, I suggest, going to depend to a very large extent on one presuppositions. If one’s preconceptions favour particular types of experience, one is likely to be convinced by reports of them. If one’s preconceptions favour particular types of experience, one is likely to be convinced by reports of them. If one is a sceptic one will need a great deal of convincing”.

Question 22

4. Arguments against religious experience as proof for the existence of God - John Hick & Peter Cole

Answer 22

John Hick, in The Existence of God (1977) observes that testimonies of religious experiences might also be equally well interpreted in non-religious ways:

“… any special event or experience which can be constituted in other ways, & accordingly cannot carry the weight of proof of God’s existence.”

This is because people cannot experience God in the way they experience either the world or other people, as Peter Cole in his book Religious Experience (2005) points out:

“God is not material, nor does He have a definite location… Can God be recognised? … God is said to be Creator. How would you recognise that attribute?”

Question 23

5. Arguments against religious experience as proof for the existence of God - natural explanations

Answer 23

• other critics have suggested that religious experiences could have a natural explanation
• for example, they could be brought on by drugs or alcohol or they could be, as Sigmund Freud suggested, a psychological reaction to the hostile world - we feel helpless & so create God in our minds as a great father & protector

Question 24

6. Arguments against religious experience as proof for the existence of God - issue of consistency

Answer 24

• there are many types of religious experience, all vastly different
• yet surely, if God is the source of all of them, there would be greater similarity between them?
• why, for instance, don’t Hindus see the Virgin Mary or Roman Catholics see Vishnu?

Question 25

7a. Arguments against religious experience as proof for the existence of God - revelatory experiences (general consensus)

Answer 25

- revelatory experiences are regarded as particularly untrustworthy - for example, in Buddhism, a revelatory experience is not accepted unless the experient is already at a very advanced stage of meditation & unless other high-ranking meditators have shared the insight - similarly, in the Catholic Church alleged revelations are strictly tested to ensure that they are in line with the teachings of the Church & that the experient is spiritually sound

Question 26

7b. Arguments against religious experience as proof for the existence of God - revelatory experiences (scholar - Peter Cole)

Answer 26

- as Peter Cole observes: ‘Only after thirteen years of examination by a commission comprised of clergy, physicians & scientists did the Catholic Church pronounce the Fatima apparitions (**ghostlike images**) as worthy of belief… **some would still question their authenticity**”. - Cole goes on to point out that many within Christianity are uneasy about claims of the Charismatic Movement regarding certain types of religious experience, particularly the phenomenon of ‘speaking in tongues’. - He argues that the experience can be regarded as potentially unreliable & theologically sound: “… what we see being exhibited today is not the same as speaking in tongues in the New Testament, and natural explanations can explain today’s phenomenon”.

Question 27

8. Arguments against religious experience as proof for the existence of God - near death experiences

Answer 27

- critics argue that, far from being religious experiences, these are, in fact, some kind of **mental phenomenon**, possibly caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain, particularly the temporal lobe, which is the centre of emotion - taking it further, the evidence concerning near-death experiences is far from certain & does not, in any event, apply in every case - scientific opinion remains divided & research published in the highly respected medical journal The Lancet in 2001 concludes: “Our research shows that medical factors cannot account for the occurrence of near-death experience”.

Question 28

Summarise the main arguments against the validity of religious experiences

Answer 28

- if God does not exist, there can be no experience of him - any religious experience may be open to a non-religious interpretation - experiences can be deceptive & there are no agreed tests for verifying that an experience comes from God - the testimony of religious believers is unreliable, as their views may be affected by their pre-existing religious belief - religious experiences may be the manifestation of psychological needs, for instance to help us cope with fear of death - the emotions & sensations that come with a religious experience can be explained by biological or neurological imbalances in the body

Question 29

What is Richard Dawkins’ argument against religious experience?

Answer 29

- Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion argues: “If we are gullible, we don’t recognise hallucinations or lucid dreaming for what it is & we claim to have seen or heard a ghost; or an angel; or God… such visions & manifestations are certainly not good grounds for believing that ghosts or angels, gods or virgins are actually there”.

Question 30

How does scholar Douglas Steere counteract Richard Dawkins’ argument against religious experience?

Answer 30

Douglas Steere argues that **”**As long as it flourishes, it constitutes a continual challenge to what WIlliam James calls “a premature closing of accounts with reality” … The mystic’s witness to the accessibility of the living presence… in the hearts of contemporary men and women has been an enormous encouragement to the religious yearnings of men.” (A Handbook of Christian Theology, 1960)

Question 31

Why is the language of a religious experience significant?

Answer 31

- to ask whether it is meaningful to speak of religious experiences is to question whether the language of religious experience serves to convey anything of any significance - for example, **logical positivists** hold the belief that, the language of religious experience, as all religious language, was essentially meaningless, since there could be no observations that would serve to verify its claims

Question 32

Explain the importance of interpreting religious experience as religious & non-religious experiences

Answer 32

- it is illogical to assume that all religious interpretations are incorrect - it is argued that one key empirical test for the validity of a religious experience is to examine the effects that it has on the person who had the experience - how their lives, emotions & feelings have been affected - if their experience is compatible with common feelings, it should be expected as a result of experiencing a benevolent (**kind**), then we may have stronger grounds on which to believe the claim - whilst it is possible that some religious experiences are a manifestation of psychological need, it does not follow that all religious experiences can be explained in this way; if God is, indeed, loving & personal, then, in a sense, we can expect experiences of God to meet our psychological & emotional needs - as Richard Swinburne suggests, God “…will love each of us as individual creatures, and so has reason to intervene…simply to show himself to individuals, and to tell them things individual to themselves”.

Question 33

How does the scholar Anthony Flew counteract the claim that religious experiences can have multiple interpretations?

Answer 33

- he argues that the testimony of religious believers is biased, irrational & questionable & cannot be regarded as **meaningful** because **there is nothing that can count against it** - he wrote that religious believers are so convinced of the truth of their religious statements that they often refuse to consider evidence to the contrary: “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?” (1977) - for example, he claims, believers say God is **all-loving** & **all-powerful** & they continue to believe this despite the evidence of great suffering in the world, which they choose to ignore

Question 34

What analogy does John Hick give for the end of time in relation to religious experiences?

Answer 34

- John Hick’s principle of **eschatological verification**, and **religious sister** Mary Ward’s claim that God may one day verify the religious experiences himself, suggest that verification may finally be realised at the end of time - **hence, religious experiences are weakly verifiable**, or verifiable in principle, although they fail a logical positivist’s test of strong verification

Question 35

What does Swinburne argue about religious experiences being meaningful?

Answer 35

Swinburne argues that it is perfectly meaningful for a personal, loving God to make himself known to humanity: ‘An omnipotent and perfectly good creator will seek to interact with his creatures and in particular, with human persons capable of knowing him”.

Question 36

How does Flew use John Wisdom’s Parable of the Gardener to further evaluate his argument?

Answer 36

- the parable highlights how believers continue to refuse to accept anything that counts against the existence of God - in this story, two men are in an overgrown garden - the first man sees some plants growing among the weeds & suggests that there must a gardener - but none of the neighbours has ever seen a gardener there; so the first man says that the gardener must come at night; the second man argues that if there was a gardener then he would have removed the weeds - the first man replied that the garden has a design about it, and he suggests that the gardener **must be invisible** - the men then examine the garden & find some things that suggest a gardener, & others that do not - finally, after both have seen **all** the evidence, the first insists that there is an **invisible** gardener, while the other says that there is **no gardener** at all

Question 37

What does the scholar Sam Harris say about the **apparent** irrationality among believers?

Answer 37

- this apparent irrationality among believers is supported by Sam Harris, who wrote in The End of Faith (**2004**): “We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them ‘religious’, otherwise they are likely to be called ‘mad’, ‘**psychotic**’ or delusional… while religious people are **not generally mad**, their **core beliefs absolutely are**”.

Question 38

How does Richard Dawkins expand on Harris’s point?

Answer 38

- Richard Dawkins goes further, claiming that testimonies of religious experiences are simply the manifestation of **mental** or **psychological** needs - he explains religious beliefs as an illusion created by the mind to enable people to cope with their fear of the unknown: “If you’ve had such an experience, you may find yourself firmly believing that it was real. But don’t expect the rest of us to take your word for it, especially if we have the **slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings**”.

Question 39

Summarise the ambiguity of religious experiences

Answer 39

- in conclusion, there is no clear-cut answer - religious experiences are too **personal** & subjective to provide convincing proof of the existence of God for those who have not had such an experience - however, **for those who have**, religious experiences are the most convincing proof of all - as American philosopher William James observed: ‘The results of religious experiences are are the only reliable basis for judging whether it is a genuine experience of the divine”.