Religious Experience Flashcards
william james religious expeirence argument?
“the varieties of religious experience”
INEFFABILITY - experiences beyond the ability of our words to express, no words can describe what is felt
NOETIC QUALITY - gives a kind of knowledge unlike the knowledge of any other human experience
TRANSIENCE - meaning the experiencer has the experience for a very short time
PASSIVITY - meaning those in such an experience have no will of their own
what is swinburne’s argument for religious experience?
2 principles
PRINCIPLE OF CREDULITY - if someone believes they have experienced something then they probably have unless we have good reason to disbelieve them
PRINCIPLE OF TESTIMONY - all being equal means that another persons description of a religious experience should be believed.
what is a corporate religious experience?
group experience
e.g. Toronto blessing in 1994 where a series of people at a Pentecostal church went through a weird experience such as laughing hysterically
what is rudolf otto’s argument?
the idea of the holy
argued for numinous experiences, saying God is transcendent and so only he can affect us by filling us with a sense of awe.
example of personal religious conversion experience?
Nicky Cruz - New York gangster
St Paul on the road to Damascus where he was on the way to persecute Jews where God’s light blinded him
KANTS ARGUMENT?
cannot use senses to experience God as he is in the noumenal realm whereas we are confined to the phenomenal realm
what is william james idea of psychological phenomena?
the prosperity to have a religious experience is universally accessible, provided one tunes their mind to the divine
ESSAY PLAN - General religious experience essay e.g. “religious experiences are an illusion” etc
POINT 1 (mystical experience psychological challenge, freud)
P1 – MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE VS. PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA
A: REJECT RE’S AS ILLUSIONS/ WILLED BY INDIVIDUAL
• The psychological challenge – Freud its chief proponent – asserts that religious experiences are no more than illusions constructed by the psyche most fundamentally to satisfy neuroses
ESSAY PLAN - General religious experience essay e.g. “religious experiences are an illusion” etc
POINT 1 counter argument (william james qualities of religious experience)
CA: WILLIAM JAMES QUALITIES OF RE’S (COMMONALITY, PASSIVE)
• It can be extrapolated from James’ work that religious experiences are not illusions, despite being “psychological phenomena”.
• It is vital to present the characteristics accredited to religious experiences to give further insight into James’ thesis: he argued vehemently that they were passive and arguably elevates the credibility of the experience as it is not willed by the individual, contrary to the assertions made by the likes of Freud. Equally experiences are ineffable, meaning the recipient cannot articulate their feeling of the transcendent or divine.
ESSAY PLAN - General religious experience essay e.g. “religious experiences are an illusion” etc
POINT 1 counter response (timothy o’leery)
R: COMMONALITY DOES NOT RELATE TO REALITY – LSD USERS
• Irrespective of whether our anatomical understanding is sound, the evidence proposed by Timothy O’Leary implicates the difficulty one has in accepting the veridicality of religious experience – in defense of the psychological challenge Leary’s research corroborates the argument that religious experiences are illusory; he recorded the experiences of both LSD users and those who’d claimed to have a religious experience and found the results were almost indistinguishable from each other
ESSAY PLAN - General religious experience essay e.g. “religious experiences are an illusion” etc
POINT 1 conclusive response (pragmatism, william james)
CR: TRUTH COMES FROM THEIR EFFECTS (PRAGMATISM)
• The noetic revelatory nature of the experience appears to contravene the notion that religious experiences are illusions; James postulated that the “good disposition” of the knowledge revealed points to the existence of what he called “something larger”, an assertion which can be corroborated by reference to Teresa of Avila whom argued that a religious experience is only “religious” if the recipient is left feeling at peace, thus analogous to James’ insistence for a “good disposition” pragmatism – value judged on its effects, not its validity; fruits not roots
• “The only thing it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find the greatest peace” (William James, Varieties of Religious Experience).
ESSAY PLAN - General religious experience essay e.g. “religious experiences are an illusion” etc
POINT 2 (swinburne,)
P2 – TESTIMONY/ CREDULITY VS. WHOLLY OTHER
A: PRINCIPLES OF CREDULITY AND TESTIMONY (SWINBURNE)
• Richard Swinburne made a ground-breaking contribution to the religious experience debate in his proposition of the two principles of credulity and testimony – the former essentially proposes that we have good reason to believe what we experience is true, insofar as our empiricist view of the world demands us to do so – this is a logical assertion to make, since reliance on the senses has been instrumental to our functioning for centuries
ESSAY PLAN - General religious experience essay e.g. “religious experiences are an illusion” etc
POINT 2 - counter argument (issue with credulity, michael martin)
CA: ISSUE WITH CREDULITY – TRUTH DOESN’T EQUATE TO REALITY
• Swinburne’s point is predicated on a question of whether people are truthful – just because one is truthful in their claim, it certainly does not follow that they have correctly grasped the truth of their perception… The issue is Swinburne’s claim about testimony of experience is very different to testimony of a religious experience, which is open to varying interpretation There is a difference between honest accounts and accurate accounts of a transcendent, ineffable being.
• Michael Martin – if testimony is treated as veridical (accurately representing the world), then one can use the POC to construct an argument on the absence of religious experiences
ESSAY PLAN - General religious experience essay e.g. “religious experiences are an illusion” etc
POINT 2 - counter response (otto)
R: MORE SO THAT JUDGEMENT OF RE IS UTTERLY DIFFERENT TO NORMAL JUDGEMENTS
• The experience Otto suggests, using the phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a mystery tremendous and fascinating), is an immensely powerful encounter or awareness of something wholly other, which cannot be described in normal language. The holy cannot be described in language from ordinary lives as, after all, the wholly other is unlike anything in our normal lives “religious language has its own kind of logic… so we have good reason to accept Otto’s thesis that religious language cannot simply be reduced to other forms of discourse” (Ninian Smart
(R: CORPORATE
• Yet still, corporate experiences such as the Toronto Blessing, add greater validity to the existence of a higher power, if more than one person experiences it!
ESSAY PLAN - General religious experience essay e.g. “religious experiences are an illusion” etc
POINT 2 - conclusive response (issue with corporate)
CR: ISSUE WITH CORPORATE
• Critics of corporate experiences suggest that the kinds of people attracted to evangelical/ charismatic worship are already pre-disposed to behaviour such as mass-hysteria, thus the experience is more of a group hallucination brought about by the atmosphere of the Church)
John Cottingham, believers may find proofs “reassuring as formal confirmations of the intellectual respectability of their religious outlook”
ESSAY PLAN - General religious experience essay e.g. “religious experiences are an illusion” etc
POINT 3 (conversion, value of experience to individual)
P3 – CONVERSION; VALUE OF EXPERIENCE TO INDIVIDUAL
A: LIFE ALTERED SUGGESTS HIGHER POWER
• One perhaps should not be asking whether the experience is genuine, as one can never overcome the epistemological problem of other minds – instead accept that religious experiences are highly valuable and powerful (suggesting the existence of a higher power but not proving it) – St Paul on the road to Damascus
