STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES
Ever since Alister Hardy founded the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC), surveys have shown religious experiences to be quite common, reported by at least 36% of respondents. Only 26% of those who avoid church if they can report positively, while 56% of those who attend church regularly report positively. Does this suggest that respondents are biased in favour of reporting religious experiences if they are church-goers?
The quote from actor Wes Bentley shows how people might be biased towards religious experiences BECAUSE of their connection to religion.
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...seems to depend on the interests, background and expectations of those who have them rather than on anything separate and autonomous - Antony Flew
An omnipotent and perfectly good creator will seek to interact with his creatures and in particular with human persons capable of knowing him - Richard Swinburne
Religious context affects religious experiences in other ways.
If God really exists, why does he present himself to Buddhists as a universal truth and not a person? If universal truths exist, why do Western religious believers mistake them for God? One conclusion to be drawn is that religious experiences represent the hopes and expectations of believers - they are products of the subjective religious context, not an encounter with something objective.
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Richard Dawkins makes an entertaining contrast between the objectivity of science and the subjectivity of religious experience
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William Alston disagrees with this. He argues that mystical experiences involve "mystical perception" - a way of perceiving things without the five senses that is just as real as sensory experience. Alston argues that animals have senses that are wider than ours, so why suppose that the five senses are the only way we have of experiencing reality?
Why should we suppose that the possibilities of experiential givenness... are exhausted by the powers of our five senses?’ - William Alston |
On the other hand, some visions are certainly hallucinations or the wild claims of attention-seekers. Even religious believers are cautious about accepting every vision. Teresa of Avila was wary of those who claim to receive visions, even though she received visions herself:
I know by experience that there are souls which, either because they possess vivid imaginations or active minds, are so wrapped up in their own ideas as to feel certain that they see whatever their fancy imagines - St Teresa of Avila |
John of the Cross (a Christian mystic) suggests false visions are the work of the Devil:
the devil causes many to believe in vain visions and false prophecies… and they often trust their own fancY - St John of the Cross John seems to hold two views here - that "vain visions" come from the Devil but also they are produced by an over-active imagination ("fancy").
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For example, after Jesus' crucifixion, his followers start having religious experiences in which they encounter him raised from the dead. The first experience is that of Mary Magdalene outside the empty tomb. Many of these experients do not recognise Jesus at first. It takes a while for them to interpret what is happening.
Thomas, one of Jesus Twelve Disciples, misses out on this experience, so Jesus appears in the room and shows Thomas the wounds from the nails on his hands and feet and the wound from a Roman spear in his ribs. This convinces Thomas that Jesus really has risen from the dead. |
The Incredulity of St Thomas by Caravaggio (1602)
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These direct encounters are not the most common sort of religious experience.
Less dramatically, people experience the divine within ordinary experiences - in moments of joy or grief, in love or the beauty of nature. In the Bible, the victories and defeats of the Israelites in battle are interpreted as judgments from God. The prophet Jonah experiences God's mercy when a plant grows that shelters him from the sun. People who hear Jesus preaching feel they are experiencing God even when he isn't performing miracles - and Christians today experience God when reading the Bible. |
Jonah is angry because God shows mercy on the wicked people of Nineveh
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The sense of intense beauty in natural phenomenon and the sense of your own smallness and insignificance is known as SUBLIMITY or the sublime. The sublime is illustrated by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who describes visiting the impressive waterfall at Cora Linn and overhearing two tourists:
‘I say it is very majestic: it is sublime,’ said the gentleman.
‘Ay,’ added the lady, ‘it is the prettiest thing I ever saw’ The first speaker is having a strong personal response to the waterfall; the second speaker is not. Coleridge thinks the man is right to see the waterfall as "sublime" and the woman is shallow to see it as just "pretty". This raises the question whether religious experiences are in fact just poetic or aesthetic experiences, but interpreted religiously?
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The Falls of the Clyde at Cora Linn in Scotland - and some other sublime locations
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Schleiermacher claimed that everyone experiences a feeling of total contingency, what he calls "a sense of absolute dependence". This is a sort of INTUITION that lies deeper than ordinary rational thinking and it is something we can all develop. This intuition gives us a glimpse of the reality of God and the truth of religion.
Many people have pointed out that Schleiermacher's "sense of absolute dependence" is not a specifically religious feeling. It's an awareness of contingency, which will have a religious meaning if felt by a Christian or Muslim but not by an atheist. John Hick points out that such feelings are RELIGIOUSLY AMBIGUOUS - they can be interpreted religiously or non-religiously and it's not obvious which interpretation is correct.
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Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), known as the 'father' of liberal religious philosophy
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rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect - Abraham Maslow
John Gaskin points out that peak experiences are felt by all sorts of people and don't have to be interpreted as religious. In fact, they are often found in poetry.
You might enjoy an example like Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3rd, 1802 by William Wordsworth, where an early morning view of the city of London produces in the poet (and in sensitive readers) an experience of the sublime in nature and architecture. Gaskin uses the term NUMINOUS AGNOSTIC for these sorts of intense but religiously ambiguous intuitions. |
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Firstly, inductive reasoning faces the Problem of Induction, which was expressed by David Hume. This is the problem that an inductive conclusion can always be overturned by a later experience.
The famous example is the experience of swans being white. Inductive reasoning tells us, based on seeing only white swans, that all swans are white. However, if we one day see a black swan, the inductive conclusion is shown to be incorrect. Even if we conclude that religious experiences are encounters with God, later experience might show they have some other cause we don't know about yet.
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When Queen Mary came to the throne of England in 1553, she executed two bishops, Latimer and Ridley, who opposed the Queen's Catholic beliefs. The two men were burned at the stake and died in great agony. Latimer died encouraging Ridley to hold firm in his faith, saying:
We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace, in England, as I trust never shall be put out! - Hugh Latimer |
The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favour of its truth – Bertrand Russell
God is both further from us, and nearer to us, than any other being - C.S. Lewis
if a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it - A.J. Ayer
The burning bush that appears to Moses can be interpreted symbolically. The fire represents God's judgment or glory and the fact that the bush is not consumed represents God's mercy. The bush represents God's Necessary Existence (aseity) since the flame does not need to consume the bush in order to burn. The entire bush represents the Children of Israel (who will not be destroyed by the plagues God will send to Egypt). For Christians, the bush represents Christ (who bears the punishment for human sin but is not destroyed by it) or the Holy Spirit (which descends at Pentecost as a flame that does not consume).
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The argument from A.J. Ayer and Antony Flew that religious experiences involve meaningless language is criticised by Richard Swinburne. Swinburne uses the idea that, while people are asleep, the toys come out of the toy cupboard and dance around. Swinburne argues that, because we know what toys are and what dancing is, the idea of the toys dancing is meaningful even if no one sees it happen.
The toys dance when there are no humans around - like in Tchaikovsky's ballet "The Nutcracker", right? No? Really? OK, it happens in "Toy Story 3" as well.
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a complete triumph for the sceptic - David Hume
Antony Flew goes further than Hume and gives examples of these contradictory claims; he points out that people would be
astonished to hear of the vision of Bernadette Soubirous occurring not to a Roman Catholic at Lourdes, but to a Hindu at Benares, or of Apollo manifest not in classical Delphi but in Kyoto under the Shoguns - Antony Flew Bernadette Soubirous saw visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in France - and you wouldn't expect visions of the Virgin Mary to appear in Benares in India (a city associated with the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman). The Greek god Apollo had a shrine at Delphi, but Kyoto is a city in Japan associated with Buddhism.
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The second view was taken by the Church Fathers (early Christian writers who formalised Christian teachings); this was that the Christian God is objectively true and faithful Christians really do encounter him, but the gods of other religions are just demons in disguise. This is the view described by the poet John Milton in Paradise Lost: in his epic poem, Satan and his devils are behind all the non-Christian religions. It is a view held by some Christian fundamentalists today. This means that even if a devout Hindu thinks he is experiencing Hanuman, really this is a demon tricking him.
The problem with this view is that it is an invitation to total doubt. If demons can imitate religious experiences in a completely convincing way, how is anybody to know whether they have encountered God or not? Maybe Hanuman is real and the Christian religious experiences are all created by demons? Or maybe it's the other way round? How could you possibly tell? |
Satan and his devils in Milton's "Paradise Lost"
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The final view is the most complex. It suggests that the real nature of God transcends cultural ideas and local images, but that people make sense of it in ways that are meaningful to them. Therefore, a devout Christian and a devout Hindu might both have the same religious experience, but one will perceive (subjectively) the Virgin Mary, whereas the other will see it as Hanuman. John Hick came to this view, called the PLURALISTIC HYPOTHESIS, and suggests an interesting fable to illustrate it. A group of blind men all describe an elephant differently because they are touching different parts of it and it is bigger than they realise.
If the Pluralistic Hypothesis is true, then nobody really has a direct experience of the divine (Hick calls this "the Real"). Everyone "clothes" the divine in symbols, images and forms that are culturally meaningful to them. |
The elephant represents God - geddit???
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YES
Religious experience is ubiquitous - it happens in every culture in history. It shares some key features in common, like mysticism and the numinous. It is life-changing and brings out the best in people, healing what William James calls "sick souls" and producing "saintliness". This suggests it is a real experience of the divine which leads us to believe the divine exists.
Religious experiences differ from culture to culture but only because those experiences are ineffable and beyond language; the experient has to express what they have seen in culturally-specific ideas, symbols and images. Besides, mystical experiences are far more common: what Schleiermacher calls "a sense of absolute dependence".
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NO
Religious experience isn't really uniform and cultural differences play a huge part. People are far more likely to report religious experiences if they attend a place of worship and the details of their experiences fit in with the culture they were brought up in. This suggests these experiences are subjective and not encounters with an objective reality.
These "peak experiences" may be ubiquitous and similar all over the world, but they are too vague to be a proof of the existence of God. Atheists experience them too but don't attribute any supernatural meaning to them. Responding sensitively to beauty in nature does not prove that there is a supernatural God who created it.
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