ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS
Critics question the reliability of religious experiences. Thomas Hobbes asked how it was possible to tell the difference between talking to God in a dream, and dreaming about talking to God.
The objectivist viewpoint treats God/universal truths as "objective" - they exists independently of us and which are there whether we experience them or not. There is a link between viewing religious experience objectively and treating revelation as propositional: |
A further difficulty is the problem of conflicting experiences. Believers of different religions claim to have had experiences that prove their religions. For example, in Catholic Spain believer have visions of the Virgin Mary but in India they see elephant-headed Ganesha. If any of these experiences are objective, then all of them should be treated as objective. However, this isn't possible, because the religions contradict each other. Their claims "cancel each other out", as David Hume says:
all the prodigies of different religions are to be regarded as contrary facts, and the evidences of these prodigies, whether weak or strong, as opposite to each other - David Hume |
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Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light - 2 Corinthians 11: 14
The naturalistic interpretations of religious experience all involve viewing religious experience as purely subjective - as events that are just "in your head" and have no connection to the real world. However, these interpretations go further, because they also present religious experiences as meaningless; they are disorders that don't tell you anything about anything (although they might be symptoms that would help a doctor diagnose you).
There are advantages of this view for religious believers. Subjectivism avoids problematic questions like "Why doesn't God answer my prayers?" Viewed subjectively, prayer is not an appeal to an external being or connection to an ultimate truth; it's a process whereby the person praying changes their life for the better.
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Can you explain the joke?
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if there is nothing which a putative assertion denies then there is nothing which it asserts either: and so it is not really an assertion - Anthony Flew
Subjectivism is seen by some philosophers as a SLIPPERY SLOPE. Once you start admitting that some experiences are subjective, you end up giving up on the idea of any sort of objective reality at all.
The belief that the outside world with all the other people in it isn't real and exists only in your imagination is called solipsism - and most philosophers reject that. The idea that the world of the senses might be an illusion goes right back to the start of philosophy - to Plato's analogy of the Cave. It was also given a brilliant science fiction twist in the 1999 film "The Matrix" (watch the original but skip the sequels).
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Several blind men were investigating an elephant. The first blind man held the elephant's leg. He said, "I think an elephant is like the truck of a great tree." The second blind man disagreed. While holding the elephant's trunk he said, "I believe an elephant is like a large snake," The third blind man believed they were both wrong. "An elephant is like a great wall," he exclaimed. He was touching the elephant's side. Each blind man was convinced he was right and others were wrong without ever realizing they were all touching the same elephant. Some believe the blind men in this parable represent the major religions of the world, each in contact with the same "elephant" without knowing it. (adapted from God & the Universe of Faiths, 1973)
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If the Pluralistic Hypothesis is true, then Kant is right and 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 personally or culturally meaningful to them. However, Hick believes the divine does in fact exist and subjective religious experience is as close as we can get to its objective noumenal reality.
Of course, critics would argue that noumenal reality is just the physical world and scientific theories get us as close as we can get to what it's really like. |
YES
We can't check religious experiences against the facts. There's no way of measuring or recording them. Even the people who experience them can't be entirely sure they aren't imagining things. Plus, we know there are some things that cause religious hallucinations (like temporal lobe epilepsy). If something can't be proved one way or another, it's subjective.
Objective truth isn't even the most important thing about religious experiences. What matters about them is that they CHANGE you. You should focus on the meaning of religious experience in your life, not what it tells you about the universe. Kant shows that we can't hope to understand the noumenal reality, so we should focus on trying to give meaning to our lives.
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NO
We can't be entirely sure that ANY of our experiences are objectively really. Subjectivism is a slippery slope. All we know is that, for the people who have them, religious experiences FEEL as objectively real as their experiences of other people. People who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality are mentally ill and religious people aren't ill.
If there is a divine reality, then religious experiences are the only way to make contact with it. The variety of religions in the world supports the idea that people describe the divine in subjective terms, but it's still an objective fact that it exists and some religions might describe it better than others. Believers need to run the risk of being shown to be wrong if their religious experiences are really to mean anything.
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