1. RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

2. A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Religious Experience has been argued to be ground for belief in
God.
In general is defined by:
1. A sense of wonder
2. A sense of new insight and values
3. A sense of holiness and profundity
It involves the whole person- mind, emotions, values and
relationships. William James states that a religious experience
‘is the feelings, acts, experiences of individual men in their
solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in
relation to whatever they consider divine’.

3. TWO GENERAL APPROACHES
There are two general approaches to interpreting
religious experience:
1. The experiential: Concerned with the experience
itself- it allows the experience to speak for itself
without trying to define exactly what is
experienced
2. The propositional: Extracts experiences from
certain definite propositions- which are claimed to
be religious truths

4. THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE
Religious experience is a way of putting particular, limited
things in a new and eternal perspective.
Rudolph Otto (The Idea of the Holy 1917) stated that a
religious experience may be an encounter with something
powerful, uncanny, weird, awesome but also attractive
and fascinating. He spoke of this as an encounter with the
numinous.
He also pointed out that a religious experience cannot be
described in ordinary language, since none of our words
quite capture that special sense of something being
‘holy’.

5. TYPES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES
1. Near death experiences
2. Conversion
3. Group experiences
4. Mysticism
5. Meditation
TASK: Read pages 54-59 and write a paragraph on
each

6. MYSTICISM
In his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
lists four qualities associated with a religious
experience:
- Ineffability (different from ordinary experience)
- Noetic quality (a type of revelation)
- Transiency (does not last long)
- Passivity (the person feels passive)

7. REVELATION
Is defined as God ‘revealing his will to humanity’ or
‘knowledge which is given through supernatural
agency’.
Revelatory experiences tend to be authoritative for
those who have them, going beyond what can be
known rationally. It is generally thought of as a gift
from God- a moment when God chooses to reveal
himself.

8. REVELATION RAISES PROBLEMS FOR
PHILOSOPHY
Knowledge can only be articulated using words that have
a commonly agreed meaning, without that, it would not
make sense. Once written down, revelation is inevitably
reduced to a set of propositions that can be assessed
rationally.
It is this last process with which philosophy is traditionally
concerned.
Revelatory experiences are powerful- people who have
received them might not be able to defend what they
have experienced rationally, but for them it is
authoritative.

9. THE ARGUMENT FROM RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE
The main question- Can any experience of the divine
be used as an argument for the existence of God?
Every experience involves the interpretation of
sensations – there is the thing that is experienced, and
the interpretation and understanding of what is
experienced. The former is objective and the latter
subjective.
Religious experience must therefore include both the
objective and subjective elements.

10. PRIOR KNOWLEDGE
If God is infinite, he cannot be located in a particular
place, nor does he have boundaries. So arguments
about whether or not an experience is of God,
require a prior knowledge of what God is.
In order for religious experience to be part of a
logical argument about the existence of God, there
needs to be an agreed definition of what is meant by
the word God. Otherwise there will be no way of
knowing how the person is interpreting their
experience.

11. WILLIAM JAMES
In the Varieties of Religious Experience, James took a
psychological approach to his subject. He made no
attempt to argue from his accounts of religious
experiences to any supernatural conclusions- he was
simply concerned with examining the effect of
religion on peoples lives.
He points to religious experience as a phenomenon
that can have a profound effect- it is self-
authenticating for the person who has it. James
admitted that it did not offer any logical proof of the
existence of God.

12. WILLIAM JAMES
James did not speak of ‘God’ but o the ‘spiritual’. He
was against any aspects of dogmatic theology. It is
only in the most general terms that James can be
said to offer any kind of argument for the existence of
God.
James simply points to religious experiences and the
role they serve as filling people with love, happiness,
humility and peace.

13. RICHARD SWINBURNE
Swinburne offers a way to classify religious experience
PUBLIC EXPERIENCES:
• 1) Ordinary, interpreted experience – e.g. night sky
(Wisdom’s Gardener)
• 2) Extraordinary experience – Jesus walking on water
PRIVATE EXPERIENCE
• 3) Describable in normal language (Jacob’s ladder)
• 4) Not describable in normal language (mystical – The
Wind in the Willows – next slide)
• 5) No specific experience (for instance when the
whole of a believer’s life is seen in a certain way)

14. SWINBURNE CONTINUED
• Richard Swinburne puts forward two principles:
• 1) THE PRINCIPLE OF CREDULITY
• maintains that it is a principle of rationality that (in
the absence of special considerations) if it seems to
a person that X is present, then probably X is
present. What one seems to perceive is probably so.
• 2) THE PRINCIPLE OF TESTIMONY
• maintains that, in the absence of special
considerations, it is reasonable to believe that the
experiences of others are probably as they report
them.

15. AS A LEARNED INTERPRETATION OF
THE WORLD
• If it is held that God cannot be experienced directly
and, instead, that an individual learns to see the
world in a religious way – then religious experience
can no longer be held to underpin faith.
• Rather, religious experience then becomes a
product of faith.
• A religious believer is educated or trained to see the
world in terms of the religious form of life he or she
occupies and in the categories endorsed by this
form of life.

16. IT DEPENDS ON PRESUPPOSITIONS
• If one believes in God, if God is real within the ‘form
of life’ of the believing community’, then the whole
world may be seen as being imbued with God’s
presence.
• St. Francis saw the whole world as reflecting the
presence of God.
• However this is NOT the same as saying that religious
experiences establish the claims that God exists
independently of the created universe….

17. SOME FINAL THOUGHTS
• Many throughout the world are convinced that
they have been in the presence of God. Many
have staked their lives on such belief.
• Such individuals are often intelligent, thoughtful and
compassionate– not the sort of people who would
lie or be readily dismissed. Their testimony may not
constitute proof but, according to James and
Swinburne it should, at the least, is deserving of
being taken very seriously and not discarded.
• Religious experience may well point to a divine
‘other’ the possibility of which, in a materialistic age,
is too often ignored.

18. CRITICISMS
The Vicious Circle Challenge
• This holds that religious experience depends on
the prior assumptions of those involved. Thus
Catholics will experience Mary and Hindus are
likely to experience Kali.
• This implies that instead of religious experience
being a BASIS for faith, they are more likely to be
generated by existing faith commitments. They
therefore have ’no epistemological

19. CRITICISMS
The Conflicting Claims challenge
• This argues that if Christian religious experiences
underwrite Christianity, then Islamic experiences
should equally be held to underwrite Islam and so
on.
• In other words, if one religion relies on their religious
experiences to prove the truth of their religion then,
philosophically, each religion can claim the same
and this provides, as David Hume put it, ‘a
complete triumph for the sceptic’ as it implies each
religion is equally true.

20. CRITICISMS
The Psychological Challenge
• Some psychologists hold that religious experiences
can be explained by psychological factors. For
instance, (a) St. Paul’s experience on the Damascus
road could have been due to an epileptic fit
• HOWEVER it is one thing to say ‘Some religious
experiences can be explained psychologically’ and
another to say that ALL religious experiences can
be explained like this.
• Also, a religious believer can claim that if there is a
God, God could work through one’s psyche.

21. CRITICISMS
Kant took the view that human beings have only five
senses and that all they know comes through one or
more of them. Since God is not part of the
phenomenal world of objects that is apprehended
through the senses, we cannot have any direct
knowledge of him.
Kant would rule out religious experience as a way of
demonstrating the existence of God.