Saul and temporal lobe epilepsy: Religious Experience Saul and temporal lobe epilepsy: This religious experience is an example of one which could have a medical and psychological explanation. Many have suggested that this experience could instead have been the result of a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy. During arousal in the temporal lobes people can experience feelings of God and even see visions of religious experience. James concluded that: The experiences should not be completely rejected It is reasonable to assume the experiences are real Religious change can be sudden or gradual For them to be real they should have a life changing experience No truth could be found in these experiences, they could only be true if they were genuine for the individual William James Wrote the most important book on religious experiences from a psychological perspective Book: ‘The varieties of religious experience: a study of human nature’ At the heart of every religion there are religious experiences, but religion develops after the experience He accepts that there are psychological phenomena to explain these experiences but thinks that there may still be a psychological element In his book he wanted to: not push an evangelical Christian message, take an objective stance, look for significant insights and test experiences for validity He thought that the experiencer should adopt the values and teachings of the religion William James on conversion: We can empirically observe the changes in a person long-term, the long-term changes to someone through adopting the beliefs and teachings of the religion can be used as evidence But inner experience is not empirically detectable This could be considered evidence for God’s existence Scholarly views: Friedrich Schleiermacher: these experiences are emotional, the theology comes later Martine Buber: they are analogous and mutual Example of RE: Julian of Norwich was a Christian mystic who lived in isolation. During a severe illness she experienced 16 ‘showings’ or revelations of divine love The Miracle of Fatima: 3 children saw a vision of the virgin Mary, they are told to return and do so with 70,000 people, once there the majority of these people claim to have seen the sun ‘dancing’ and more visions of the virgin Mary. However, mass hysteria could have accounted for this and people may have felt under pressure to experience something. The Toronto Blessing: at a Church in Toronto people have experienced strange behaviors such as speaking in tongues, laughter, shaking, falling and making animal noises, these are attributed to God. This could have been caused by preachers encouraging people to experience something and whipping the congregation in to a frenzy. Otto and the numinous experience Direct experiences=include a direct encounter with God Numinous experiences=an experience in which we apprehend the ‘wholly other’ Otto believed that direct experiences must be numinous Indirect experiences=the individual focuses on God Otto argued that all religious experiences are numinous Otto believed that religious experience was central to religion because god can only be experienced like that as He is entirely distinct to humans 4 qualities of RE: Ineffability- can’t be expressed in normal language Noetic quality- the understanding of important truths that could not have been known otherwise Transience- short –lived but the effects last a lifetime Passivity- the experiencer feels the experience was initiated by another being Corporate religious experiences: these are experiences that more than one person experiences at once. Mysticism: direct knowledge of God, spiritual truth or ultimate reality can be achieved through subjective experience However: These experiences cannot be documented ‘numinous’ can be considered too simplistic a definition

Religious experience-continued Arguments from religious experience: Swinburne: if God exists then religious experiences are to be expected. He also came up with 2 principles: the Principle of credulity: if someone thinks they have experienced something they probably have, and the Principle of testimony: if there is no reason to doubt someone we should trust them. James: religious experiences are persuasive rather than inductive proof of God, they are psychological phenomena but could still have a religious element The historical argument: if these experiences have been so influential then they must be real The cumulative argument: too many people have claimed to have had religious experiences for them to be fake so God must be the cause Challenges to the arguments: Marx: God is a projection of our imaginations, there is no God to experience Dawkins: in the God delusion Dawkins writes about a story of his friend who was camping in Scotland and though he heard the Devil speak to him, but it turned out to be the call of the devil bird, this story highlights that our imaginations can convince us that we are experiencing something that we are not and that there can be much more ordinary explanations for these experiences Psychological explanations of RE: Feuerbach: there is no God, he is a human projection, we made him in our own image, therefore there are no religious experiences Freud: the idea of God is an infantile neurosis, we crave a perfect parental figure, the idea of an all powerful God provides this Mackie: we are mistaken about the cause of the experience, it is the experience itself that matters, we cannot tell the difference between God caused and Devil caused experiences, yet we attribute the devil caused experiences to the subconscious mind and the God caused experiences to God, therefore we are attributing the same thing to different causes so religious experiences are not real Jung: they are purely psychological experiences but religion itself is good for us Frankl: religion can be psychologically beneficial for us Studies: Michael Persinger: he believed we could induce RE, he conducted a study in which he stimulated the temporal lobes, 80% of participants described a feeling of “not being alone” or used some religious language, there were different sensitivities found in people to the stimulating, the participants were told they were studying relaxation so they were not encouraged to try and experience God Andrew Newburg: he studied those trying to induce religious experiences in themselves, specifically Buddhist monks to study the brain during meditation looking at the bloodstream and brain scans, he found that temporal lobes were being stimulated and eventually shut down during meditation meaning that the sense of self disappears