Religious experience

 What is religious experience?  In a broad sense, religious experience refers to any experience of the sacred within a religious context, including religious feelings, visions, and mystical and numinous experiences  Three common features  Universality – significant portion of population  Diversity – some similarities, many differences  Importance – can result in world view change

 Regenerative  Experience in which the experiencer undergoes life transformation or conversion  Charismatic  Experience in which special abilities, gifts, or blessings are manifested  Mystical  Ineffability  Noetic quality  Transiency  Passivity

 Ineffability: the experience cannot be adequately described, if it can be described at all  Noetic quality: the experiencer believes that he or she has learned something important from the experience  Transiency: the experience is temporary, and the experiencer soon returns to a “normal” state of mind  Passivity: the experience occurs without conscious decision or control, and it cannot be brought to happen at will

 God/Absolute Reality  Identity or union with God or Absolute Reality  Natural  Experience with nature, even an atheist can have one  Numinous  An encounter with a separate self, will, or power which unexpectedly and profoundly forces itself upon the consciousness of the experiencer

No empirical tests for religious experiences Psychological States Martin Argument from analogy, (trees and God) Verifications Wainwright Doxastic practices Experiences are just as valid as sensory perceptions Alston Principle of credulity Unless there is good reason to doubt Swinburne Best explanation of experience Strength in number greatness Gellman

 Lack of verifiability  Either religious experiences are corrigible, or they are incorrigible  If religious experiences are corrigible, then people could be mistaken  If religious experiences are incorrigible, then they are subjective, personal, and worthless as justification for other’s religious beliefs

 Conflicting claims  Religious experiences are widely divergent, conflicting, and even contradictory  The reliability of religious experiences seems to be shaken

 Circularity of reasoning  A person’s worldview seems to dictate the kind and focus of the religious experience that is experienced  In other words, people have religious experiences in line with what they already believe to be true

 Briefly explain the three categories of religious experience described in this chapter. Do you think the variety of religious experiences fall neatly within them? Is there overlap?  How might a person having religious experiences differentiate between real experiences of God or the Absolute on one hand, and delusion or hallucination on the other?