Category: Revision

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Notes from the A2 conference – Religious Experience

Strength – if you had a personal experience it would be absolutely convincing

Weakness – it cannot be quantified on rational grounds.

2 basic groups – direct and indirect

Types – numinous – holiness of God [Isaiah]; interpretive [prayers answered]; conversion [St Paul]; revelation, vision, enlightenment [Buddha / St Teresa / Moses]; mystical from meditation sense of ultimate reality.

William James – 4 characteristics of mystical experiences:

  • Ineffability
  • Noetic (universal truths)
  • Transient
  • Passive

Swinburne’s Principles of Credulity (we should believe them) and testimony (what people usually say is the truth)

Conclusion – it only needs one experience to be true to prove God exists.

N Smart – a ‘perception of the invisible world.’

Other explanations – reliability

Pre-existing beliefs

RM Hare’s bliks a particular view of the world

Swinburne ‘must…be taken as tipping the balance in favour of the existence of God’

There’s always a reason why a believer will believe even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary

Dawkins will not accept you’ve had a religious experience because he understands the way the brain works.

For

Against

A posteriori -Centuries of exp and testimony

Cannot be verified by obj testing

Culmulative

Lying and wishful thinking

Inductive – testimonies of 1000s of individuals

Other causes, external factors, interps

Loving God…

Religious believers unreliable

 

A good introduction e.g. for questions on religious experience

 

Religious experiences are by their very nature beyond empirical investigation or explanation. Yet they may produce feelings of awe and a sense of oneness with the universe such that they convince a believer that they have had an encounter with Someone Other or as Otto calls it the ‘wholly other’ or the ‘numinous.’ However it is perhaps only logical that scholars are in doubt about their validity when even the experients claim an inability to describe the very experience which they consider to be proof of the existence of God.

[Use quote to round off this bit e.g. St Teresa of Avila or some such.]

 

Or this:

A religious experience is an encounter with the divine. It is defined by Rudolph Otto as ‘the wholly other’ and by Schleiermacher as ‘a sense of absolute dependence’ it may happen suddenly and unbidden like CS Lewis who …. Or St Paul who… or they may come after deep meditation such as St Teresa of Avila.

They all inspire a feeling of what Otto called the ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’ However they also have many common features…..

 

You can then go on to:

As an argument for the existence of God it is a posteriori and inductive meaning that it is based on evidence and on a logical conclusion to the premises e.g.

P1    I have had an unusual experience in which I felt as if I was meeting some ultimate spirit, I felt a oneness with the universe and awed by the whole experience.

P2    I have heard that this is what a religious experience is like

Conclusion: therefore it was one.

 

Despite this the actual existence of God is not proven by these experiences however convincing they may be and the existence of God is therefore only probable rather than definite.

 

And a conclusion:

Religious experiences are persuasive but not convincing evidence for the existence of God. Yet for the individuals who have had them they may be convinced beyond any doubt with no further need for more rational argument they thus become convincing if subjective proof. As Dawkins said ‘you
may well be convinced but don’t expect the rest of us to take your word for it.’

However Swinburne suggested if the balance of evidence and probability were able to prove there was no god it would have done so, since it has not the ‘overwhelming testimony of so many millions of people to occasional experiences of God, must be taken as tipping the balance in favour of the existence of God.‘

Ayer argues that religious experiences are only valuable from a psychological viewpoint because they give insight into the mind of the believer. Critics have also argued that they only happen in emotional circumstances and neurologists like Michael Persinger have managed to stimulate the temporal lobe of the brain under laboratory conditions and ’cause’ religious like experiences. On the other hand Francis Collins leader of the Human Genome Project, ‘It wouldn’t trouble me to discover that my temporal lobe was lit up. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some genuine spiritual significance. [atheists] with the presumption that there is nothing outside the natural world will look at this data and say ‘Ya see?’ Whereas those who come with the presumption that we are spiritual creatures will go ‘cool! There is a natural correlate to this mystical experience! How about that!’

 

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2009 Specimen paper – Religious language

a) i) Explain what is meant by verification and falsification in the context of religious language. [18]
ii) Evaluate their criticisms of religious language. [12]

 

i) The verification principle was dreamed up by the Logical Positivists to support their claim that religious language is meaningless. The idea is that unless an assertion or claim can be verified by one or more of the five senses then it is unverifiable. They went on to divide statements into 3 groups: either analytic (true by definition e.g. all bachelors are unmarried men), synthetic (verifiable by testing e.g. it is raining outside) or mathematic (2+2 = 4.)

This principle was then appealed to when assessing the meaningfulness of theists’ statements or assertions about God. For example the claim ‘God exists’ falls into none of the categories of meaningful statements and is therefore regarded as meaningless. Likewise to suggest that ‘God loves me’ is not verifiable either.

AJ Ayer for the LPs soon realised that historical statements also became meaningless if the principle were applied so rigorously and formulated the ‘weak verification principle.’ By which he acknowledged that for historical claims it is sufficient to call a statement like ‘Harold was shot inn the eye by an arrow at the Battle of Hastings’ verifiable if, in the event that we had access to a time machine and were able to go back to the event, we would be able to discover for ourselves whether or not the claim was true.

Anthony Flew also in response to the critics of the verification principle proposed the falsification principle. In it he suggested that a claim can be deemed to be verifiable if we can discover what might actually make it false. For example we cannot actually prove that we cannot travel faster than light so if we can discover what might make the claim false (like discovering that there are things which travel faster than the speed of light) then the claim becomes meaningful. (Not necessarily true but meaningful!!)

Unfortunately he realised that believers were not very likely to give any regard to evidence to the contrary of their beliefs. The story of Job in the Bible is a good example of a man who believed god loved him despite all evidence to the contrary when he lost his wife, family, health, home, livelihood – everything except his life, yet still he believed. This, Flew said, was what made religious claims so meaningless! He updated John Wisdom’s ‘Parable of the Gardener’ adding in a detailed list of all the traps that the two explorers set to trip up the so-called Gardener. When he set none of them off the theist refused to entertain the notion that he didn’t exist and the atheist in despair asked ‘but what is the difference between a gardener who is invisible, intangible and undetectable and no gardener at all?’ Obviously the comparison is with God. As Basil Mitchell put it the believer has three choices when faced with evidence which challenges their faith: adapt their beliefs to accommodate the new information; reject the new info out of hand or reject the belief.

{{ put it this way – you believe your husband loves you; your best friend says she saw him with another woman do you a) refuse to believe it b) face him and forgive him or c) throw him out!!?}}

But for believers who won’t allow any evidence to count against the existence of god makes their claim that God exists meaningless.

 

ii) One of the most obvious flaws in the verification principle is that it doesn’t allow for claims such as emotional ones: ‘I love him’; opinions: ‘that is a great work of art;’ statements of intent: ‘I had intended to come to school to do my timed essay but I had a cold…’ and many others, although the falsification principle can render some of them meaningful if we can ascertain what might count as evidence against them. (For example if I run into you in the pub and you are hale and hearty!!!)

But rather more importantly the claims of a believer even that they ‘just know’ God exists are not so easily rendered meaningless because they have an importance in their life. They may live their life by a particular code or creed based on an ‘unverifiable’ belief. It is not meaningless to them. RM Hare illustrates this idea with his concept of bliks. These are beliefs which are unverifiable and sometimes paradoxical but which nevertheless dictate our behaviour. He gives the example of ‘the Paranoid student and the Dons’ in which he describes the odd behaviour of a student who believed, against all his friends attempt to dissuade him, that the university dons were attempting to kill him. His behaviour was completely dominated by this unfounded belief. A bit like if you are afraid of spiders no amount of people telling you they won’t hurt you will prevent you checking the room before you go to sleep at night!! It might be meaningless or incomprehensible to an arachnophile but not to you!!

Ultimately of course Ayer retracted his position on the verification principle realising that there was a lot more to language than he had allowed for originally. Wittgenstein even invented a whole new area which he called language games theory in which he suggested that you had to know the rules in order to play the game – a bit like cricket then! But once you did know the rules you were unlikely to find them meaningless, indeed they are likely to enhance your enjoyment of the game. The same is true of religious language – you have to be in it to understand it and once you are you are unlikely to be just a neutral observer.