verifying religious experience

Question 2

philosophical issues with religious experience

Answer 2

• why are rel experiences different
• rel experience are subjective, inner mental events
• rel experiences are ineffable
• how can finite humans experience the infinite

Question 3

why are rel experiences different and response

Answer 3

• religions claim they validate their beliefs (exp of God, jesus, vishnu, ganesh, transcendence, unity with the universe)
• cannot all be valid as religions are mutually inconsistent, so if not all of these claims are valid, none of them are (exclusivism)

response:
- Hick: all rel exp experience the same ultimate reality and interpretation is inevitable as people have preconceptions due their upbringing
- people with same exp but different rel shape them in different ways
- pluralism, differences due to cultural relativism
- this then characterises religious experience as subjective
- conflicting interpretations: distinguishing from illegitimate interpretations of religious experience

Question 4

religious experiences are subjective, inner mental events

Answer 4

• hard to use subjective experience to justify objective claims about the world
• evidential value of rel ex undermined as mental events are always private
• subjectivist: rel ex can be true for the believer –> not automatically invalid
• objectivist: rel ex happens and demonstrates the ex of God

response:
- mental and emotional life cannot be treated as objective, yet these experiences define us and are rarely questioned
- can be further challenged by thr fact that we can experience similar emotions but do not all have rel experience and may need more convincing evidence
- empirical verification? evidence for the experience (fruits, william james) or shared experience like toronto blessing

Question 5

rel exp are ineffable and response

Answer 5

• impossible to verify if account is true and this is made worse by the ineffability of experience –> cannot be described, only metaphorically (nonsense?)
• Ayer: ‘merely gives us indirect information about the condition of his own mind’

response:
- rel exp are proof for those who have them –> SELF AUTHENTICATING, even if not indicative of anything for anyone else (tautology and only philosophically meaningful)
- verifying your own rel ex is just as problematic as verifying someone elses
- thomas hobbes: god spoke to me vs i had a dream that god spoke to me
- Teresa: verifying with 3 fold test –> another mystic, scripture and assessing a change

Question 6

how can the finite experience the infinite and response

Answer 6

• many experiences are indirect experiences of god, how can we understand the infinite from this
• where there is no object involved in rel ex, the mind has gained access to the divine, how can we understand this

response:
- objects are not divine but the feelings they invoke create an awareness of the divine, not experienced but inferred –> signpost (contemplation of an icon may signpost to an awareness of heaven)
- without object: experiencer is still in a finite reality in the presence of the infinite (sufi and soul adjoining with God)

• Kant: empiricism and sense data, phenomenal world and noumenal world where God exists
• humans only gain knowledge through this phen world –> rejected rel ex as this requires knowledge of the noumenal transcendent realm (rejects the numinous experience)
• sixth sense: Vardy ‘problem of God’, maybe possible that some are able to access knowledge as they are gifted with an additional sensory awareness like visonaries and mystics (challenge to Kant, some can actually access the noumenal world)

Question 7

3 philosophical theories of truth

Answer 7

• correspondence: truth relates only to what can be empirically tested
• coherence: truth relates to what we already know to be true, teresa 3 fold test
• pragmatic: uses consequences of experience as evidence for basis in reality –> william james fruits

Question 8

challenges to religious experience from science

Answer 8

• temporal lobe epilepsy
• brain imaging
• drugs
• persinger’s God helmet
• psychology

Question 9

temporal lobe epilepsy as a challenge to rel exp

Answer 9

• Professor Ramachandran: around 25% of patients with temporal lobe ep reported having rel experiences (deep and life-changing)
• feeling always came in seizures
• believed the overwhelming of emotion caused by seizures made patients assume something spiritual was occurring
• left hemisphere makes up events to account for seemingly inexplicable emotions
• seizures may also affect the amygdala - helps focus on what is significant while allowing us to ignore the trivial –> emotions seem deeper than usual and can lead to belief that a rel ex has occurred
• galvanic skin response: those with TLE did not respond to violence or sexual imagery as expected, but greatly to God and religious icons

Question 10

brain imaging as a challenge to rel ex

Answer 10

• andrew newberg
• injecting radioactive tracers into the veins of nuns, buddhists etc and constructed brain maps to show how different practices affect neural processing
• different areas of the brain activated for tibetan buddhist meditation, or a nun praying
• thalamus: one side becomes more active, rearranging of reality
• oneness of rel ex: blood flow drops off in parietal love, which helps orients people and gives them a sense of self –> block info to the P lobe, so u achieve this feeling of oneness
• frontal lobe: less active, allows the sense of surrender in religion –> concerned with making things happen
• attacked for investigations, especially by athiests –> he cannot prove god by his work, and studying people with rel ex are easy (attacked by rel believers who say there is more to religion than these experiences)

Question 11

drug use as a challenge to rel ex

Answer 11

• soma –> hinduism
• marijuana in Rastafarianism
• moses’ vision could be induced by the acacia tree, and its hallucinogenic effects
• Good friday experiment: walyer Pahnke
• 20 graduate school divinity students in a double blind experiment, given either psilocybin or niacin (placebo)
• almost all reported profound rel experience
• paul lee –> paul tillich teaching assistant
• huston smith –> became an author on comparative religion

Question 12

persingers god helmet experiment as a challenge to rel experience

Answer 12

• michael persinger
• used a head circlet device with solenoids (snowmobile helmet) that created complex magnetic fields that can simulate a religious experience in patients via electric charges
• near death experiences, exp of the numinous, none are the same (80% of his participants exp a presence other than themselves and 1 report God)
• people sit in a soundproof chamber blindfolded to deprive senses
• can generate words through magnetic patterns, so patients thinks they are hearing them
• if right and left side of brain stop communication, the right side self intrudes into consciousness and makes us think there is another person there (sensed presence) –> explains the experiences of the closeness of God, visitations of divine creatures etc

Question 13

psychology as a challenge to rel exp

Answer 13

• Both Freud and Jung argued that the mind explains religious experiences.
• Freud challenged religious experience and argued
  that the experience was the mind projecting the “father- substitute” to deal with our fears and insecurity.
• Schleiermacher argued that the sense of dependence on God was due to the fact that we were God’s
  creation.
• As God’s creation, we can become aware of our creator, for whom we feel love and respect. He
  called religion “a sense and a taste for the infinite” and “a sense of absolute dependence”.
  (Otto’s idea of the numinous was influenced by Schleiermacher.)
• our parents are our substitutes for God

Question 14

swinburne principle of credulity (special considerations and ockhams razor)

Answer 14

• argues we should trust our own rel experiences
• ‘we ought to believe that things are as they seem to be until we have evidence that we are mistaken
• belief in all experiences we have means that all experiences of God should also be believed (okhams razor)
• ‘in the absence of special considerations’ –> taking drugs, famine/exhaustion, head injury, mental disorders involving hallucinations
• needs to be asserted as athiests may assign rel ex to mental disorders etc
• ockhams razor: it is more economical to believe your experience is true rather than attribute it to some factor

Question 15

swinburne’s principle of testimony

Answer 15

• inductive arg –> probably true
• it is reasonable to trust your rel exp and reasonable to trust other people’s testimony about their rel exp
• we go through life trusting the testimony of others on all subjects, until we have a reason to doubt
• we trust what they think, but is this actually what is happening (difference between a justified true belief and knowledge)
• argues atheists shouldnt make a special exception for rel experience
  –> eg passover and holy spirit and tongues, passers by think they are drunk but peter agues they cannot as it is 9 o clock and they didnt drink before 12 in the society
• special considerations: proven liars, drug users/mental disorders, people have something to gain

Question 16

swinburne on proving god

Answer 16

• cumulative view
• need all the arguments and experience and principles to prove God
• circular logic: God exists, so people who have rel exp are genuine and if people are genuine they should be trusted

Question 17

value of testimony and hume

Answer 17

• ‘men of such unquestioned good sense education, and learning’
• ‘undoubted integrity’
• ‘credit and reputation…detected in any falsehood’
• instead of being from educated, respectable and credible, most testimonies come from ‘ignorant and barbarous’ people
• eg. moses had speech imp, muhammed pbuh was illiterate
• believes we should be sceptical until we have reasons to trust
• circular logic: assume God does not exist, people who believe are stupid, and only people who are not stupid have legitimate testimonies of God, but by their logic they dont exist

Question 18

can rel exp prove God

Answer 18

yes:
- experience = existence, people experience god, so he exists
- a posteriori due to observations
- lifechanging exp show gods ex as he communicated with people and reveals himself

no:
- sam harris – ‘religious’ vs ‘mad, psychotic or delusional’
- temporal lobe epilepsy, god helmet, where dawkins saw nothing (prior belief or explain what is happening in the brain)
- psychedelics, acacia tree moses –> brain works in a different way that god can access
- james: needs fruits of knowledge and this can verify it

Question 19

arguments for rel exp proving God

Answer 19

see sheet from the end of unit :)