What is a religious experience?

A religious experience is a non-empirical, often direct awareness taken by the subject to be of God or an ultimate reality. AQA distinguishes several types:

• Mystical — union with the divine.
• Numinous — awe before a wholly-other holy presence.
• Conversion — a reorientation of the self (e.g. St Paul).
• Corporate — shared by a group (e.g. the Toronto Blessing).
• Prayer, visions and voices.

William James: the marks of mysticism

William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience) studied experiences empirically and pragmatically — by their fruits, not their roots. He gives four marks of the mystical:

• Ineffability — it defies description.
• Noetic quality — it feels like genuine knowledge, an insight into truth.
• Transiency — it does not last long.
• Passivity — the subject feels gripped by a higher power.

James' conclusion: such experiences are, at the least, evidence that "the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe". He judges them pragmatically — good fruits (a transformed life) count in their favour — while staying agnostic about their ultimate cause.

Whose four marks?

Otto and the numinous

Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy) coined the numinous — the distinctive feeling of the holy as "wholly other". He describes it as:

For Otto the numinous is a unique, non-rational category of experience that cannot be reduced to ordinary feelings — an encounter with a reality utterly beyond us that fills us with awe and creaturely dependence.

Swinburne's principles

Richard Swinburne argues that, absent special reasons to doubt, we should trust apparent experiences of God:

• Principle of credulity: if it seems to you that X is present, then probably X is present — unless there is reason to think otherwise.
• Principle of testimony: in the absence of special reasons, we should believe that others' experiences are as they report them.

Swinburne lists defeaters (when credulity does not apply): the subject is unreliable, conditions were unreliable, the object probably does not exist, or the experience is better explained otherwise. He treats religious experience as part of a cumulative, probabilistic case for God.

Which principle?

Corporate religious experience

Corporate experiences are shared by many people together — e.g. the Toronto Blessing (1994, laughing/falling), revival meetings, or reported Marian apparitions.

• For: multiple simultaneous witnesses seem harder to dismiss as one person's delusion; shared "fruits" can transform a community.
• Against: critics point to crowd psychology, suggestion and emotional contagion; sceptics (and some believers) doubt the phenomena are of God.

Challenges to religious experience

• Physiological/neurological: experiences may correlate with brain states; Persinger's work on temporal-lobe stimulation, or the effect of drugs, suggests a natural cause. (Reply: a mechanism need not be the whole story — God could work through the brain.)
• Psychological: Freud treated religion as an illusion born of wish-fulfilment and a projected father-figure.
• Verificationism: Flew and the logical positivists question whether "I experienced God" is even a meaningful, checkable claim.
• Conflicting claims: different religions report different objects — do they cancel out, or point to one reality described differently (Hick)?

Which challenge?

Sort each idea by thinker

Tap a claim, then drop it under the thinker it belongs to.

Match the concept

Tap a description, then the term or thinker it belongs to.

The big ideas to hold together

You can now explain, apply and evaluate the main accounts of religious experience. Press Finish to see your score.