Kinds of religious experience

• Mystical — a sense of union with a greater reality (James's focus).
• Numinous — awe before a wholly other, transcendent presence (Otto's focus).
• Conversion — a reorientation of the self, e.g. St Paul on the Damascus road.
• Corporate — shared experiences within a community, e.g. revival meetings.

Experiences may be direct (of God) or indirect (a changed way of seeing the world).

William James

William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902) studied first-hand accounts and identified four marks of mystical experience:

• Ineffability — beyond words;
• Noetic quality — it conveys knowledge/insight;
• Transiency — short-lived;
• Passivity — the person feels acted upon.

James was a pragmatist: experiences are validated by their fruits — the good effects they produce in a person's life.

James's four marks

Rudolf Otto

Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy, 1917) described the numinous — the non-rational feeling of the holy. Its object is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans:

• mysterium — wholly other, beyond comprehension;
• tremendum — awe-inspiring, even dread;
• fascinans — compelling, attractive.

For Otto the numinous is a distinctive, irreducible category — not reducible to ethics or reason.

The numinous

Richard Swinburne

Richard Swinburne (The Existence of God, 1979) defends experience with two principles:

• Principle of Credulity — if it seems to someone that X is present, then probably X is present, unless there is special reason to doubt it.
• Principle of Testimony — we should normally believe what others honestly report.

Together these make religious experience a rational basis for belief unless defeated by counter-evidence.

Principle of credulity

Challenges

• Sigmund Freud: religious experience is an illusion rooted in wish-fulfilment and a projected father-figure.
• Physiological / neurological explanations: experiences may be produced by the brain — e.g. Michael Persinger's temporal-lobe stimulation research.
• Verification and interpretation: experiences are private, unrepeatable and already interpreted through the subject's religious tradition.

A challenge

Whose idea is it?

Sort each idea by the thinker who is associated with it.

Term to meaning

Match each key term to its meaning.

The big ideas to know

A strong answer weighs whether experience is evidence for God or explicable naturally. Press Finish.