Types of religious experience

Religious experiences take many forms:

• Mystical — a sense of union with the ultimate or the divine.
• Numinous — awe before something holy and 'wholly other'.
• Conversion — a transformation of belief and life (individual or corporate).
• Corporate — shared experiences within a group (e.g. revival meetings).
• Visions, voices and answered prayer.

Key question: is such an experience the perception of a real God, or a psychological or physiological event? The thinkers below take different views.

William James: the marks of mysticism

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James studies experiences as real psychological states. He identifies four marks of a mystical experience:

• Ineffability — it cannot be put into words.
• Noetic quality — it gives knowledge and insight.
• Transiency — it is temporary.
• Passivity — the person feels acted upon, not in control.

James is a pragmatist: we should judge experiences by their fruits — the positive change they produce in a person's life. He concludes they are at least evidence of 'something more' worth taking seriously.

The four marks

Rudolf Otto: the numinous

Rudolf Otto coined the numinous to describe the non-rational core of religion: the experience of the holy as something wholly other.

• He calls it the mysterium tremendum et fascinans: a mystery that both makes us tremble (awe, dread) and fascinates (draws us in).
• It cannot be reduced to ethics or feeling; it is a unique category of experience of the divine.

Otto numinous

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Swinburne: credulity and testimony

Richard Swinburne argues we should treat religious experience like any other perception, using 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.
• Principle of Testimony: we should generally believe what others tell us they experienced, unless we have reason not to.

Together these make religious experiences prima facie evidence for God, adding to the cumulative case.

Principle of Credulity

Challenges to religious experience

Several challenges question the evidential value of religious experience:

• Physiological / neurological: experiences may be caused by brain states, temporal-lobe activity, drugs or fasting.
• Psychological (Freud): religious experience may be wish fulfilment — an illusion born of deep desires, not perception of God.
• Conflicting claims: different religions report contradictory experiences, so they cannot all be veridical.
• Unverifiable and private: we cannot check another person's inner experience.

Response: a cause in the brain does not prove the experience false — perception always has a physical basis. Swinburne's principles still shift the burden onto the sceptic.

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A key challenge

The big ideas to take into the exam

Religious experience offers an experiential route to God to set beside the arguments. Press Finish.