A Level Religious Studies - Religious Experience Notes

Religious experience

The key issues:

*  Are religious experiences veridical, i.e., of something transcendent/supernatural?

*  Are religious experiences different from other (sense) experiences?

*  Can religious experience be verified/checked?

*  Are religious experiences too diverse to be judged reliably?

*  Can religious experiences be “explained away” by science?

Definitions:

*  An experience with religious significance, e.g. the act of worship in a religious setting

*  A person’s experience of something or a presence beyond themselves

Arguments for religious experience as evidence for God’s existence

There are two different variants on the basic valid argument:

The argument from 1st person experience:

1. I have had an experience which seemed to be of God
2. I have no reason to doubt my experience
3. Therefore, God exists

The argument from 3rd person perspective:

1. Others have related their experiences of God
2. We have no reason to doubt their testimony
3. Therefore, God exists

Swinburne

Swinburne suggested two principles for the assessment of religious experience:

*  Principle of Credulity – with the absence of any reason to disbelieve it, one should accept what appears to be true. E.g., if one sees someone walking on water, one should believe that it is occurring.

*  Principle of Testimony – with the absence of any reason to disbelieve them, one should accept that eye-witnesses or believers are telling the truth when they testify about religious experiences.

For Swinburne, these principles are the ordinary criteria we use for assessing whether experiences that people have are veridical (of reality). The second premises of both of the above arguments rest on these principles. Many people sincerely report religious experiences, and he argues that we have no good reason to doubt their reports. If the second premises are true, the conclusion follows.

Other arguments

Davies’ argument:

1. God can be directly and non-inferentially encountered as an object of experience
2. If one encounters God in such a way, then one has reason to believe that God exists
3. Therefore, God exists

The argument from self-authentification: religious experiences are self-authenticating. They need no external justification because, by virtue of their content, they are guaranteed to be veridical.

Replies to the basic arguments

Scepticism about experience: Experience is inherently unreliable as a guide to reality. Experience is often deceptive because we can make a variety of mistakes (such as perceptual, mistaken identification or misinterpretation).

BUT, Davies à we have no reason to suppose in advance that a claim is suspect if it is based on experience. Experience can be a source of knowledge. Claims based on experience may be retracted by the people who make them, but this does not show they can never be correct.  To misinterpret evidence is to be aware of something and to draw mistaken conclusions about it. It must therefore be possible to be aware of something and to draw correct conclusions about it.

Problems of interpretation: Those who have religious experiences may be utterly sincere in their reports, but there is a gap between what they experience and the conclusion they draw about God. They may also be hallucinating, or insane.

BUT, Davies à The truth of a belief is not affected by the factors that bring the belief about.

Problems with verifying religious experiences: The content and alleged consequences of religious experiences cannot be checked against reality (verified) in the way other experiences can be. Davies à universal agreement is rare, no agreed tests to distinguish a religious experience from a hallucination.

The asymmetry between the 1st and 3rd person arguments: Having a religious experience may convince oneself that God exists, but a mere report from another may not do so.

Science against religious experience

Bertrand Russell à “From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes”. This encapsulates the key claims that such experiences:

1. can be explained by scientific principles and require no supernatural causation
2. can be simulated by natural causes, either in real life or under experimental conditions

Altered states of consciousness: brought about by disciplines and activities such as meditation, drug taking (especially entheogens), dancing (e.g. sufi-whirling), intense prayer or extreme pain (e.g. mortification of the flesh, self-flagellation).

*  During meditation, the condition of the brain is altered: part of it becomes inactive.

*  An entheogen is a drug that has a history of religious or shamanic use. The word means “to create God from within”. Common effects include the stimulation of powerful emotional, cognitive and therapeutic reactions and interpretations. Could possibly spark a religious experience as it alters the state of mind of the user. BUT, the terms 'psychedelic' and 'entheogen' suggest a genuine experience, contrary to  'hallucinogen' which suggests confusion and derangement.

*  Intense prayer. The neuroscientist Newburg conducted a study into the effects of prayer on the brain. There were some areas of increased activity in the frontal lobes, which handle focused attention. Referring to intense prayer, he says: "You can sculpt your brain just as you'd sculpt your muscles if you went to the gym. Our brains are continuously being sculpted, whether you like it or not, wittingly or unwittingly."  The effect is similar to that of meditation (a different state is reached as the brain activity alters). Newburg says that this could change the way the mind works.

*  Extreme pain. “Ritualised induction of small amounts of pain...can also affect your consciousness. The small amounts of pain cause various hormones to flow throughout the bloodstream, and these hormones affect the brain-mind complex.” (Donald Michael Craig) Inga Niedtfeld and colleagues carried out a test on those who self-flagellated and formed an extreme conclusion based on the findings. They found that for people with borderline personality disorder there was ‘evidence of heightened activation of limbic circuitry in response to pictures evocative of positive and negative emotions’ (Limbic system = areas including emotion, behaviour and long term memory). John Krystal à “physically painful stimuli provide some relief from emotional distress for some patients with borderline personality disorder because they paradoxically inhibit brain regions involved in emotion. This process may help them to compensate for deficient emotional regulation mechanisms."

Temporal lobe activity: the link between religious experiences and temporal lobe activity, such as temporal lobe epilepsy and the stimulation of the temporal lobes in “normal” people involving Persinger’s “God Helmet”.

The “God Helmet”. 1980s à Persinger artificially stimulated people’s temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field. He said that the magnetic field could make the feeling of “an ethereal presence in the room”. He also believes that the Miracle of the Sun was due to the stimulation of the cerebral-temporal lobe (other factors could also include an obsession with religious themes and lack of education).

BUT,

*  In December 2004 Nature reported that a group of Swedish researchers, attempting to replicate the experiment under double-blind conditions, were not able to verify the effect. BUT, Persinger à “They didn’t replicate it, not even close”. He argues that they didn’t expose the subjects to the magnetic fields for long enough to produce an effect.

*  Dawkins was famously reported not to have experienced a religious feeling. BUT, before donning the helmet, Dawkins had scored low on a psychological scale measuring temporal lobe sensitivity. Also, Susan Blackmore à "When I went to Persinger's lab and underwent his procedures I had the most extraordinary experiences I've ever had… I'll be surprised if it turns out to be a placebo effect."

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy symptoms include hypergraphia (overwhelming urge to write), hyper religiosity, fainting spells, and pedantism, and it can cause seizures in the temporal lobe which affect the whole of your brain. One of the types of seizure caused is Simple Partial Seizures, which can cause psychic sensations such as an out of body feeling or euphoric feelings.

 By presenting subjects with neutral, sexually arousing and religious words while measuring galvanic skin response, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran was able to show that patients with TLE showed enhanced emotional responses to the religious words, diminished responses to the sexually charged words, and normal responses to the neutral words. These results suggest that the medial temporal lobe is specifically involved in generating some of the emotional reactions associated with religious words, images and symbols.  TLE could suggest why people with it have more of a tendency to report religious experiences.

Persinger asserts that stimulating the temporal lobe electromagnetically can cause TLE and trigger hallucinations of apparent paranormal phenomena such as ghosts and UFOs.

One suggestion which has emerged from these experiments is that religious figures such as St Paul and Moses suffered from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. Their accounts of religious events are similar to those with the accounts of people who have this condition. “It makes one wonder if Moses went up the mountain during a thunderstorm.  Maybe he was hit by a non-lethal bolt of electricity at the summit and imagined his famous encounter with ‘God,’ commandments and all.”  BUT, how could this be tested? This form of epilepsy is rare so is this a suggestion that every religious figure has this form of epilepsy?

ALSO,

*  It doesn’t explain why people report miracles that don’t have TLE, and it doesn’t directly prove that religious experiences are all in the brain

*   There’s no way of determining how many people have temporal lobe epilepsy and to what degree. We also cannot determine whether all “paranormal” experiences are the result of temporal lobe malfunction

*  The sense of “something else” experienced by God Helmet is not specific enough as a feeling to meet Davies’ criteria of commonly agreed-on experiences of God (e.g. feeling of calm, union… etc.)

*  We don’t say all writers who describe themselves as ‘seized by the urgency to write’ or all people who are overly concerned with precision have malfunctioning temporal lobes!  (Not just linked with hyper-religious tendency) à cannot isolate hyper-religiosity as significant – should be considered with equal weight given to pedantism, hypergraphia, hyposexuality etc.

Wish-fulfilment: Freud’s theory that religious experiences are a form of wish-fulfilment, where we believe and experience what we want to be true about reality.

Sigmund Freud: In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud states that dreams are disguised fulfilments of wishes and deep desires suppressed by the unconscious. He applies the same thinking to religion. He says religious teachings are “illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes.” They are caused by the desire for security and meaning.

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires." An illusion is not an error, and isn’t necessarily false – it is a belief derived from a wish. “It is a very striking fact that all this [that religion proclaims] is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be”

He also argues that religion is a form of obsessional neurosis. Our adoption of religion is a reversion to childish patterns of thinking in response to feelings of helplessness and guilt. As a child we are vulnerable and need a source of security and forgiveness, so humans designed God as a father figure. Religion is therefore a childish delusion, and atheism a grown up realism. Freud saw religion as a powerful influence on the entire human race, the company they keep and the people they turn out to be.

BUT,

*  If wish fulfilment creates a personal wish-fulfilment world for each individual, how does this differ from the real world? Could I wish away someone I did not wish to know? If yes, how is it an objectively real world? If no, then it is not a true wish-fulfilment world. How is this other person’s world different from my own? BUT, Dualism à The wish-fulfilment world is non physical; the non-physical mind and physical body work independently. BUT, objections to dualism.

*  What can be imagined or conceived should not be confused with what is possible. Objects are constrained by the physical laws that apply to them. E.g. iron floating on water is perfectly conceivable, but iron cannot float on water without ceasing to be iron. ‘Wanting to meet a disembodied person is like wanting to go to the Isle of Man T.T. Races and bring home a bucketful of speed!’

*  Even if people do need a father figure, it doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist

*  It is only a theory that dreams are deep-rooted desires

*  Freud’s arguments could just be a reaction to his strongly resented Jewish upbringing

Ludwig Feuerbach developed the idea that God is a projection of the unconscious mind. “Christianity has in fact long vanished not only from the reason but from the life of mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed idea.” He argues that the idea of God rises understandably but mistakenly from human experience. Religion (and therefore religious experience) is just wish-fulfilment.

BUT,

*  He assumes that the basis of all religions is the same. E.g., Buddhism doesn’t have an actual god, but follows the example set by the Buddha.

*  It is just a hypothesis; he does not have any experimental evidence to support his claims

*  It is true that not everything we desire exists, not true that everything we desire does not certainly exist.

Scientific issues:

1. Are religious experiences an altered state of consciousness?
2. Are religious experiences due to temporal lobe activity?
3. Are religious experiences due to wish-fulfilment?

Philosophical issue: If the scientific explanations are true, do they undermine the validity of the claim that religious experiences are evidence for God’s existence?

[Example: Jill has a brain operation in which the surgeon manipulates part of her brain so that she hears her favourite song. Jill really does hear the song, though she may believe that there is a CD playing the song (which would be false). The fact that the experience can be simulated without the CD does not entail that others who hear the song cannot use their experiences as evidence for the existence of the CD.]

Just because an experience can be artificially induced, it does not automatically undermine the claim that others have real experiences of the object in question, or that the object of their experience exists, though it might undermine the rationality of the person in question.

William James

Mysticism: “feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude of whatever they consider to be the divine”.

James categorised the forms of religious experience that cannot be explained using normal language:

1. Ineffable. Those experiences that are so extraordinary they cannot be described in a way that would make them intelligible to anyone who has not had such an experience
2. Noetic. These experiences provide some kind of insight or carry a message of revelation of truth
3. Transient. Brief experiences that do not last more than half an hour
4. Passive. Experiences that cannot be actively sought or created. Often people describe their bodies being “taken over” by a superior presence

He also identified a different cluster of features of religious experience:

1. They are experiential, like perception, but not like just thinking or imagining God
2. They are not connected to any particular sense modality
3. The awareness of God is immediate and unmediated
4. This awareness blocks out anything else

Swinburne’s five types of religious experience

Public

1. A normal event interpreted in a religious way, e.g., seeing the face of the Virgin Mary on the moon
2. Witnessing a very unusual event with others, e.g., the resurrection of Jesus

Private

3.       A private experience which may be explained using normal language, e.g., the Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary

4.       A private experience which may not be explained using normal language, e.g. mysticism

5.       An ongoing impression of a presence based upon no specific experience – just a sense that God is guiding one’s life

Rudolph Otto

The German thinker Otto argues that there is one common factor to all religious experiences, independent of the cultural background: numinous.

The “numinous” experience has two aspects:

1. Mysterium tremendum: the tendency to invoke fear and trembling
2. Mysterium fascinas: the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel

It also has a personal quality to it, in that the person feels to be in communion with a wholly other. Otto sees the numinous as the only possible religious experience: “There is no religion in which it [the numinous] does not live as the real innermost core and without it no religion would be worthy of the name”.