Summary RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE NOTES AND EVALUATION

Religious Experience
What is a Religious Experience?
 An out-of-the-ordinary experience with God or a religious figure, known as
the Ultimate.
 Transcendent and can occur both personally and corporately. (Examples:
conversion, mystical, possession, elation)
 Recipients say they have a deeper understanding of God/Higher Power
afterwards, so it changes people to an extent.
Example: 1987 David Hay to the British public “Have you been influenced by a
presence or power, different from your everyday?” 48% answered yes.
RE as proof of God’s existence
 Other religious experiences can be interpreted as subjective interpretation
of reality in a religious, objective framework. (Examples: prayer,
pilgrimage, fasting)
 Inductive, a posteriori argument for the existence of God. Follows premise:
1. If an entity is experienced, it must exist
2. God is the sort of being that is possible to experience
3. People claim to have experienced God directly
 It has HISTORICAL, MEDICAL AND ACCUMULATIVE evidence
 The RE proves God wants a relationship with us
 Proves God is omnipotent and omniscient
 Objective view: God is independent, and we interact with him. Could be
evidence for his existence
 Subjective: Purely interpreted as God personally. Less evidential.
Swinburne and Testimony
 Is there a God (1996)
 God desires to interact with us, and this fits his attributes of benevolence
and omnipotence
 If there are Res, God exists
Principle of Testimony
 “In the absence of special considerations, the experiences of others are
as reported”
 We should believe the testimony, unless there is exceptional
circumstances
Principle of Credulity
 The “overwhelming testimony” “tips the balance” of the argument that
God exists
 It is Rational to believe the number of testimonies.
 We should trust Intuition
 CRIT: Where is the tangible proof!
 RESP: If we experience something, we tend to assume it is true. How is
different from anyone else’s view

, Support for Swinburne
Brian Davies:
 Vouches for Pro-Inductive argument.
 “We need to work on the assumption” otherwise it will be difficult to
establish anything at all
Ockham’s Razor:
 Supports fewest assumptions:
 Swinburne trusts the assumptions to prove God exists, the Razor supports
this
Criticism of Swinburne
 The religious experience is not like other testimonies; there is a bigger
likelihood of erroring observations when working with something so vague
 God is not definable as a testimony
 Are people really trustworthy in testimony?
 Sincerity of belief should not be credible for everyone. Just because
sincere Nazi’s exist does not mean I should believe their views— “Problem
of other minds”
Historical argument for existence of God
 Probable proof by those who had an experience exists forever
 CRIT: Too subjective and ambiguous
 CRIT: Different interpretations of God rule each other out.
Cumulative argument for Existence of God
 Sheer weight of different arguments tips it in favour
 CRIT: Hume argues that all miracles have only been viewed by one person
at a time
Corporate experiences (Mystical and Conversion)
 Religious experiences as a collective
 Perceptions are still individual
 Toronto Blessing: People felt the Holy Spirit as a presence, and began
feeling mass “holy laughter”
 Bosnian Six: Six children in a small village saw Marian apparitions,
attracting pilgrims to the village.
 Biblical story of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit
Criticism of Corporate experiences
 Mass hysteria is a well-recognised phenomena; it could be mistaken as a
RE
 Many believed that the work of the Toronto blessing was that of the Devil,
not the Holy Spirit
 Why would God choose to reveal himself in this way when he was always
canonically spoken to one person at a time?
 Why would God choose this type of interaction over anything else? The
Toronto blessing only made fools of those involved.