AQA A Level RE: Religious Experiences (Philosophy)
- Created by: cpoppy
- Created on: 15-02-20 10:12
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- Religious Experiences
- Otto (numinous experiences)
- Religious experiences are sui generis
- Sui generis: In a class of their own and in a special faculty in our minds that recognises and responds to the holy
- Religious experiences are encounters with the Holy that are numinous
- Numinous: the feeling of the presence of something greater than you, transcending everyday experience
- Personal religious experiences are mystical experiences
- Experiences of the "wholly other": God being completely different from all things that exist
- They are "Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans": mysterious and seductive nature
- Religious experiences are sui generis
- Swinburne
- Principle of Credulity: "if (in the absence of special considerations) it seems to a subject that X is present, then X is probably present"
- Principle of testimony: "in the absence of special considerations, the experiences of others are porblably as they report them
- Strengths:
- when a change in lifestyle ensues after, we can assume it was true
- Cumulative arguments support the argument from religious experiences
- Weaknesses:
- hard to see how claims about reliability of sense experiences make religious claims reliable also
- religious experiences are subjective and ineffable
- Visions
- Corporeal
- Seen by the eyes, experienced by the senses. Person can interact (eg. St Bernadette)
- Intellectual
- No image, things are seen "as they really are" (e.g st Teresa of Avila)
- Imaginitive
- Seen by the eye of the mind, often through dreams, cannot be controlled (eg: Pharoah's dreams in genesis
- Corporeal
- Stace (mystical experiences)
- Drug-induced experiences are still valid
- Mystical experiences are non-sensuous, non-intellectual unions with the divine
- Senses no longer work at this level,
- Normal conscious "I" is replaced by pure consciousness
- Two types of experiences
- Introvertive - totally suppressed seses
- Extrovertive - still some senses
- James (mystical experiences)
- Mystical experiences have to be: (PINT)
- Passive
- Ineffable
- noetic
- Sense of revelation
- transient
- experiences are primary, organised faith is secondary, and God exists factually
- Objective is union with God
- This world draws its chief experience from the realm of God
- True end of humanity is union with a higher realm
- Spiritual communion with the higher realm has positive effects in this world
- Mystical experiences have to be: (PINT)
- General
- Difficult to prove ture because they are private, subjective, ineffable, may be contradictory, and are apart from all earth experience
- Corporate experiences are experienced by multiple people at the same time e.g. The Toronto Blessing
- Understood by union with a greater power, psychological and physiological effects
- Corporate experiences could be explained as mass hysteria
- A mystic is someone who has had a mystical experience
- Can influence faith because they can be foundational, inspirational, life-changing, they confirm faith and are at the heart of pilgirmage
- Challenges from science
- Freud: religious experiences are wish-fulfilment by the mind
- Ramachandran: assessment of TLE - those with TLE have more religious experiences, maybe famous mystics have TLE
- Persinger: made a God helmet that stimulates the temporal lobe and provokes religious experiences
- religious responses: Temporal lobe could be God's way of communicating with us, we should reach out to God to generate religious experiences?
- Otto (numinous experiences)
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