Religious Experience

Davis defines religious experience as "any experience which one takes to be religious."

Vision = revelation seen other than by ordinary sight, asleep or awake. 

1. Sensory - external objects, sounds or figures appear.

2. Dream-based - series of images while in an unconscious state.

3. Intellectual - message of inspiration, insight, instruction or warning.

4. Group - seen by multiple people.

5. Individual - seen by one person.

6. Corporeal - external object appears physical in nature. 

Examples: St Teresa's thrusting spear, Bernadette seeing Mary at Lourdes.

Conversion = change direction, altering one's view of the world. Can be personal or communal.

James' four features: gradual or sudden, volitional or self-surrendering, passive or active, transforming. 

Other descriptions: 

1. Unifying inner self - psychological completeness.

2. Intellectual persuasion - two conflicting systems of thought, new one seen as true.

3. No religion to faith - St Augustine was converted this way.

4. Believing to trusting - mind to heart, heart is strangely warmed.

5. Intellectual conversion - C S Lewis concluded that Jesus was the son of God by talking it through with J.R.R. Tolkien.

6. Moral conversion - changing your morals and way of life e.g. Swearing Tom.

Mysticism = departure from logical view of religion. 

1. Mystical assent - like a ladde, ascending into a higher reality, darkness to light. 

2. Transcendent mysticism - beyond the physical realsm into the spritual, ineffable one. E.g. the poet Rumi practiced sema, a sacred dance, where you turn on your left foot to symbolise turning towards Allah.

3. Ecstatic mysticism - Teresa of Avila, suspension of exterior senses, 2 states are interior where the mind is focused and physical where you reach a trance-like state, 

4. Unitive mysticism - removal of separation between individual and God, lost in God. 

James' features: passivity, ineffability, noetic insight to unknown truth, transcient short-term experience but long-term effects.

Miller's features: transcendant beyond space and time, ineffable, noetic, ecstatic filled with peace, unitive soul unites with reality.

Teresa of Avila:

Garden metaphor for four stages: well is vocal prayer and meditation, water-wheel is slightly easier and more rewarding, stream involves no human effort and is union of soul with God, rain involves no labour and is prayer of union.

Mansion analogy of seven stages of prayer: soul surrounded by sin but seeks God through humility, daily prayer, lives an exemplary life, prayer of quiet when captivated by God's love, prayer of simple union as God is implanted in soul, spiritual marriage of wanting to spend all your time with God, transforming union or mystical marriage when you have achieved complete unity with God. 

As well as James and Miller's features of mysticism, other scholars tried to define the idea of holy.

Otto: holy is unhelpful so defined three features. Numinous means awesome and inspiring supernatural power. Mysteium tremendum is a profound sense of awe and wonder. Mysterium fascinans is when God becomes an object of yearning and desire and includes feelings of mercy, love and comfort. 

Happold: identified the consciousness of the oneness of everything, a sense of timelessness and the idea that the ego is not real.

St Bonaventure: saw three stages of mysticism. Purgative is when you are purified via meidtation. Illuminative is when your intellect and feelings are affected. Unitive is when you gain a continuing union with God. 

Veridical = real, external, objective.

Swinburne: principle of credulity says we can mostly trust our senses and principle of testimony says we can mostly trust what others say. He also argues it is a cumulative case. 

James: belief is not down to reason but an act of fideism, Latin for faith, and trusting our passional nature. Thinks religious experience is self-authenticating based on how it changes the individual. 4 fruits: focus beyond superifical, sense of power, joy and freedom, morality. 

Pascal: says we can't rationalise religious belief, faith is "not of the philosophers and savants."

Davies: 4 reasons to accept the authenticity of a religious experience - consistent with other truths, similar to toher experiences, good short and long-term consequences, offers insights. 

Analogy of people: we know people from their personalities, not their bodies. This contradict's Cole's spider analogy by saying it doesn't matter that God is not physical, He is still personal. Cole refutes that people still have bodies as well, whereas God does not. 

Davies: 4 reasons to reject authenticity - unreliable subject, under unreliable circumstances e.g. drugs, improbable based on background info, other causes e.g. mental illness. 

Franks-Davis: 4 challenges - description-related such as self-contradictory or inconsistent story, subject-related such as mental illness, object-related unlikeliness of experience, chronology-related and alternative empirical explanations.

Cole: uniformity says experiences are too diverse so contradict each other and can't all be correct, scarcity questions why only a minority have an experience, analogy of sight suggests some people are just more able to access noetic revelations. Spider in bath analogy, can't distinguish God from any other experience.

Ayer: verification principle, Vienna Circle, can be proven analytically or synthetically but religious statements can't be proven either way so are meaningless. Hick's eschatological verification and prable of the celestial city suggetss we will know someday.

Flew: falsification principle says religious experiences would be valid if you could accept evidence that proves it wrong, but believers are so committed to their faith that their claims die the death of a thousand qualifications, parable of gardener. 

Neurological - Persinger found that you could trigger a sensed presence in the temporal lobe of the brain using electromagnetic frequency. He believed that religious figures such as Ellen White, founder of the 7th Day Adventist church, had temporal lobe epilepsy, not real visions. 

Criticisms - unverifiable, only addresses numinous feature, can only induce similar experiences.

Psychological - Freud thinks religious belief is a neurosis caused by needs and wishful thinking, e.g. Teresa's thrusting spear expressed her sexual frustration. Dawkins thinks that seeing a face in the smoke at 9/11 and hearing the manx shearwater as the cries of the devil is just a crutch or defence mechanism based on irrational fears.

Criticisms - unverifiable, Dawkins commits fallacy of ridicule, reductionistic. 

Pharmacological - James and Huxley experimented with drugs to induce mystical experiences, just like Rastafarians use cannabis to feel closer to God.

Criticisms - reductionistic, can be explained by the Paris analogy, doesn't mean all religious experiences are induced.