Religious Experience

It’s Nature and Significance

Experience and Inference

Sense experience is “direct perceptual awareness” of a material being

Statements can describe or express the content of our experience

Example: “I hear voices in the hallway.” (Alston, SP)

An inference is a conclusion drawn from other statements

Example: “There are people talking in the hallway.”

Religious Faith

Faith shares some qualities with both experience and inference:

Like experience, it “feels” and/or is accepted as obvious or certain, although it is not based sensory facts.

Like inference, it is an acceptance of that which is not itself directly experienced, although some argue that the object of faith can be demonstrated by reason.

Religious experience

Religious experience (Alston, RE) shares some qualities with perceptual experience.

Both religious and perceptual experience are modes of “direct awareness” of something.

Thus, there is the feeling of certainty that is grounding in the reality of direct awareness.

Unlike perceptual experience, however, religious experience is not “of” natural being; it is directed beyond that which can be normally experienced.

Philosophical Questions

The Descriptive TaskWhat are the reported characteristics of

religious experiences, in all their variety?

The Interpretive Task

What can we infer about ultimate reality, based on the data of such experiences?

Our Readings on Religious Experience

Smart explores both the nature and significance of religious experience generally.

Suzuki explains sartori, or the Buddhist experience of the “ultimate nature of things.”

Alston and Penelhum debate the significance of religious experience.

Experiential Dimension

Ninian Smart and the Varieties and Interpretation of Religious Experience

NuminousExternally oriented; of the “awesome and fearful

Other”; dualistic

MysticalInternally oriented; of the ultimate oneness and

unity of all

Two Kinds of Religious Experience

Numinous

Externally oriented

Otherness

Dualistic

Mystical

Internally oriented

Connectedness

Non-dualistic

Shared Characteristics

1. Smallness of self

2. Limits of the ordinary

Exploring the Experience

Some religions emphasize one kind of religious experience over the other.

Buddhism

No ultimate being or reality

Focus on consciousness: attainment of selflessness, peace and

Christianity

Ultimate Being

Outer orientation (before inner cultivation of “union”)

Exploring the Experience

Some emphasize an integration of the two.

Hinduism

Braham – Ultimate reality and objective truth; exists “outside of” created beings

Atman – Ultimate reality and subjective truth; exists “within” all beings and is experienced by sentient beings

Exploring the Experience

The distinction can create conflict within a religion

Mystic visions v. Orthodox interpretations

Christian or Sufi (Muslim) mystics challenge the orthodox teaching of:

1. the holiness and otherness of God

2. the idea that salvation flows from “God the other”

The Question of Truth

Religion experience has an undeniable subjective effect. Why think it has objective significance?

Challenges from psychologists regarding the causes of these unusual experiences (Freud, Fromm, Jung)

Brief Comment about Truth

Freud’s theory does not apply universally Fromm’s critique of “numinous experience” is

insupportably judgmental Jung reduced religious experience to collective

psychology

Common problem (according to Smart):

Each involves judging a (religious) worldview from a (humanist) worldview – that is, arbitrarily applying the criteria of one perspective to that of another.

Perceiving God

Alston on the Significance of Religious Experience

Two Kinds of Perceiving Sensory perception (SP)

Rooted in the physical universeSource of claims about the existence and

nature of physical things

Religious experience (RE)Rooted in the putative spiritual universeSource of claims about the existence and

nature of God (and other spiritual phenomena?)

Sensory Perception – Direct Realism

1. the theory that “what you see is what you get.”

2. assumes that the object of perception exists and causes the experience of perception

3. asserts that the perceptual experience caused by the object of perception reliably represents the nature of that object.

Religious Experience – “God Realism”

religious experience is a form of experience

as experience, it supports the idea that there is a (religious) cause of the experience

Religious experience reliably represents the nature of its religious cause: i.e., religious experience provides evidence for the existence and nature of God (M-Beliefs)

The Justification Argument

Based on these similarities, Alston argues that:

As sense experience justifies perceptual beliefs (I see a table justifies the claim that “there is a table”)

So religious experience (via something other than sensory qualities) justifies religious beliefs (I “saw” God justifies the claim that “God exists”)

Standards of Justification

Shared perceptions are a basis for claims about objective reality

Perception is supplemented by other shared means to construct and verify knowledge

Override systems apply those other means

Override systems are themselves derived from experiences

Alston’s Analogy

SP and RE are significantly alike in that both:Are based on individual “perceptual”

experiences Support a wider “world view” based on those

same perceptual experiences (doxastic value)Have an “override system” (188)

The Epistemology of Religious Perception (according to Alston)

All claims to knowledge must reference an experiential basis of belief religious experience is such a distinctive sort of

experiential basis for belief, “like” sensory experience

All claims to knowledge must fit into a distinctive range of belief contents (subject matter) Those who have religious experiences tend to report

religiously acceptable conclusions from their experiences

The Epistemology of Religious Perception

There must be an “overrider system” to correct unjustified “leaps” from experience

Not every unusual experience counts as a religious experience, by virtue of religious communities’ own experiences and bodies of belief

It is unreasonable to ask of any experiential doxastic system that its beliefs be indubitable.

Yeah, but….

Religious perception seems to assume what it is trying to prove

Objection I – we are assuming that there is a God to cause a RE

Objection II – different people report different and contradictory claims about what God is or wants

Objection IV – there are naturalistic explanations of putative religious experiences

Yeah, but….

Religious perception is significantly unlike sensory perception.

Objection III – sense experience varies according to the varied conditions of perception

Objection V – RE is not universally available, and its inferred claims are vague or obscure

Objection VI – there is no intersubjective confirmation of RE claims

Penelhum’s Response

The basic problem is that religious experiences – by Alston’s own criteria – are “religiously ambiguous.”

Such experiences can be explained by both SP (naturalist) criteria and RE (religious) criteria

Alston’s argument seems to put both on a parity, as he explicitly claims that these “doxastic” systems have epistemic parity.

Penelhum’s Response

Other observations:

1. The demand for parity makes us accord (epistemic) rights to apparently incompatible religious systems.

2. The demand for parity makes us accord (epistemic) right to non-religious systems.

Glossary - Alston

Doxastic – having to do with belief Compare: aesthetic – having to do with the senses; with

artistic experienceCompare: existential – having to do with meaning; with

the purpose of life

Doxastic practices – having to do with belief-formationthe social and logical conventions and standards

through which beliefs are generated and validated