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Religious Experience
What does it say about Experience?
What does it say about God?
(Outline notes from a
talk given at the RS AS Level conference
November 30th, 2006)
What does it mean
to ‘experience’ something?
·
We get
sensations, transmitted to the brain, form images and
respond accordingly - a basic feature of all ‘sentient’ life
·
Without
experience, you’d die. Experience is therefore key to the
relationship you have with the rest of the world.
·
BUT we divide up
our experience. Things ‘exist’ if the ‘stand out’ against
their background.
·
We are conscious,
but always conscious ‘of’ something. We experience things
‘as’ something.
·
That’s the start
of language – the way of distinguish one thing from another
and communicate to others what we experience.
‘religious’
experience?
·
At least one in four people
have an experience at some point in their lives which could
be called ‘religious’, even if they do not think of
themselves as religious.
·
What makes an
experience ‘religious’? Is it a matter of content or of the
quality of the experience?
·
Is that extra
‘religious’ something beyond description? Is ‘God’, for
example, always beyond the meaning of the words we use.
·
There would be no religion if
there were no religious experiences.
·
Great religious leaders have
all recorded powerful experiences which have shaped their
lives, and which led them to teach and preach as they did.
·
Special experiences change
people’s lives. They have some common features which have
been examined by William James and others.
·
For most people, the
‘religious experiences’ that they have are far more routine.
They are the experience gained from taking part in organised
religion.
·
If people did not find benefit
in the experience of taking part in religious ceremonies,
they would not continue to do so.
·
The fact that religions exist
at all means that they provide experiences that their
followers find valuable. They take part in worship and feel
'uplifted' by it. They may feel inspired by readings from
scripture, or ritual, or even the building in which the
worship takes place.
·
People may also find that
religion gives new depth to ordinary experiences - they may
see something that is overwhelmingly beautiful, or they may
be faced with the powerful moments of birth or death, they
fall in love or fall ill.
·
How they experience these
moments may be influenced by their religious beliefs, that
the experiences then reinforce those same beliefs.
·
In other words, as a result of
some ‘religious’ experiences – perhaps in connection with an
organised religion, people tend to interpret other
experiences they have as religious.
·
A religious person, in Western
Christian terms, is someone who sees God as acting
everywhere, and therefore someone who experiences everything
religiously.
Mystical…
·
In his book On Religion:
speeches to its cultured despisers (1799),
Schleiermacher described religious experience as ‘the
immediate consciousness of universal existence of all finite
things, in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal
things in and through the Eternal.’
·
A mystical experience is one
in which a person may sense the underlying unity of
everything. It can produce a very deep sense of joy, of
'being at home', of being at one with nature and of seeing a
truth that cannot be put into words.
·
In his Varieties of
Religious Experience, William James lists four
qualities:
·
Ineffability (cannot be
described using ordinary languge)
·
Neotic quality (they provide
knowledge)
·
Transiency (they don’t last
long)
·
Passivity (the person feels
that they receive something)
The numinous…
·
In The Idea of the Holy
(1917), Rudolph Otto saw religious experience as an
encounter with something powerful, uncanny, weird, awesome,
but also attractive and fascinating.
·
Otto described the object of
religious experience as mysterium tremendum et fascinans
– a mystery that is both awesomeness and fascinating: an
encounter with 'the numinous'.
·
It cannot be described in
ordinary language. The of words we use (e.g. good, loving,
powerful) to describe the holy are its 'schema‘.
The personal…
·
In I and Thou (1937)
Martin Buber argued that we have two different kinds of
relationships: I-It relationships are impersonal; I-Thou
relationships are personal.
·
For Buber the relationship
with God was an I-Thou relationship, in other words, it was
more like getting to know another person.
So…
·
Ordinary experience – divides
our sensations up into various bundles, each able to be
described literally.
·
There are other elements to
religious experience: the mystical sense of oneness, the
sense of personal encounter. What do these tell us?
What does this
say about ‘God’?
·
The Philosophy of Religion
does not simply look at the facts, it probes and ask
questions
·
It tries to tease out the
truth of claims that are made. And so we need to examine
what religious experience can and cannot prove.
·
Experience is a
given fact; the interpretation of that experience may be
examined and its conclusions debated.
·
If someone says
‘I have had an experience of God.’ What that means is ‘I use
the word ‘God’ to describe what I have experienced.
·
In other words,
it may not be a simple matter of saying whether the
experience is true or false, but it is more a matter of the
nature of what is experience and the significance it has for
the person concerned.
·
Every experience
is open to interpretation – there is no objective check.
·
There are two general
approaches to interpreting religious experience – the
‘experiential’ and the ‘propositional’.
·
The first of these is
concerned with the experience itself, and religious claims
that arise from it are seen as filtered through the
particular circumstances.
·
The ‘propositional’ approach
extracts from the experience certain definitive
propositions, which are then claimed to be truths, backed by
the authority of the original experience.
·
Paul Tillich
points out two features of religious experience and
language…
·
It is about
‘being itself’ – not individual beings
·
It is about
‘ultimate concern’
So… What about ‘God’?
·
If God is infinite, he cannot
be located in a particular place, nor does he have
boundaries. You cannot point to where God is not, if he is
infinite.
·
Yet all our experience is of
particular things in particular places; they are known only
because they have boundaries. Our senses divide reality up
into segments to which we can give names: this is one thing;
that is another.
·
Since all experience
involves interpretation (we experience 'as'), our prior
understanding of ‘God’ will be used to interpret whether
this experience is an experience of God or not.
·
Therefore, in order for
religious experience to be part of a logical argument about
the existence of God, there needs to be an agreed definition
of what is meant by the word ‘God.’ Otherwise, there will be
no way of knowing how the person is interpreting their
experience.
·
The argument from religious
experience may therefore show what people mean by ‘God’, and
persuasive (particularly for the person who has the
experience), but it is not a logically compelling argument
that a god exists.
Getting beneath
the surface…
·
Fundamental
distinction between ‘religion’ as the set of beliefs,
practices, ceremonies and so on and the ‘religious’ aspect
of all experience.
·
Most people want
to say that some moments – whether in connection with
religion or just as part of our everyday experience – are in
some way special, speak to them of the depths of things, not
superficially, challenging their self understanding, giving
their life some new sense of purpose. Those are the
experiences that tend to be called ‘religious’
·
Parallel to
falling in love, or finding that someone else has fallen in
love with you. Or being suddenly moved by a work of art of
piece of music. Such things open up the whole dimension
that we can call ‘the transcendent’.
·
And that is
probably the best way of describing ‘religious’ experience –
it is an experience of something that transcends, that goes
beyond the physical moment or sight or sound, that speaks of
something greater.
·
So ‘religious experience’
tends to show that experience can be rather more profound
than we might at first expect – it’s not just receiving
phenomena.
·
It also shows what people mean
then they use the word ‘god’ to explain what they
experience.
·
We should not take the
description of that experience literally. God is not
literally experiences – because he is not physical. But it
points to this intuition of something deeper, a
‘transcendent’ aspect of life.
© Mel
Thompson 2006
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