Religious experiences

• Mystical experiences involve a sense of unity or oneness with God or a higher power, accompanied by feelings of peace, joy, and insight.
• William James studied religions from around the world
• James claimed that mystical experiences in all religions share 4 common criteria:

  • Ineffable: beyond description and language
  • Noetic: provides knowledge and insight
  • Transient: occurs in a limited amount of time
  • Passive: it happens to you, you don't make it happen
• James believed that the presence of these criteria in all religions is evidence that mystical experiences come from a higher spiritual reality
• Other scholars like Stace, influenced by James, argue that the similarities in mystical religious experiences across cultures suggest an objective cause behind them
• Some scholars propose naturalistic explanations for the cross-cultural similarities in mystical experiences, such as the similarity in human brain evolution leading to similar hallucinations
• Religion and religious experiences may fulfill a universal human psychological need or sociological function, suggesting no necessity for the hypothesis of a higher spiritual reality as their origin
• William James studied religions from around the world
• James claimed that mystical experiences in all religions share 4 common criteria:

  • Ineffable: beyond description and language
  • Noetic: provides knowledge and insight
  • Transient: occurs in a limited amount of time
  • Passive: it happens to you, you don't make it happen
• James believed that the presence of these criteria in all religions is evidence that mystical experiences come from a higher spiritual reality
• Other scholars like Stace, influenced by James, argue that the similarities in mystical religious experiences across cultures suggest an objective cause behind them
• Some scholars propose naturalistic explanations for the cross-cultural similarities in mystical experiences, such as the similarity in human brain evolution leading to similar hallucinations
• Religion and religious experiences may fulfill a universal human psychological need or sociological function, suggesting no necessity for the hypothesis that they originate from a higher spiritual reality
• Swinburne argues that witness and testimony provide good evidence for religious experiences being valid
• Seeing something or someone telling you they've seen something is evidence that it exists, although it doesn't prove it
• If you see God (Credulity) or someone tells you they've seen God (testimony), that is evidence that God exists
• You can only dismiss evidence if you have other, better evidence that contradicts it
• If you know someone is a liar or on drugs, you could dismiss their experience
• There are many religious experiences where there is no evidence of any physiological or psychological influence
• In cases with no evidence of influence, we have to accept them as evidence for God
• Even if religious experiences are evidence for God, it's not enough evidence to justify believing in God
• Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
• We need more than just religious experience to justify belief in God
• Corporate experiences are considered convincing because multiple people can testify to them
• When multiple people share a religious experience, such as the Toronto blessing where individuals in a church in Canada felt the presence of the Holy Spirit in different ways
• Corporate experiences cannot be explained by factors like mental illness or drugs, as it is unlikely for everyone to hallucinate the same thing
• In the book of Acts, there is a mention of apostles having a corporate religious experience where they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues
• Groups of people can share delusions, as seen in examples like villagers claiming to have seen alien spaceships or witches in different historical contexts
• This shared delusion among groups of people could potentially explain corporate religious experiences
• Freud's psychological explanation:

  • Religious experiences are illusions/delusions caused by fear of death and fear of being an adult
  • People delude themselves into believing they have seen a God who is like a father figure and will provide them with an afterlife
  • Similar to a mirage in a desert where people hallucinate water due to desperation, people hallucinate God due to desperation for death not to be the end
• Evaluation of Freud:

  • Freud was not a real scientist, didn't conduct experiments, and studied a small sample size of people who were not representative of society
  • Overgeneralizing his conclusions, may be right about some religious people but not all
  • Conversion experience critique of Freud:
  • Argues that religious experiences result from mental desperation for an afterlife
  • Some religious individuals already believe in an afterlife, yet have experiences converting them to a different religion
• • This contradicts Freud's explanation as they already believed in an afterlife, so the conversion experience cannot be solely attributed to desperation for an afterlife
• Michael Persinger created the God Helmet that produced the same sensations as a religious experience. It is all in the person’s head