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.
• James (The Varieties of Religious Experience) 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
• James believed that the presence of these criteria in all religions is evidence that mystical experiences come from a higher spiritual reality
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
  • "religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.”
• 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
• Michael Persinger created the God Helmet that produced the same sensations as a religious experience. It is all in the person’s head
• St. Paul & Wesley's conversion

  • Radical examples of conversion can be found in St. Paul and John Wesley:
  • St Paul: Originally called Saul, Paul was a Jew who persecuted Christians until a sudden experience of the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. He described himself as a new man, a new creation.
  • John Wesley: Initially aware that he did not have the same faith in a personal saviour that others had. He had a conversion experience in which he felt his heart warmed and felt trust in Christ that he had been saved from his sins.
• William James: sick & healthy soul

  • William James examines conversion in the light of his psychological account of the ‘sick soul’ and the ‘healthy soul’.
  • The sick soul is a personality type that is depressive and pessimistic; the healthy soul is conversely optimistic about life.
  • James claims that conversion affects the sick soul in a more profound and long-lasting way.
• What does 'metanoia' mean?

  Repentance
• Forms of religious experience

  • Mystical: Supernatural experience e.g special revelation
  • Could be chance/ natural occurence
  • Conversion: event that brings a change in beliefs
  • could be social influence
  • Corporate: group experience e.g Toronto Blessing
  • could also be social influence
  • Near-Death: Near state of death and often full of imagery
  • could emphasise Freud's wish fulfillment
• Benny Hinn's crusades - Corporate religious experience example

  • Speech contains a spotlight on him with dark light surrounding it - disorientating
  • People go with the expectation of healing
  • could be a placebo that leads people to believe in special revelation
  • Less about God, more about Hinn
• William James - *The Varieties Of Religious Experience*


  • experience is authentic for individual
  • it's the heart of religion and is a mystical experience
  • "One may say truly...that personal religious experience has its roots and centre in mystical states of consciousness"
  • Common core of mystical experiences:
  • Passive
  • Ineffable
  • Noetic - provides insight
  • Transient - short but significant
  • Persuasive, but not inductive proof of God
• Michael Persinger - *The Paranormal* (opponent)


  • "all activity is brain activity"
  • created the 'God Helmet' - meant to stimulate what a mystical experience feels like; proves that mystical experiences are just metabolically active parts of the brain stimulating nerve activity
  • "You can control a person's experiences and they don't know they are being controlled"
• Richard Swinburne *Is There A God?*

  • God wants to interact with creation
  • Principle of Credulity: believe in your senses
  • "we ought to believe things that are the way they seem to be"
  • witness and testimony provide good evidence for religious experiences being valid
  • Principle of Testimony: Trust accounts of religious experience, unless the individual is an addict or a liar
  • "tipping the balance of evidence decisively in favour of the existence of God."

  (+) axiomatic principle of rationality that we apply to everyday life
• Saint Therese of Lisieux

  • felt God's presence throughout life
  • practiced smallness before God through humble charity
  • felt call to religion at 15
  • felt like she was "wounded by a dart of fire" and "burning with love"
  • HOWEVER - could be criticised by Freud as this is utilisation of religion as a coping mechanism
• Edwin Starbuck *Psychology of Religion* (opponent)


  • psychological factors rule out God
  • Mystical experiences are part of adolescence
  • Most non-religious adolescents go through "mental suffering" before "happy relief". Religious experience is not mystical, it is finding an identity
• Carl Yung *Synchronicity* (proponent)


  • spirituality and religion are essential to a healthy mind
  • St Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus was a result of an emotional breakdown triggered by guilt over the persecution of Christians
  • "The religious instinct is as basic as the need for food or shelter" - necessary for becoming a good person
• Ludwig Feurbach *The Essence of Christianity* (opponent)


  • "Man...made God in his image"
  • Psychological explanations rule out the possibility of God as we created Him as a source of hope, thus religious experiences are a placebo of that hope becoming a reality as God is whatever we want Him to be
• W T Stace: - *Man Against Darkness* mystical experience

  • "Extrovertive mysticism": the plurality of objects in the world are transfigured into a single living entity.
  • "Introvertive mysticism": a loss of identity as a separate individual occurs, and one merges into the divine reality.
• Rudolf Otto *The Ideal of the Holy*


  • emphasises God’s separateness and otherness.
  • Numinous comes from the latin numen, meaning divinity.
  • tried to convey the original sense of awe-inspiring wonder and terror which he believed lay at the heart of religious experience.
  • e.g fear that the disciples felt when Jesus calmed the storm, a supernatural fear, contrasted with their fear of the storm itself. Their fear of Jesus calming was a far more profound fear.
  • Explained numinous experience with two words: mysterium (unavailable to ordinary human reason) and Tremendum: The experience is awe-inspiring and exposes our inferiority 
• St. Teresa of Avila

  • In her book The Interior Castle, she outlines many types of religious experience.
  • Through mental prayer “God gave her spiritual delights: the prayer of quiet where God's presence overwhelmed her senses, raptures where God overcame her with glorious foolishness, prayer of union where she felt the sun of God melt her soul away.”