I. Fundamental Questions of the Course

Conceptual Question: What is religious experience?

Religious experience has been characterized as a subjective feeling, a perceptual experience, and as a supernatural interpretation of ordinary experiences.

Friedrich Schleiermacher said the essence of religion is “the feeling of absolute dependence.”

Rudolph Otto said that religious experience should be defined not by a feeling of oneself as absolutely dependent (from which the divine is inferred), but in terms of one’s own immediate “awareness of another as divine.”

Cf. Bonaventure: Deus praesens est ipse animae (God is present to the soul itself).

William James held that the common core of religious experience is a sense of the presence of a reality or power that transcends the self and the world.

Contemporary philosopher William Alston has argued that a broad range of religious experiences involves “a perceptual awareness of God,” and that such experiences have the same generic structure as sense perception. Alston speaks of a non-sensory perceptual experience of God in which God or the divine is presented directly to consciousness in a way analogous to the presentation of physical objects to consciousness in sense experience.

Another contemporary philosopher, Wayne Proudfoot describes religious experience as an experience the subject takes or interprets to be religious. “Those who identify their experiences in religious terms are seeking the best explanations for what is happening to them.”

Evidential Question: Is religious experience good evidence for the truth of religious beliefs?

In other words, can the facts about religious experience furnish us with premises from which we may infer the actual existence of the being allegedly experienced in religious experience?

The two questions above are related because how we characterize the nature of religious experience will have implications for whether religious experience can be evidence for the truth of religious beliefs. For example: non-cognitive views of religious experience => negative answer to the evidential question.

The evidential question must be distinguished from a third question:

Epistemic Question: Can religious experience ground a rationally justified belief in God?

If we equate rational belief with logical argument, then we are likely to conflate the two questions. However, a tendency in recent philosophy of religion has been to propose religious experience as the kind of experience that can ground rational or justified religious beliefs even if we can’t construct an argument from the experiences to the truth of the beliefs based on them. In much the same way, we might not be able to construct a good argument from our being appeared to treely to the conclusion “there is a tree,” but it may nonetheless that the experience of being appeared to treely confers justification on our belief that there is a tree in front of us. This argued eloquently in Alston’s book Perceiving God.

Although the epistemic is not one of the fundamental questions of the course it is a question that I will return to at different points in the course.

II. Importance of the Philosophical Examination of Religious Experience

There are at least three reasons why it is important to engage in a philosophical examination of religious experience.

A. Illuminates an Important Ground of Religious Belief.

Religious Experience is a ground of religious belief for many people in the eastern and western religious traditions. For example, many religious people believe in God because they claim to have experienced God in some way. Our attitude toward the reasonableness or rationality of belief in God can be shaped by our understanding of the character of religious experience. In other words, we can assess the quality, credibility, or intellectual status of religious beliefs by considering the nature of the experiences that ground them.

B. Illuminates Our Understanding of Other Grounds of Religious Belief

Traditionally, theists have identified three general kinds of grounds for belief in God: tradition (or authority), religious experience, and natural theology.

Tradition or authority involves the acceptance of religious claims on the basis of testimony, from one’s parents, church, or creedal or confessional statements.

Natural theology involves the acceptance of religious claims (specifically concerning the existence and nature of God) on the basis of logical arguments: Cosmological, Teleological, Ontological arguments.

1. It may be that religious experience provides the necessary background for arguments for the existence of God to carry their desired force. Perhaps theistic arguments fill out details and extend the knowledge of God given by way of religious experience. Unless there is already some knowledge of God present to us by way of encountering God, reasoning about God will get us nowhere.

2. Alternatively, we might suppose that traditional arguments for the existence and nature of God are strengthened if we add to them the facts of religious experience. Religious experience might combine with other sorts of theistic arguments for a cumulative case for theism.

What B shows us is that an analysis of religious experience can assist us in a broader evaluation of the intellectual merits of belief in God.

C. Illuminates the Character and Internal Dynamics of the Religious Life

If religious experience plays an important role in the formation and sustenance of religious beliefs, then our understanding of the character of a religious way of life is affected by our understanding of religious experience.

1. An understanding of religious experience may help explain the tenacity of belief that characterizes most religious people. Why are religious people so reluctant to give up their fundamental tenants of faith, even when these beliefs are challenged in various ways? Analogy with sense experience? Why are skeptical arguments not sufficient to cause us to doubt the reality of the external world?

2. An understanding of religious experience may also explain the problem of evil as it is experienced by the religious person. Non religious people frequently appeal to the fact that the world contains much suffering as a reason not to believe in the existence of God (defined as an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being). “If there is a God, he would not allow such and such to happen.” To someone who already believes in God because the person has experienced God this problem must take on a profoundly different character. Some religious people find themselves drawn closer to God through suffering, for they find a greater reliance on God because of their suffering. Other religious people are angry at God because of their suffering. The problem of evil for them is not a reason to doubt God exists but a reason to doubt God’s love or providence, or to suppose that one is being punished for some wrong doing.