Analyse the key strengths for the existence of God based on religious experience

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Jason Wong (Housman)

A2 Religious Std – Existence of God based on Religious Experiences

Analyse the key strengths for the existence of God based on religious experience. (18 marks)

To debate whether religious experiences can be used as a proof for God’s existence we must first decide what constitutes the term. A religious experience is unique and occurs when an individual has a personal encounter with the divine; the occurrence is non-empirical and is often perceived to be supernatural. Such experiences can be brought about by different means: they are either spontaneous, such as the conversation of St Paul in the Acts of Apostles as well as being a result of intense religious training and discipline, such as the practices of Sufi orders of Islam as well as various Christian sects and cults. Testimonies often show that recipients feel a sense of being in the presence of the Divine power but yet remotely separated from it. This is perhaps best articulated by Otto who coins the phrase numinous in describing such an experience. Religious experiences often “draw people into” having a deeper connection with the Divine and can have a profound impact on one’s life.

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Critics often discredit religious experiences as a means of universally proving God’s existence by suggesting that such experiences are limited to the recipient and no one else; hence as long as one has not experience God, they cannot believe in God nor can they trust the accounts of those who claimed they have. This argument has been successfully rebutted by Swinburne along with other scholars put forward the Principle of Credulity, arguing that unless we have evidence to prove against recipients, we cannot say that they are untrue accounts and therefore must accept it. He states that “In the absence ...

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