James accepted that religious experiences are psychological experiences with religious elements. Freud however used the fact that it is a psychological experience to argue against the validity of them. According to Freud, all religious experience is an illusion created by people that wish for them to come true. Religious experiences are a neurotic response to repression that originates from psychological needs that are unfulfilled. He argued that god is brought about as a father figure that a mind craves for protection; the experiences are the product of the subconscious caused by the desire for security. Similarly to this, Ludwig Feuerbach argued that God is just a human projection with attributes of human desires. There is no concrete evidence for God, however psychological explanations for religious experiences can be, and have been proved.
Happold was a philosopher that agreed with James and furthered his efforts. He said that there are three types of mysticism, soul, nature and God mysticism. Soul mysticism is seeking personal knowledge and knowledge of God, Nature mysticism is the awareness of a presence in nature and God mysticism is the feeling of experiencing being God whilst retaining your identity. However all three strands are flawed. Soul mysticism can be entirely psychological and does not present evidence of God; it merely is searching for and finding yourself. Nature mysticism is vague and subjective. Similarly to how you may view the beauty of nature, you may view the interaction of God within it. And lastly God mysticism would mean that a human felt that they were existing outside of human understanding itself. As all three are personal experiences, and on certain levels subjective, they cannot provide an argument for the existence of God as no one but yourself can perceive the way you experience mysticism.
Richard Swinburne considered that a loving God has reason to make himself known. He argues that since many people have experienced what they believe to be God, then rationally they should be believed. He came up with two principles that argue that a person should believe an account of religious experience as we would believe anything else that has been recollected to us. The first is the principle of credulity. This principle states that unless we have serious evidence to the contrary, we should believe that things are, as they seem. Therefore a religious experience must be considered a truthful experience until such time as it is disproved. The second is the principle of testimony. This principle is applicable to all beings and works on the assumption that people tell the truth. This principle says that unless there is good reason to believe otherwise, a person is telling a true account, except that it’s a general universalised principle as oppose to the more personal principle of credulity. Swinburne therefore supports William James and most specifically his conclusion of pragmatism.
Swinburne however is his own critic as he proposed a third principle. The principle of incredulity states that there are occasion when we are correct in not believing an account. These occasions may occur if the circumstances surrounding the account are unreliable, for example the person is drunk, or if the account is so far fetched that you cannot believe it to be true.
Similarly to James, Rudolph Otto believed that religious experience is at the core of religion. However he said that all experience is numinous in nature, meaning that it is an experience of awe and wonder in the presence of God. Those who experience it gain a dependency on something objective and external to themselves that is greater than themselves. These experiences then lead the followers to interpret the world from their experience and to develop their own ideas about god. However Otto’s account is to simplistic, it cannot be suggested that all religious experience is numinous as many accounts of religious experience aren’t numinous in nature therefore suggesting that Otto’s proposal cannot prove the existence of God.
However Marx produced a sociological explanation for religious experiences by comparing religion to a drug. He said that religion is the “opium of the world” as people long to belong to the community. Everyone in a religious group forms a close community that draws people in. Even when looking at the British working year, Christianity depicts holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, both bank holidays and important Christian dates.
Therefore religious experience does provide an argument for the existence of God but it’s flawed, especially when considering proposals like soul mysticism that are proving to be psychological. The most solid argument is that it is of a psychological reasoning that people experience such strong religious feelings and that that seems most plausible.
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vimto890 (student)
