Swinburne’s third example states that a religious experience may be one of God or Ultimate reality through private sensations, which can be described in normal language, For example a vision or dream that although still private, remains describable. Alternatively the vision or dream cannot be described using normal language. Swinburne’s final example is one in which the perceiver experiences an awareness which cannot be sensed through eyes, ears, touch etc. However, Whilst Swinburne’s theory of the five types of religious experience is true it is also the case that an experience may fall in to two or more of the categories. If this is the case how can it be defined? And is this experience still religious?
Friedrich Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto both understand religious experience in terms of feeling. Schleiermacher says that religious experience is not an intellectual or cognitive experience, but “ a feeling of absolute or total dependence upon a source or power that is distinct from the world.” Schleiermacher’s thinking influenced Otto, who believed that some aspects of God can be grasped by reason, in other words we can know some of Gods attributes can be known through human experience however this knowledge is not true religious experience. Otto believed that the only true religious experience is the experience of God’s deeper nature. He described this as numinous experience; which is manifested in three ways; Firstly through a feeling of complete dependency on God and as a fear or dread at God’s power or as a longing to be near God. Otto believed that only an experience with these three manifestations was a true religious (or numinous) experience. The process used to describe numinous experience is called schematization, although these words inevitably fall short of what the experience is like. Therefore we can define numinous experience in terms of Swinburne’s forth type of experience. However the problems occur in asking yourself weather an experience should be defined as religious if it is impossible to even describe?
A different view is that religious experience is a type of perception. William Alston, for example holds that many experiences of God have the same structure as normal perception.
Some think it is strange to talk about religious experience in terms of perception, as it appears that ordinary perception has many important differences from experiences of God. In a normal perceptual experience I can perceive and fully understand that which I perceive; for example, I perceive the table in front of me to be wooden, hard and brown. In this perception I can sense everything about the object that I perceive, however, God has many attributes that are not sensory. For example, in a religious experience the perceiver senses God’s love, power and goodness, however these things cannot be sensed in a normal perceptual experience. I cannot sense the ‘goodness’ of the table in front of me.
Alston admits that these properties of God are not sensory. However for Alston this does not mean that these properties cannot be the content of a perception. He distinguishes between the way something looks to me at the moment and the way it would look under normal circumstances. For instance, if I described the way my house looked I might say that it was white. However it wouldn’t look white in the dark, instead it would be grey, however I would still describe my house in the same way because I am able to understand that the house is white under normal circumstances. We describe things using comparative concepts rather than referring to the way the phenomena may look at the time or perception. Similarly an experience of God would be described using comparative concepts. Many criticise this by asking how we know what God is like under normal circumstances, however, Alston says we perceive Gods goodness, love, beauty etc based on the experiences of these things around us.
Alston’s theory is useful in helping to explain the way in which we feel religious experience, and is useful in defining some religious experience. Nevertheless it fails to take into consideration the sheer diversity or religious sensory experiences which make it difficult to define. For instance the ultimate reality that a Hindu experiences is very different from the personal God a Christian experiences. This of course does not show that religious experience is not perceptual; it may only show that religious experience is more open to individual interpretation.
Wayne Proudfoot rejects the idea of religious perceptual experience and agrees that religious experience is open to personal interpretation. In fact he believes that any experience is religious if an individual chooses to bring a religious meaning to it. He does agree that some element of the experience must be perceptual for the X must exist for it to be experienced. The experience is not religious because it has religious content but because of the belief that a person brings to whatever experience he or she has. It is based on a person’s personal religious belief. Although scientific explanation may attempt to criticise a religious explanation, it struggles to dissuade the individual or others that the experience was a religious one.
Proudfoot is interested in not what causes the person to have a religious experience but the person who is having the experience and why they choose to describe it religiously. The problem with this is that if each person’s religious experience is based on his or her own personal beliefs then which account will give the best explanation? Proudfoot rejects this, saying that if a person truly believes they have had a religious experience then they have.
This links back to Swinburne and his principle of credulity, a simple theory that states that the perceiver does not have to prove their experience to be religious, it is up to the denier to prove otherwise. In other words if I were to say that I had seen God it would be up to you to prove that I didn’t, however ridiculous my claim may sound. This relates to Proudfoot by saying that any experience is religious if the perceiver believes it to be so. The only exceptions to this rule is if the perceiver has a history of incoherent claims (like the boy who cried Woolf) or if the perceiver were on drugs or had a history of mental problems. Swinburne also says that the other time a perceiver may have to prove his or her experience is if the thing perceived was not actually present at the time. For example, if I saw my friend on a distant platform at a train station you could only deny it was him if you knew he was elsewhere.
All of these arguments make it difficult to disprove religious experience. We need to define experience as religious or non-religious in order to better understand religious belief. It is impossible to say that people do not have experiences, which they feel to be religious or supernatural. The important thing is to consider what it is that makes them believe that this is an experience of God or ultimate reality and why.
