Religious Experience
Having looked at several rational approaches to the religious, we now proceed to look at the religious experience. The difference between the two can be seen in the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard's comment that "to stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking him." The religious experience does not necessarily appeal to the philosophical part of the mind. Rather, it is a more immediate experience, a personal connection with the divine. Another way of thinking about this is by using Martin Buber's image of the "I-Thou" relationship. Our relationship to the world around us, which Buber calls "I-It," is characterized by an objective element. We are separate from it and investigate it as such. However, the religious experience brings us into direct subjective contact with God.
As we look at the religious experience we will address several key points which define it and then proceed to give some examples. We will also consider whether this experience can provide any evidence for the existence of God. In addressing this question we will look at several objections to the religious experience and a possible way of dealing with these objections.
The difficulty of explaining the religious experience can be explained by pointing to one of the most salient elements of it: it’s supposed to be ineffable. That is, one cannot adequately put it into words. This is why many people who have had the experience describe it in highly metaphorical and poetic language. The experience defies rational analysis and description. This is partly due to another important element of the experience; its transcendence. You remember the difficulty we had describing the transcendent Forms in Plato's theory. Imagine how difficult it might be to describe it not from the outside looking in, but rather, from the inside. In other words, the religious experience puts those who have had it into an entirely different perspective. Those of us who have not shared this may be at a loss to understand it.
Understanding, though, is a key element of the experience. To describe this we say that the religious experience is noetic. That is, it conveys a deep sense of illumination. Those who have had the experience come away with a greater understanding, not only of the divine and their relationship to this but also, the cosmos as a whole. In some cases, this experience is so profound that it includes a feeling of unity with all of reality. Needless to say, then, the experience is also ecstatic; filling the soul with a great sense of peace and joy.
There are many examples of the religious experience throughout history. Perhaps the most famous are related in the Bible. In the Old Testament, we encounter several examples of direct experience with God. Among these is the experience of Abraham and his son Isaac. In this case, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son. Thankfully, God stops him short but as Kierkegaard once said, when faced with this kind of divine command which flies in the face of our normal considerations, follow the divine. This Kierkegaard called the "teleological suspension of the ethical." A New Testament example is St. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus. In this case, Paul has a vision of Christ himself and the changes that take place for Paul as a result of this were nothing short of historical.
The philosophical question concerning the religious experience is: does it prove anything? Can we use this experience to validate our knowledge of God? Reviews are mixed. Needless to say, those who have had such experiences say that they have given them very good evidence. But does this help those who have not had the experience? One criticism is that the religious experience is so subjective that it cannot possibly be used as evidence. After all, evidence needs to be objective. In this respect, the religious experience is unlike other experiences. For example, if I were to say that I saw the most amazing rock formations at the Grand Canyon you would understand what I meant. And more than that, if you put yourself in my position at the Grand Canyon you would have the same experience. Of course, there would be a subjective element to my experience and you may not find the rock formations amazing. But you would experience them which shows that there is some objective component there as well. However, the religious experience is not like that. For example, I could walk along the same road to Damascus as Paul did at the same time of day and reasonably expect to have the same experience. In some sense, the religious experience is entirely subjective and that's the problem.
But that doesn't mean we can't explain the experience. In fact, for critics of the religious experience, this subjectivity is entirely explainable. One of the breakthroughs of 19th-century science and philosophy was a deeper understanding of the human mind and body. Both psychology and biology made significant gains and many of these scientists turned their attention to the religious experience to explain it. The most popular explanation was that the religious experience was a product of some mental or physical condition. More correctly, the religious experience was explained by appealing to some mental of physical illness. After all, it was said, Paul was an epileptic. That would explain his visions; epileptics have seizures and visions. Saint Teresa was an hysteric. George Fox had a disordered colon. So do these medical conditions explain the religious experience? Not everyone thought so.
In particular, one person familiar with both biology and psychology disagreed with this explanation. William James, the eminent American psychologist, and medical doctor was much more sympathetic to the religious experience. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, he offers a cogent defense. First, he criticizes this view that the religious experience can be explained away as some sort of medical or psychological ailment. He refers to this "simple-minded system of thought" as medical materialism. The main problem, in James' view, is that it only addresses the cause of the experience, not the significance of the experience itself.
Let's consider what medical materialism is really saying. A religious experience is the result of some organic cause therefore it can be discounted. But wait a minute! Isn't every experience the result of some organic (that is biological or psychological) cause? Yes. So by this same logic, all experiences are discredited. Even a scientific theory has some organic cause. Thinking about a scientific theory gives us another refutation of medical materialism. While this is not James' example it will serve to explain his point. Suppose we were to discover that Einstein developed his theory of relativity as a result of his having schizophrenia. Would that cause us to reevaluate the theory? It shouldn't. We should evaluate the theory using appropriate scientific methods. If the evidence is in favor of the theory it doesn't really matter that its cause was a medical condition. What matters is whether the theory can pass certain scientific tests. The same should how true of the religious experience.
The cause, strictly speaking, is irrelevant. As James points out "Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology if the trial of the theology by other tests should show it to be contemptible." What we need, then, is an appropriate set of criteria to evaluate the experience. In a fit of prolix James gives us just that. "Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria" to evaluate the religious experience. The experience needs to be reasonable in the sense that it fits in with our intellectual life. It must also fit in with our moral understandings.
But, do these criteria really address what is needed to assess the accuracy of the religious experience? Can't an experience be completely false and morally helpful at the same time? Perhaps, which is why James also says that the experience must be philosophically reasonable (emphasis on reasonable). But, part of being reasonable entails an analysis of the cause of the experience. As I mention below there are several interesting works on this subject including one titled Why We Believe What We Believe which seems to relate directly to the cause of the belief and the importance of understanding this. Surely in some sense, the accuracy of our beliefs is tied to their cause.
Given these criteria, we can now turn to consider a few experiences that may not immediately seem religious but do have religious implications. I will only touch briefly on these experiences to introduce them. Both of these were popular areas of research in James' day and are being freshly considered today. The first of these is the near-death experience. In 1976 another medical doctor, named Raymond Moody, published Life After Life; a series of case studies describing the experience of people who had clinically "died" and come back. What struck Moody, and many others was the uniformity of elements in the experience and the fact that having the experience did not depend on the religious view of the subject. There have been attempts to explain this in purely biological terms but it is, in part, still an open question. Our understanding of the dying process is still developing, even as our understanding of the mind.
The second of these experiences is mediumistic communication. This is where someone purports to be able to communicate with people who have died, or as it is sometimes put crossed over. This is the title of a popular television show hosted by one of these mediums named John Edward. Now, before you start rolling your eyes, you should know that this has been an area of research for over a century with some very interesting recent findings. The most recent effort to study this was conducted by a psychologist named Gary Schwartz. He published the results of this research in 2002 in a book titled The Afterlife Experiments. In this book he claims to prove, he used the "p" word, the validity of these mediums' claims to communicate with those who have died. The implication of this is that they have in some sense "survived" the death of their bodies. Schwartz admits that further research is required, and Moody would say the same about the near-death experience.
Are these experiences valid or just representative of our longing for something more? As Sir Thomas Browne once said, "the long habit of living indisposeth us to dying." While hope may inspire the research, to validate the experiences we'll need hard evidence. What does the hard evidence tell us about the religious experience? We now know quite a bit more than we did in James' day about how the mind works. In particular how it constructs reality and sometimes constructs it in ways that do not bear any connection to the objective world. As Richard Dawkins puts it, "the human brain runs first-class simulation software." Sometimes the simulations are helpful and accurate but not always. Two books in particular provide useful insights into the working of the mind and its ability to construct beliefs. In Why We Believe What We Believe, Andrew Newberg illustrates some of the common mistakes the brain makes and how to guard against them in your quest for accurate beliefs. In Sway, Ori Brafman illustrates just how prevalent and irresistible irrational behavior is (in fact that's the subtitle of the book: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior). To truly understand our beliefs and how to assess their accuracy you need a firm grounding in the science and psychology of the mind.
What do the research and evidence tell us so far about the near-death experience and mediumistic communication as evidence for an afterlife? Interestingly enough, many scientists, when confronted with the research that has been done, have to admit that nothing we know about how the universe works preclude the possibility of "survival." Of course, this doesn't mean that these experiences are valid but actuality has to be preceded by possibility. Only time will tell. Can these experiences be validated by James' criteria? Well, we've briefly addressed the reasonableness of them. Are they morally helpful? Some say yes since the possibility of survival would potentially solve a serious moral problem. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do those who do evil seem to prosper? Perhaps they do so here only to meet a different judgment in the hereafter. Still, the problem of evil is serious and we now turn to consider this.
As we look at the religious experience we will address several key points which define it and then proceed to give some examples. We will also consider whether this experience can provide any evidence for the existence of God. In addressing this question we will look at several objections to the religious experience and a possible way of dealing with these objections.
The difficulty of explaining the religious experience can be explained by pointing to one of the most salient elements of it: it’s supposed to be ineffable. That is, one cannot adequately put it into words. This is why many people who have had the experience describe it in highly metaphorical and poetic language. The experience defies rational analysis and description. This is partly due to another important element of the experience; its transcendence. You remember the difficulty we had describing the transcendent Forms in Plato's theory. Imagine how difficult it might be to describe it not from the outside looking in, but rather, from the inside. In other words, the religious experience puts those who have had it into an entirely different perspective. Those of us who have not shared this may be at a loss to understand it.
Understanding, though, is a key element of the experience. To describe this we say that the religious experience is noetic. That is, it conveys a deep sense of illumination. Those who have had the experience come away with a greater understanding, not only of the divine and their relationship to this but also, the cosmos as a whole. In some cases, this experience is so profound that it includes a feeling of unity with all of reality. Needless to say, then, the experience is also ecstatic; filling the soul with a great sense of peace and joy.
There are many examples of the religious experience throughout history. Perhaps the most famous are related in the Bible. In the Old Testament, we encounter several examples of direct experience with God. Among these is the experience of Abraham and his son Isaac. In this case, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son. Thankfully, God stops him short but as Kierkegaard once said, when faced with this kind of divine command which flies in the face of our normal considerations, follow the divine. This Kierkegaard called the "teleological suspension of the ethical." A New Testament example is St. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus. In this case, Paul has a vision of Christ himself and the changes that take place for Paul as a result of this were nothing short of historical.
The philosophical question concerning the religious experience is: does it prove anything? Can we use this experience to validate our knowledge of God? Reviews are mixed. Needless to say, those who have had such experiences say that they have given them very good evidence. But does this help those who have not had the experience? One criticism is that the religious experience is so subjective that it cannot possibly be used as evidence. After all, evidence needs to be objective. In this respect, the religious experience is unlike other experiences. For example, if I were to say that I saw the most amazing rock formations at the Grand Canyon you would understand what I meant. And more than that, if you put yourself in my position at the Grand Canyon you would have the same experience. Of course, there would be a subjective element to my experience and you may not find the rock formations amazing. But you would experience them which shows that there is some objective component there as well. However, the religious experience is not like that. For example, I could walk along the same road to Damascus as Paul did at the same time of day and reasonably expect to have the same experience. In some sense, the religious experience is entirely subjective and that's the problem.
But that doesn't mean we can't explain the experience. In fact, for critics of the religious experience, this subjectivity is entirely explainable. One of the breakthroughs of 19th-century science and philosophy was a deeper understanding of the human mind and body. Both psychology and biology made significant gains and many of these scientists turned their attention to the religious experience to explain it. The most popular explanation was that the religious experience was a product of some mental or physical condition. More correctly, the religious experience was explained by appealing to some mental of physical illness. After all, it was said, Paul was an epileptic. That would explain his visions; epileptics have seizures and visions. Saint Teresa was an hysteric. George Fox had a disordered colon. So do these medical conditions explain the religious experience? Not everyone thought so.
In particular, one person familiar with both biology and psychology disagreed with this explanation. William James, the eminent American psychologist, and medical doctor was much more sympathetic to the religious experience. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, he offers a cogent defense. First, he criticizes this view that the religious experience can be explained away as some sort of medical or psychological ailment. He refers to this "simple-minded system of thought" as medical materialism. The main problem, in James' view, is that it only addresses the cause of the experience, not the significance of the experience itself.
Let's consider what medical materialism is really saying. A religious experience is the result of some organic cause therefore it can be discounted. But wait a minute! Isn't every experience the result of some organic (that is biological or psychological) cause? Yes. So by this same logic, all experiences are discredited. Even a scientific theory has some organic cause. Thinking about a scientific theory gives us another refutation of medical materialism. While this is not James' example it will serve to explain his point. Suppose we were to discover that Einstein developed his theory of relativity as a result of his having schizophrenia. Would that cause us to reevaluate the theory? It shouldn't. We should evaluate the theory using appropriate scientific methods. If the evidence is in favor of the theory it doesn't really matter that its cause was a medical condition. What matters is whether the theory can pass certain scientific tests. The same should how true of the religious experience.
The cause, strictly speaking, is irrelevant. As James points out "Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology if the trial of the theology by other tests should show it to be contemptible." What we need, then, is an appropriate set of criteria to evaluate the experience. In a fit of prolix James gives us just that. "Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria" to evaluate the religious experience. The experience needs to be reasonable in the sense that it fits in with our intellectual life. It must also fit in with our moral understandings.
But, do these criteria really address what is needed to assess the accuracy of the religious experience? Can't an experience be completely false and morally helpful at the same time? Perhaps, which is why James also says that the experience must be philosophically reasonable (emphasis on reasonable). But, part of being reasonable entails an analysis of the cause of the experience. As I mention below there are several interesting works on this subject including one titled Why We Believe What We Believe which seems to relate directly to the cause of the belief and the importance of understanding this. Surely in some sense, the accuracy of our beliefs is tied to their cause.
Given these criteria, we can now turn to consider a few experiences that may not immediately seem religious but do have religious implications. I will only touch briefly on these experiences to introduce them. Both of these were popular areas of research in James' day and are being freshly considered today. The first of these is the near-death experience. In 1976 another medical doctor, named Raymond Moody, published Life After Life; a series of case studies describing the experience of people who had clinically "died" and come back. What struck Moody, and many others was the uniformity of elements in the experience and the fact that having the experience did not depend on the religious view of the subject. There have been attempts to explain this in purely biological terms but it is, in part, still an open question. Our understanding of the dying process is still developing, even as our understanding of the mind.
The second of these experiences is mediumistic communication. This is where someone purports to be able to communicate with people who have died, or as it is sometimes put crossed over. This is the title of a popular television show hosted by one of these mediums named John Edward. Now, before you start rolling your eyes, you should know that this has been an area of research for over a century with some very interesting recent findings. The most recent effort to study this was conducted by a psychologist named Gary Schwartz. He published the results of this research in 2002 in a book titled The Afterlife Experiments. In this book he claims to prove, he used the "p" word, the validity of these mediums' claims to communicate with those who have died. The implication of this is that they have in some sense "survived" the death of their bodies. Schwartz admits that further research is required, and Moody would say the same about the near-death experience.
Are these experiences valid or just representative of our longing for something more? As Sir Thomas Browne once said, "the long habit of living indisposeth us to dying." While hope may inspire the research, to validate the experiences we'll need hard evidence. What does the hard evidence tell us about the religious experience? We now know quite a bit more than we did in James' day about how the mind works. In particular how it constructs reality and sometimes constructs it in ways that do not bear any connection to the objective world. As Richard Dawkins puts it, "the human brain runs first-class simulation software." Sometimes the simulations are helpful and accurate but not always. Two books in particular provide useful insights into the working of the mind and its ability to construct beliefs. In Why We Believe What We Believe, Andrew Newberg illustrates some of the common mistakes the brain makes and how to guard against them in your quest for accurate beliefs. In Sway, Ori Brafman illustrates just how prevalent and irresistible irrational behavior is (in fact that's the subtitle of the book: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior). To truly understand our beliefs and how to assess their accuracy you need a firm grounding in the science and psychology of the mind.
What do the research and evidence tell us so far about the near-death experience and mediumistic communication as evidence for an afterlife? Interestingly enough, many scientists, when confronted with the research that has been done, have to admit that nothing we know about how the universe works preclude the possibility of "survival." Of course, this doesn't mean that these experiences are valid but actuality has to be preceded by possibility. Only time will tell. Can these experiences be validated by James' criteria? Well, we've briefly addressed the reasonableness of them. Are they morally helpful? Some say yes since the possibility of survival would potentially solve a serious moral problem. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do those who do evil seem to prosper? Perhaps they do so here only to meet a different judgment in the hereafter. Still, the problem of evil is serious and we now turn to consider this.