RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE- A PHILOSOPHIC PERSPECTIVE

Dr. Peter Vardy Candle Conferences

Twitter: @puzzlevardy November 2014

ASSESSING PROBABILITY

• Some things clearly exist – oak trees, cars, cows, fish, the moon, chairs, etc.

• Others are more doubtful – for instance, up until recently, the Higgs Boson

• But for many things we have to make a JUDGEMENT based on probability and this can be subjective.

• How would you assess the probability of the things listed on the next slide on the basis that 100% certain means it is absolutely certain that something exists and 0% means that it is absolutely certain that it does not exist….

ASSESS PROBABILITY

• Assessing probability is subjective – it may depend partly on evidence (sonar throughout Loch Ness has disclosed no monster, there is no clear evidence of aliens) or argument (many claim experiences of life after death and many mathematicians argue that the laws of mathematics represent the fundamental structure of the universe and they exist independently of human beings).

• In the case of God, there are arguments for and against God’s existence and the majority of the world’s population believe in God- nevertheless opinion is divided…

ALIENS YETI FAIRIES LOCH NESS

MONSTER

LAWS OF

MATHSLIFE

AFTER

DEATH

GOD

PROFESSOR RICHARD SWINBURNE

• Swinburne argued that arguments to God from religious experience depend on an assessment of PRIOR PROBABILITY.

• He maintains that none of the arguments for the existence of God, taken by themselves, succeed but, take together, they provide a CUMULATIVE CASE which makes it reasonably plausible that God exists.

• NOTE that he lists the Cosmological, Moral, Design and Ontological arguments but does not take the Religious Experience argument into account in assessing probability.

• IF and only if (this is written as ‘iff’) there is a reasonable probability that God exists THEN AND ONLY THEN can the religious experience argument be persuasive..

SWINBURNE’S TWO PRINCIPLES

• Swinburne aims to turn the tables on the sceptic by treating religious experience as similar to ordinary experience.

• IF there is a reasonable probability God may exist, then it is right to rely on reports of religious experience because of two principles:

• THE PRINCIPLE OF CREDULITY – things are normally as they seem to be unless there is evidence to the contrary (for instance someone is on drugs or has delusions)

• THE PRINCIPLE OF TESTIMONY – We generally trust reports that people give of their experiences unless they are liars.

SWINBURNE’S 5 TYPES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

• PUBLIC EXPERIENCES• 1) A very unusual experience but one that anyone could see if they were

there – for instance Jesus walking on water or rising from the dead.

• 2) Experiences of an ordinary event which can be interpreted religiously –for instance the night sky or the experience of beauty

• PRIVATE EXPERIENCES• 3) Experiences describable in normal language – for instance Joseph’s

dream of a ladder running up to heaven or Mary being told she would have a son

• 4) Experiences not describable in normal language – for instance mystical experiences

• 5) The way that the whole of life is seen by a religious believer.

BEAUTY

• Most people say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is relative to culture.

• In Europe, thin women are generally regarded as the standard of beauty – in much of Africa unless a woman casts a decent shadow she is not beautiful. BEAUTY IS RELATIVE.

• But Plato and other philosophers (perhaps a minority today) deny this and claim that beauty is part of the essential fabric of the universe.

• In particular, KANT and ST. FRANCIS consider that beauty makes a demand on us.

KANT AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

• Religious Experience has been argued to be ground for belief in God. Kant rejected the possibility of experiences of God as he argued that no senses exist to experience God.

• HOWEVER Kant held that the appreciation of beauty is something through which we can experience absolute value which is linked to the very structure of the universe.

• In this respect, Kant is very Platonic..

KANT

• Most people associate Kant with rationality and morality –Kantian ethics appears on many AS and A2 examination board specifications.

• Yet Kant also wrote on AESTHETICS and devoted much time to discussions of the nature of beauty

• Kant rejected the idea that beauty was relative – like Plato, he considered that beauty was real and was something that we could recognize (or reject).

• Beauty makes a DEMAND on us, a demand to be recognized. Of course, some of us may refuse to recognize the presence of beauty, but that does not mean that it does not exist.

• Lack of proof is not the same as lack of truth!

PROUST

• Kant makes a distinction between the appearance of beauty to us and the recognition of the reality of beauty.

• He considers that this is grounded in judgement.

• Proust makes something of the same point in one of his novels…

PROUST

• In Proust’s ‘In search of Lost Time’ he has a young character called MARCEL who recognizes incredible beauty in the Hawthorn blossoms at a house in which is family are staying and, when he comes to leave, is in tears..

• “That year my family fixed the day of their return to Paris rather earlier than usual. On the morning of our departure [...] my mother, after searching everywhere for me, found me standing in tears on that steep little hillside close to Tansonville, bidding a long farewell to my hawthorns, clasping their sharp branches to my bosom [...] My mother was not at all moved by my tears, but she could not suppress a cry at the sight of my battered headgear and my ruined jacket. I did not, however, hear her. “Oh, my poor little hawthorns,” I was assuring I them through my sobs, “It isn’t you who want to make me unhappy, to force me to leave you. You, you’ve never done me any harm. So I shall always love you.” And drying my eyes, I promised them I would never copy the foolish example of other men, but that even in Paris, on fine spring days, instead of paying calls and listening to silly talk, I would set off for the country to see the first hawthorn-trees in bloom.”

HING

EXPERIENCES CAN HAVE A LIFE-LONG EFFECT

• Of course Marcel forgets his promise and he is preoccupied with all the chatter of a typical ‘man about town’ but his experience of the beauty of the Hawthorns never leaves him and he comes back to it as one of the most important moment of his life.

• It is the Hawthorns that set him on his path to becoming a writer and, in a sense, the whole of his life is formed by this experience…

• Of course, most of us will say ‘Nonsense – they are just flowers that are fertilized, die and produce seeds’. But perhaps there is more to it than that.

• St. Francis certainly thought so and the whole of his theology (and that of St. Bonaventure, the Master of the Franciscan order who succeeded Francis) is based on beauty and this pointing to God.

ETTY HILLESUM (1914 – 1943)

• Come to someone more modern – Etty Hillesum.

• She was an extraordinary young Jewish woman, She started out as an atheist and an anti-facist. Her parents and relatives were placed in the Westerbork camp and she worked there as a special assistant but, in 1943, she was turned into an inmate and eventually sent to Auchwitz where she died.

• She came to faith slowly and her diaries are really worth reading. She saw every day the hard faces of the Nazi guards and found it almost impossible to maintain hope in the face of so much evil.

• One contributory factor which enabled her to hold on and to believe in the goodness and mercy of God was the Jasmine flowers.

THE INADQUACY OF A PURELY RATIONALAPPROACH

• Etty took the first step towards what was to become a deep religious faith without being interested in religion at all.

• It started when she realized that for her, as a highly intellectual young woman, she engaged with the world primarily through the mind – and this was not adequate.

• The mind has its function in academic research and the like, but it cannot access the most profound truths about the nature of reality.

• Etty found that she needed to BE STILL, to LISTEN, to stop the mind thinking and being active all the time.

• She became aware of a profound ability to go on an inner journey and to find herself, as if at the bottom of a well…

• She found God in the deepest and best within her but, not only this, she found a profound inter-connectivity with every other person and the natural world.

• THOMAS MERTON was to find the same…

AN INWARD JOURNEYIn her diaries, Etty says that she found God by looking inwards. She

forced herself to find time each day to be still, to be silent and to start on

an inward journey…

Pope Benedict XVI, in his first general audience on Wednesday after

his resignation said:“...I am also thinking of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch girl of Jewish origin who

died in Auschwitz. At first far from God, she discovered him looking deep within

her and she wrote: “There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God.

Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and

God is buried beneath. Then he must be dug out again” (Diaries, 97). In her

disrupted, restless life she found God in the very midst of the great tragedy of

the 20th century: the Shoah. This frail and dissatisfied young woman,

transfigured by faith, became a woman full of love and inner peace who was able

to declare: “I live in constant intimacy with God"...”

—Benedict XVI, 13 February 2013"General Audience (Ash Wednesday) , 13 February 2013".[2]

• Etty Hillesum died in Auschwitz around 30th

November 1043. Her mother and father died on the way to the camp. Her brother died in a forced labour camp.

• The names of her guards and those who so cruelly ran Westerbrokare long since forgotten but Jasmine bushes grow round the museum dedicated to her memory and her diaries and faith have inspired hundreds of thousands of people.

• She saw beauty in the Jasmine in the middle of the most appalling atrocities – she found God in the every day world.

• She moved from Swinburne’s second category to his fifth…..

SWINBURNE’S 5 TYPES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

• PUBLIC EXPERIENCES• 1) A very unusual experience but one that anyone could see if they were

there – for instance Jesus walking on water or rising from the dead.• 2) Experiences of an ordinary event which can be interpreted religiously –

for instance the night sky or the experience of beauty (The Jasmine)

• PRIVATE EXPERIENCES• 3) Experiences describable in normal language – for instance Joseph’s

dream of a ladder running up to heaven or Mary being told she would have a son

• 4) Experiences not describable in normal language – for instance mystical experiences

• 5) The way that the whole of life is seen by a religious believer (the way Etty managed to see God is everything – even in the faces of her prison guards…

INDIRECT VOLITIONISM

• Kant recognized that there was no empirical proof that would enable one to confirm that beauty is something that makes a demand on us.

• Plato thought that reason and imagination could point to the possibility of a transcendent realm, but there was no proof.

• Socrates said ‘I cannot prove the immortality of the soul, but I am ready to stake my life on this if’

WILLIAM JAMES

• William James’ ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ is possibly the most influential book on such experiences this century.

• James gives a classic definition of religious experience:

• ’the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.’ (Varieties of Religious Experience. P. 34)

• James maintains that underneath all religious creeds and dogmas lies the primary experience of the Divine.

WILLIAM JAMES’ MARKS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

• James claims that there are four marks of religious experience. These experiences have/are:

1. A NOETIC QUALITY – they provide knowledge that is not available elsewhere,

2. INEFFABLE – they cannot be adequately described in normal language – hence the need for the language of paradox.

3. TRANSIENT – they last a short time,

4. THE INDIVIDUAL IS PASSIVE – the experience comes to the individual and is not sought and cannot be controlled.

• James analyses two types of conversion experience – one is a conversion from unbelief to belief but equally significant is a DEEPENING OF EXISTING BELIEF

WILLIAM JAMES CONTD.

• James then asks whether these experiences should be regarded as authoritative. His answer to this is in three parts:

1. Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.

2. No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.

3. They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon their understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness....’

ATTRACTION AND THE BAR OF IRON

• “It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being”. Varieties of Religious Experience p 4.

WILLIAM ALSTON

• Alston is a Protestant REFORMED EPISTEMOLOGIST – he starts from faith and seeks to argue, as a philosopher, why it is rational to accept that religious experiences occur to SUPPORT and DEEPEN faith, not to create faith.

• Alston rejects Kant’s position and asks why it should not be accepted that we have more than our five senses and that, therefore, there may be a sixth sense through which God can be experienced. This could fit well with William James’ Bar of Iron analogy.

• Alston accepts that prior beliefs will influence experience, but holds that religious experiences provide more information from a different perspective.

WILLIAM JAMES

• Both Kant and Proust are concerned with a sense of requirement or obligation in

• connection with the experience of the beautiful, and see this as the primary difference between

• the beautiful and the (merely) agreeable or pleasant. For Kant, the requirement is described as

• something outward-directed, toward other people, in that we only speak of the beautiful as such

• when we are not speaking merely for ourselves but are prepared to demand the agreement of all

• others. [15]

• “Many things may be charming and agreeable to him; no one cares about

• that. But if he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same

• liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone, and

• speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. That is why he says: The thing

• is beautiful, and does not count on other people to agree with his judgment of

• liking on the ground that he has repeatedly found them agreeing with him; rather

• he demands [fordern] that they agree. He reproaches them if they judge

• differently, and denies that they have taste, which he nevertheless demands of

• them, as something they ought to have.” (212-213)

• The language here couldn’t be more emphatic as to its imperatival quality, but insofar as the

• demand in question is a demand to others (however hypothetical) that they agree in liking the

• 3

• beautiful object, it raises the question of what the basis could be for such a demand, what there is

• in this demand that these others might be bound to respect. That is, what could it be that places

• this person in a position to issue such a demand? It cannot be simply his personal authority, a

• possibility which Kant in any case is at great pains to reject. Rather, it would seem that, as with

• the issuing of moral or prudential demands, the person is in a position to make such a demand

• only because he recognizes himself as subject to a requirement here, to be under an obligation.

• The source of the outward-directed requirement on others in these cases can only be his own

• acknowledgment of the obligations of the moral law or the maxims of practical reason. But in

• the case of someone prepared to require the agreement of all others in his liking or pleasure in

PROFESSOR NICHOLAS LASH

• Lash rejects the whole idea that God can be experienced directly in the way that James’ claims. To hold this, he says, is to make religion depend on a few privileged ‘pattern setters’.

• Instead Lash puts forward a different view – that God is experienced ONLY in the everyday events of life.

• In ‘Easter in Ordinary’, Nicholas Lash – possibly the foremost Catholic theologian in Britain in the last 20 years - fiercely attacks William James’ whole conception of Religious Experience.

NICHOLAS LASH

• Lash rejects the ‘dualistic cartesianism still lurking at the back of the Christian mind’ (in other words that ‘god’ and ‘the world’ are two distinct substances)

• God, he says, is ONLY experienced in the everyday (hence the title of his book ‘Easter in Ordinary’)

• He says………

• ‘... in action and discourse patterned by the frame of reference provided by the creed, we learn to find God in all life, all freedom, all creativity and vitality, and in each particular beauty, each unexpected attainment of relationship and community... To speak of “spirit” as “God” is to ascribe all creativity and conversion, all fresh life and freedom, to divinity.’

• Nicholas Lash. Easter in Ordinary P. 267

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AS A LEARNED INTERPRETATION OF THE WORLD

• If it is held that God cannot be experienced directly and, instead, that an individual learns to see the world in a religious way – then religious experience can no longer be held to underpin faith.

• Rather, religious experience then becomes a product of faith.

• A religious believer is educated or trained to see the world in terms of the religious ‘form of life’ (Wittgenstein) he or she occupies and in the categories endorsed by this form of life.