Challenges to Religious Experience

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Challenges to religious experience tend to be centred around: 

1. the highly individualistic nature that protects from rational enquiry
2. the inconsistency with everyday life that means that questions about authenticity are raised
3. the challenge that scientific knowledge (how the mind works), more self-awareness (there is no coincidence that cultural perceptions of the divine prevail) and/or linguistic precision (is the term divine an appropriate word to use?) could provide an alternative explanation.

Caroline Franks Davis

Caroline Franks Davis categorises all challenges into three categories:

Description: these challenges involve misremembering, exaggerating, misusing terms or telling lies.

Subject: these challenges look at questions around the unreliability, impairment or moral vulnerability of the subject of religious experiences and identify determining factors such as physiological states (e.g. intoxication) and psychological states such as dreams, hypnosis, feelings of loneliness and fear.

Object: these challenges centre on the implausibility of the object of the experience existing. The divine and G-d are not the only conclusions that could be drawn and such conclusions can be reduced to psychological factors (e.g. sexual repression), sociological influences (projection of society) or anthropological needs (to access social or political power).

Caroline Franks Davis offers a critique of the three types of challenge.

Description: a religious experience cannot provide linguistic precision as it is describing something beyond normal experience; those with highly interpreted experiences are often willing to discuss them more objectively.

Subject: it is an assumption, and a tenuous logical step, to argue that just because psychological and physiological factors of the individual may be impaired means that the experience is therefore unreliable.

Object: many religious experiences do not claim be the only authority, but rather serve as cumulative evidence as part of a wider argument.

Cumulativity, Credulity + Testimony

Richard Swinburne proposed this cumulative argument that taken together, the vast evidence for religious experience suggest it is more ‘probable’ than ‘improbable’. Swinburne also presented the principles of credulity and testimony as integral parts of the argument from religious experience for the existence of G-d.

The principle of credulity argues that it is reasonable to believe that the world is probably as we experience it to be, unless there are special reasons for thinking the experience is false.Only four factors might cast doubt on the validity of the event

1. if the person was unreliable
2. if similar perceptions are shown to be false
3. if there is strong evidence that the object or person did not exist
4. if the event can be accounted for in other ways

The principle of testimony suggests that in the absence of special considerations, it is reasonable to believe that the experiences of others are probably as they report them. Together, these principles point to the probability that G-d exists.

QUOTE BANK!!

Franks Davis: “Religious experiences are not the sort of thing which can easily be produced for observation in a controlled setting.”

Franks Davis: “One must not assume some undetected (and probably undetectable) pathology in an otherwise healthy individual...”

Franks Davis: “These principles of credulity and testimony are ultimate principles of rationality which ally to all types of perceptual experience...”

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