Is religious experience realistic?
David Brown
Research Summary
Religious experience – communication with God, or spiritual realisation of ultimate reality – is normally held to be an unusual form of experience. However, does it share features in common with ordinary experience of the world? If so, religious experience might be viewed as realistic, in the senses of being experience of a real object and telling a credible story. Often, people object to the idea that religious experience can be compared to ordinary experience. They argue that its object is a highly unusual one, that it takes place in highly unusual circumstances and that unlike ordinary experience, it varies substantially from religion to religion. The writer responds that religious experience, like ordinary experience, can be predictable; that not all ordinary experiences are straightforward; that moral or aesthetic circumstances can be just as unusual as religious experience circumstances; and that religious traditions may only be incompatible on the surface. The material will be of direct use in teaching about religious experience on A level philosophy and ethics courses.
Researcher
David Brown
Research Institution
University of St Andrews
What is this about?
- Philosophically speaking, is religious experience realistic?
- The question can be interpreted in two ways: is the object of religious experience (usually God) a real object? Are religious experience accounts credible?
- The writer’s approach is to show how religious experience may not be so different from ordinary experience as is often assumed. Like ordinary experience, it may be predictable. Ordinary experience can be just as complex as religious experience. Ordinary experience can depend just as much on the emotions.
- Religious traditions describe religious experiences in different ways, but this is also true of how different cultures and languages describe ordinary experience.
What was done?
This is a scholarly philosophical essay, reviewing ideas on religious experience and whether it can be compared to ordinary experience and drawing original, interesting conclusions.
Main findings and outputs
- Religious experience may be predictable in similar ways to ordinary experience: just as we might predict when we might meet people, so it can be predicted that beautiful landscape or music may suggest divine presence.
- Experiences of God’s love are held to be unusual, but ordinary experience is less than straightforward (a tomato is red only in a certain light, its is hard to explain how we experience that a person is intelligent, etc.). Experiencing all of God’s divinity is as problematical as experiencing a person’s entire personality.
- Religious experience is argued to be impossible without conditions such as joy, awe, orwonder. But the emotions are also involved in aesthetic or moral experience (e.g. appreciation of music, or loving care setting a good example to people).
- It is often argued that whilst it is easy to communicate about ordinary experiences with a range of others, communication about religious experiences is different, because of religious conflicts.
- However, each could be seen as describing experiences which are true within its own ways of describing the truth (as not all languages distinguish between colours in the same way).
- This would not mean that religions cannot communicate and interact. Hindu polytheism seems far from Judaism, for instance, but the quantity of gods could be argued to stop any one from being dominant, guarding against idolatry.
- The argument is not that differences between religions might dissolve, but that the distinction between ordinary perception and religious complexity is simplistic.
Relevance to RE
- The essay has use as a resource for teaching about religious experience in A level philosophy and ethics. If possible, teachers should read it first (it is clear and reasonably concise); if not, use could be made of the main findings and outputs above, perhaps as a powerpoint presentation.
- An outline lesson plan follows. Students might first be asked to mind-map differences and similarities between ordinary experience and religious experience (or, one or more groups to mind-map differences, others similarities). After discussion of the mind-maps the teacher could then introduce the article and talk through the main findings and outputs. Students could then go back into their groups to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the main findings and outputs (or perhaps each group could be given one of the points to work on). They could next feed back their findings. Finally all could offer a personal conclusion, giving the argument of the essay a mark out of 10 and providiing reasons for their marks.
Generalisability and potential limitations
The ideas and arguments developed in the essay are applicable to any discussiion of religious experience, because the writer looks across broad issues and into various religious traditions.
Find out more
Realism and religious experience, Religious Studies 51, 497–512 (published online 12 October 2014), doi:10.1017/S0034412514000389