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Religious experience

Philosophy is interested in religious experience as a possible source of knowledge of the existence, nature and doings of God. The experiences in question seem to their possessors to be direct, perceptual awarenesses of God.

But they may be wrong about this, and many philosophers think they are. Many philosophers think that such experiences are never what they seem, and that no one has a veridical experience of the presence and/or activity of God. The main philosophical reason for supposing that such experiences are in fact sometimes veridical is a principle according to which any apparent experience of something is to be regarded as veridical unless we have sufficient reasons to the contrary. Experiences are innocent until proven guilty. If we do not accept that principle,

we will never have sufficient grounds for taking any experience to be veridical - religious, sensory or whatever.

There are critics who think that we do have sufficient reasons to the contrary in the case of religious experience For one thing, we do not have the same capacity for intersubjective checks of religious experiences that we have with sense perceptions. But to this it can be replied that we should not suppose that sense perception represents the only way in which we can achieve genuine cognitive contact with ive reality. For another thing, it is widely supposed that religious experience can be adequately explained by psychological and social factors,

without bringing God into the picture. But even if this-worldly factors are the only immediate causes of the experience, God could figure as a cause farther back in the causal chain. Finally, the disagreements between alleged experiences of God, especially across different religions, provide a reason for doubting the deliverances of religious experience. But it is possible for a number of people to be genuinely experiencing the same thing, even though they disagree as to what it is like. This is a common occurrence in sense perception.

1 The experience of God

The term ‘religious experience’ is properly used for any experiences one has in connection with one’s religious life, including a sense of guilt or release, joys, fears, longings, a sense of gratitude, and so on. But the usual philosophical concern with religious experience has a much narrower focus. It is concerned with experiences taken by the subject to be an experiential awareness of God. To cast the net as widely as possible, and to avoid restricting the discussion to one kind of religion, such as ‘theistic’ religions that think of God in personal terms, let us understand ‘God’ here to range over any supreme reality, however construed.

Here is an anonymous report of such an experience:

All at once I… felt the presence of God - I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it - as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether… Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart; that is, I felt that God had withdrawn the communion which he had granted… I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai could have had a more intimate communication with God. I think it well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form, color, odor, nor taste; moreover, that the feeling of his presence was accompanied by no determinate localization… But the more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse, the more I feel the

impossibility of describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him.

(James [1902] 1982: 68)

This report is typical in several respects. First, the awareness of God is experiential, as contrasted with abstract thought (thinking of God, reasoning about God, or asking questions about God). Like sense experience it seems to involve a presentation of the . The subject takes God to have been present, to have been given to the

subject’s awareness, in something like the way in which a tree is presented to one’s awareness when one sees it.

Second, the experience is direct. The subject feels immediately aware of God, rather than being aware of God through being aware of something else. That is, it seems to be analogous to directly seeing another human being in front of you, rather than seeing that person on television, where one is aware of the person through being aware of something else, in this case the television screen. People also report indirect experiences of God:

There was a mysterious presence in nature and sometimes met within the communion and in praying by oneself, which was my greatest delight, especially when as happened from time to time, nature became lit up Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998) from inside with something that came from beyond itself (or seemed to do so to me).

(Beardsworth 1977: 19; original italics)

Third, the experience is completely lacking in sensory content. It is a wholly non-sensory presentation of God. But there are also experiences of God that involve seeing or hearing something:

I awoke and looking out of my window saw what I took to be a luminous star which gradually came nearer, and appeared as a soft slightly blurred white light. I was seized with violent trembling, but had no fear. I knew that what I felt was great awe. This was followed by a sense of overwhelming love coming to me, and going out from me, then of great compassion from this Outer Presence.

(Beardsworth 1977: 30)

Many find it incredible that a non-sensory experience should involve a presentation of something, but this seems a baseless prejudice. Why should we suppose that our modes of sensory receptivity constitute the only possible vehicles of an experiential awareness of external reality?

Finally, it is a focal experience, one in which the awareness of God attracts one’s attention so strongly as to blot out all else for the moment. But there are also lower-intensity experiences that persist over long periods of time as a background to everyday experiences, as in this report from James: ‘God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere. He is closer to me than my own breath. In him literally I live and move and have my being’ ([1902]

1982: 71-2).

The present discussion will be limited to direct, non-sensory, focal experiences, since they constitute the most distinctive and striking claims to be experientially aware of God.

A great deal of the literature on this subject concentrates on mystical experience, understood as a state in which all distinctions are transcended, even the distinction between subject and . The person is aware of a seamless unity. Such experience falls under our general category, for it is typically taken by the mystic to be a direct awareness of supreme reality. But since experiences like this pose special problems of their own, the present entry will focus primarily on more moderate cases like the ones cited, in which subjects do not seem to lose their own

identity. In spite of this, the term ‘mystical experience’ will be used as a convenient way of designating what is taken by the subject to be a direct experience of God. Since these subjects suppose themselves to be aware of God in a way analogous to that in which one is aware of things in the physical environment by sense perception, the

term ‘mystical perception’ will be used.

2 Mystical experience as a basis for beliefs about God

The chief philosophical interest in mystical experience concerns the possibility that it serves as a source of knowledge, or justified belief, about God. Those who have such experiences typically take themselves to have learned something from them, as well as receiving additional confirmation of beliefs already held. Usually they suppose only a limited set of beliefs to be justified in this way. These include the belief that God exists, certain beliefs about his nature (for example, that he is loving or powerful), and beliefs about what God is doing vis-à-vis

the subject at the moment - comforting, condemning, forgiving, inspiring, communicating a certain message. It is rare, at best, for someone to think it possible to come to know that God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt or that he is three persons in one substance just from an experience of God (unless that is something that the subject takes God to be saying). But the beliefs that are derived from such experiences typically play a central role in one’s religious life. In another anonymous report, the writer, after speaking of an experience in which he ‘felt

the perfect unison of my spirit with His’ goes on to say: ‘My highest faith in God and truest idea of him were then born in me…. My most assuring evidence of his existence is deeply rooted in that hour of vision, in the memory ofthat supreme experience’ (James [1902] 1982: 66-7).