Religious Experience as an Argument for the Existence of God

Overview

Recall questions on Swinburne's principles of credulity and testimony, Hick's experiencing-as, Persinger's temporal lobe research, Dawkins' case against the argument, and the objections from conflicting traditions, divine transcendence and the limits of language.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   How is religious experience turned into an argument for God?

   Model answer

   Inductively. The argument treats the very large number of reports, across cultures and centuries, as a fact requiring explanation, and claims that the simplest explanation is that at least some are what they seem to be. It moves from how things appear to those who have them, through the general reliability of perception and testimony, to a conclusion about what exists. Being inductive it aims at probability, so a rival explanation weakens rather than destroys it.

2. 2

   Explain Swinburne's principle of credulity.

   Model answer

   His claim that in the absence of special reasons for doubt, if it seems to someone that something is present, then probably it is. He argues this is not a rule invented to help religion but the principle on which all perception rests: if we demanded independent proof before trusting appearances, we could never establish anything, because the proof would itself have to be trusted. Applied here, the burden falls on the sceptic to give a reason for setting a particular experience aside.

3. 3

   What is the principle of testimony, and why does Swinburne need it?

   Model answer

   It is the parallel claim that, failing special reasons for doubt, other people's reports of their experiences should be taken to be roughly as described. Swinburne needs it because most people have not had a religious experience themselves, so the argument depends on the reports of those who have. He again argues this is ordinary practice, since almost everything we believe about history, geography and science rests on testimony we have never checked.

4. 4

   When does Swinburne allow that an experience should not be trusted?

   Model answer

   When the subject is known to be unreliable, whether through drink, drugs or a habit of invention; when the conditions are ones in which people are known to go wrong; when there is strong independent evidence that the apparent object does not exist; and when the experience is demonstrably produced by something other than what it appeared to be of. He argues that none of these defeats religious experience across the board, since whether God exists is precisely the point in dispute.

5. 5

   What does J Hick mean by experiencing-as, and what follows from it?

   Model answer

   Hick argues that all experience involves interpretation: we do not receive bare data and add meaning afterwards, we see something as something. A religious experience is therefore not a raw encounter later dressed in doctrine, since the believer's framework is part of the seeing itself. Two consequences follow: the universe is religiously ambiguous, so the same events can be experienced naturalistically or religiously without either party being irrational, and experience can rationally ground faith for the person who has it without compelling anyone else.

6. 6

   How does Hick handle the fact that different traditions report different things?

   Model answer

   He argues that the transcendent as it is in itself lies beyond human categories, and that each tradition meets it through its own cultural and conceptual lens, so the personal deities and impersonal absolutes are authentic but partial responses to one reality rather than rival descriptions of it. This turns diversity from an embarrassment into exactly what one should expect. Critics reply that it rescues the traditions only by contradicting what each of them says about itself.

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