Religious Experience Essay

A spiritual pick up is an encounter with immortal when you exist original reality and it you screw non w baleful it to happen. A address sacred insure refers to effects where immortal reveals him/herself like a shot to the nearlybody having the reassure to it. The experience is non chose or willed by the soulfulness the person experiences or observes graven image in roughly way. An substantiative spiritual experience refers to experiences, thoughts or feelings almost deity that ar prompted by situations in everyday life. For lawsuit observing the stars in the sky and having thoughts ab step to the fore the greatness of graven image the Creator. Ineffable experiences argon beyond homosexual powers and abilities to fully describe and communi cast offe. Religious experiences screwing be experienced in umpteen forms such as visions, regions, numinous experiences, regeneration experiences, or corporate ghostly experiences.The inducive argument is all bas ed upon experience. inducive arguments suggest that if an entity is experienced, it regard ass that it must exist. It implies that matinee idol is the sort of macrocosm that is possible to be experienced and that concourse tail assembly postulate to vex experienced beau ideal directly. ace whitethorn conclude from this that God exists.Richard Swinburne suggested that on that point are two different types of phantasmal experience Public and Private. An ordinary experience comes under public and is an experience where a person interprets a natural suit as having a spiritual import (for example the beauty of nature). An extraordinary experience appears to violate normal mind of the whole works of nature (e.g. Jesus turning water supply into wine). There are three types of surreptitious experiences which includes experiences such as dreams, non describable experiences where God is revealed.These experiences go beyond world powers of description. The hold up type incl udes things like looking at the world from a ghostly perspective. Swinburnes pattern of credulity maintains that it is a rationale of rationality that in the absence of e picky(a) consideration, if it seems to a person that X is present, wherefore X probably is present be crusade what whizz seems to perceive is probably so. The principle of testimonial maintains that in the absence of special considerations, it is middling to weigh that the experiences of others are probably as they report them.There is turn up of ghostly experiences in the Bible, such as capital of Minnesotas conversion in Acts 91-3. Saul sees a big aerial which no wholeness else experiences, followed by the original speaking to Saul where Saul dialog back (other people likewise collect the lord). Saul so goes blind and the manu particularuring business speaks to Ananias in a vision who then restores Sauls sight. This experience was verbalise to change Sauls life which cave ins it the account mo re accurate because wherefore would he lie? all the same somewhat may critique that the person who wrote it (Luke) was non present at the duration of the event so may not deal all the correct details. Furthermore some may say that the experience could lease that been an epileptic fit, which would explain the glitter Saul axiom. However there was no evidence that he had an illness could cause side effects like phantasms, visions or delusions. Sauls conversion also appears later(prenominal) in the bible in Acts 22 and 26 which may die its validity because each account has more or less different details.William throng was interested in the conversion experiences because he guessd that they were the inspiration underside institutions like the church, and gestated we would not bring the church without them. He believed that spiritual experiences lead to injustice of anxiety, gaining of new knowledge and a changed understanding of the world. One of pack achievement s was to identify quadruplet characteristics of religious experiences, which were particularly prominent in mystical religious experiences of God. This includes ineffable which is a direct experience of God, which goes beyond human powers of description. Another characteristic is that they are noetic, which refers to the accompaniment that mystics receive knowledge of God that is not otherwise available. An addition characteristic is pass(a) which means the affects are not imperishable but it they are long immutable and bath change a person. The last(a) characteristic is passive which means that the person is not in control of it calamity but is something, which happens to the mystic and is from God. James saw this as evidence against arguments claiming that a religious experience can be explained by saying a person willed it.James suggested that the only possible sign that religious experiences are from God is a heavy disposition. So he would not ask you to do anything bad . For example, Michael Abrams believed that he hear a voice intercourse him to sweep away George Harrison in 2001, when in actual fact he was just mentally ill because he had come off his medication. The voice he heard was not from God because they encouraged him to do bad things. James believed that religious experiences only present laterality for the person who experiences it, but they may have great meaning. James did not deny the reality of religious experiences, but he examined the similarities between them and other experiences such as dreams and hallucinations, or subconscious ideas.He suggested that on their own they do not edge Gods existence, they do suggest the existence of something large. James makes it rather clear in his book Varieties of Religious Experience that religious experience is central to religious belief. However James leaves open the possibility of Gods existence. Furthermore, many psychologists claim that religious experiences only happen to peopl e who already have at least some religious belief. However there are some cases that have no union to any religious tradition. James argued that religious experiences are explainable psychologically, however J.L. Mackie argued that if this is the case, they have no authority even for the person who experienced it.Immanuel Kant rejected all claims of religious experiences. He thought that because God is not an object in space and time and we only have five senses, which desex us to only sense what is in space and time. This makes it impossible for us to experience God. The example of the blind girl can be employ to explain Kants suggestion. For instance, the blind women in the picture can experience her daughters blur because she is touching it, but she cannot experience the rainbow, which is loafer her because she has no sight so it is out of her senses.Richard Swinburne suggests two ways, which can be used to asses claims about religious experiences. The first one is the princ iple of credulity. This argues that other things being equal, we have good reason to believe what a person tells us is correct. On the whole we normally believe would believe a simple statement telling us that they saw a cat crossing the road, even if we had not witnessed it ourselves. The principle of Credulity states that we ought to believe that things are as they seem to be unless and until we have evidence that they are mis taken (Swinburne Is there God). He suggests reasons why we may not believe evidence, such as there may be evidence that an event was not caused by God. He gives the example of an set of identical twins you see one twin but later discover it was actually the other twin.Swinburne then goes on to suggest the principle of testimony, which argues that it is reasonable to believe what someone tells you. For example there would normally be no reason why you would not believe what your good friend says. However if that person is a known joker or liar, this may be a special consideration as this knowledge may undermine any instance to believe what your friend tells you. However, not everyone has religious experiences, which you mean that one could say that this may be a reason to say that experiences are caused by something else. If someone is dying of crave they may see a hallucination of an oases but this does not mean that it is real.If religious experiences are similar to this, they do not reveal god. Swinburne suggests that it is the already religious people who are more likely to have a religious experience just because they have a better occur of recognising a religious experience by using their beliefs. This means that attention can be drawn towards prior beliefs. Swinburne argues that, taken with other evidence of Gods existence, religious experiences make it likely that God exists. However Anthony Flew gave the example of 10 porous buckets they will never be as good as one non-broken one. Flew suggests that a series of weak argum ents does not make a strong one.The Vicious circle Challenge says that religious experience depends on the prior assumptions on those involved. This implies that instead of religious experience being a bum for faith, they are more likely to be generated by existing faith commitments. So therefore they do not see to it faith. The Conflicting Claims Challenge argues that if one morality relies on their religious experiences to prove their godliness then each can righteousness can claim the same. It implies that each godliness is equally true, as David Hume put it that it is a complete triumph for the sceptic.