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The Argument from Religious Experience

I
From A.E. Taylor: The Vindication of Religion

From God to God

... We have to consider the worth of the so-called “religious experience” as testimony to the reality of its own object, ...

That civilized men, in the presence of anything they take as divine, have [a] sense of being face to face with the “ineffable” is quite certain, and we can see by reading the cruder utterances of the uncivilized in the light of what has grown out of them that they too must have it. ... It is equally the same sense of being in the presence of the wholly “other-worldly” which finds expression in such an exclamation as the prophet's “Woe is me for I am unclean, for mine eyes have seen the Lord of hosts,” or St. Peter's “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” We should quite misunderstand such language if we read it as a confession of any special wrongdoing on the part of the prophet or apostle. It is the universal voice of the mutable and temporal brought face to face with the absolutely eternal; hence in Scripture even the sinless seraphim are said to “veil their faces” as they stand before their Lord. This, again, is why it has been the belief of all peoples that he who sees a god dies.

As nearly as we can express our attitude towards that which awakens this sense of being immediately in the presence of the “other-worldly” by any one word, we may say that it is the attitude of “worship”. ... The word worship, like all other words, is really hopelessly inadequate to express the attitude a man experiences in the presence of what he feels to be the “absolutely other” made directly manifest. ... Yet it is hard to believe that the most skeptical among us does not know the experience.

II

1 There is a species of experience in which the subject encounters the “absolutely eternal”.
2 This experience awakens in the subject the attitude of worship.
3 Therefore, this experience is the experience of God.
4 Furthermore, most people have had this experience.

III

The idea of religious experience is opposed by empiricism. Empiricism states that all our knowledge derives from sensory experience. If this were the case, then religious experience must be a species of sensory information.
Actually, Hume, in his characterization of empiricism, acknowledges that there are both external and internal senses.
From Hume: Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding
We may divide all the perceptions of the mind into two classes or species, which are distinguished by their different degrees of force and vivacity. The less forcible and lively are commonly denominated Thoughts or Ideas. The other species want a name in our language, and in most others; I suppose, because it was not requisite for any, but philosophical purposes, to rank them under a general term or appellation. Let us, therefore, use a little freedom, and call them Impressions; employing that word in a sense somewhat different from the usual. By the term impression, then, I mean all our more lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or love, or hate, or desire, or will. And impressions are distinguished from ideas, which are the less lively perceptions, of which we are conscious, when we reflect on any of those sensations or movements above mentioned.

.... In short, all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment: the mixture and composition of these belongs alone to the mind and will. Or, to express myself in philosophical language, all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones. [Hume: Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, Section II: Of the Origin of Ideas, 12, 13.]
The underlining is my own. Hume includes among the primary sources of information about the world the external senses (sight, hearing, touch, small and taste) but also the internal senses (emotions). In our period, with its emphasis on causal and mechanistic explanations, we would say that the emotions are mechanically induced in us by chemical and electrical reactions of our bodies. The claim would be, then, that what are called religious experiences are species of emotions, induced mechanically in us by chemical reactions of our bodies, in the same way that other emotions are produced.
To argue from religious experience to the existence of God, then, is to oppose empiricism. Those who accept the argument accept as its premise that a religious experience is a non-empirical occurrence. Another way of putting this is that it is an experience of the “supernatural”. In any case, it cannot be explained in mechanistic terms.
Most religious experiences are said to be mystical, that is involving the spiritual recognition of truths beyond normal understanding. This means that the recipient feels a sense of 'union' with the Divine. Many religious experiences are classified as 'prayer' experiences. This usually refers to experiences that have been brought about by meditation and reflection. The effects of religious experience can sometimes be permanent and life-changing. Such experiences are often classified as 'conversion' experiences.
The term numinous is used for the sense of being in the presence of an awesome power and yet distinct from it. Rudolph Otto in The Idea of the Holy (1936) used the term 'numinous' and argued that God must be a being totally separate from this world. However, it is replied that this contradicts the Christian belief in God as a personal being. Martin Buber argues that religious experience involves a discourse with God – and “I-Thou” relationship.
William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) gives four characteristics of mystical experience: (1) Ineffability — the experience cannot be described; (2) Noetic — experiences do provide insights but not through the intellect — rather through intuition and perception. The noetic quality refers to the knowledge gained through religious experience. (3) Transciency — the experiences last between a few minutes and two hours. (4) Passivity — one loses control to a more powerful being.

IV

Religious experiences have a sufficiently distinct character as experiences to warrant further study. The argument from religious experience takes the experience as a form of communication with something external to the experience, just as we interpret perception as a communication with an external material reality.
The real question, then, is why should we not accept religious experiences as a form of communication? Many people do. The atheist, agnostic or sceptic does not. They accept some form of empiricism, and argue that the religious experiences that people report are not produced by an external source.
There are various forms of this thesis. One example of this, and because of its quirky nature, perhaps not the best, is found in Freud's work Moses and Monotheism. In this work he argues that the development of monotheism (the belief in the existence of one God) was a response on the part of the Jewish people to the crime of having killed their prophet, Moses. The essence of this interpretation of religious experience is that it is routed in guilt. He argues that religion originated in the guilty feelings of sons who had murdered their father in a primordial power struggle. He claims that this is the origin of the concept of original sin, and he calls the conflict between fathers and sons in prehistory our “prehistoric tragedy”. He argues that elements of this prehistoric tragedy, after having been buried in human consciousness for ages, have a tendency to surface, and when they do so, they bring with them a religious revolution. Once such revolution was the adoption by the Jewish people of the idea of one god, which is monotheism. Freud claims that the development of Christianity is another manifestation of this psychological trauma, originating in the murder of a primordial father of the tribe. Here is a sample of his writing in this matter.
From Freud: Moses and Monotheism
The re-establishment of the primal father in his historic rights was a great step forward but it could not be the end. The other portions of the prehistoric tragedy insisted on being recognized. It is not easy to discern what set this process in motion. It appears as though a growing sense of guilt had taken hold of the Jewish people, or perhaps of the whole civilized world of the time, as a precursor to the return of the repressed material. Till at last one of these Jewish people found, in justifying a politco-religious agitator, the occasion for detaching a new — the Christian — religion from Judaism. Paul, a Roman Jew from Tarsus, seized upon this sense of guilt and traced it back correctly to its original source. He called this the 'original sin'. It was a crime against God and could only be atoned for by death. With the original sin death came into the world. In fact this crime deserving death had been the murder of the primal father who was later deified. But the murder was not remembered: instead of it there was a phantasy of its atonement, and for that reason this phantasy could be hailed as a message of redemption. A son of God had allowed himself to be killed without guilt and had thus taken on himself the guilt of all men. [Freud: Moses and Monotheism,Book III, part I (D).]
The key features of this passage are key words guilt and latency (although this term is not used specifically in this extract, it is implied, and is central to Freud's thesis). In other words, the religious experience is derived from forgotten guilt. Freud adds a special element to this by arguing that whole nations can repress the guilt of their ancestors and the re-emergence of this guilty sentiment can lead to a religious revolution — he explains the emergence of Christianity in this way!
There might by other versions of this psychologizing thesis — that is, interpretation of religious sentiment. In its broadest conception it asserts that religion is a reaction to suppressed or unrecognized emotions.

V

Another attack on religion is derived from sociology. This thesis maintains that religion has been used throughout the ages as a means to browbeat the lower classes and maintain social order. The theory of the divine right of kings would nicely fit this interpretation. If kings derive their temporal and spiritual authority from their being appointed by God, then any disobedience to a king is a disobedience to God. This certainly makes rebellion harder. [An example of the application theory of the divine right of kings in practice can be seen in Shakespeare's play, Richard II. (see (Richard II. Act IV, Scene I.) In this play the weak king, Richard II, is deposed by Henry Bolingbroke (also called Herford), who later becomes Henry IV. The Elizabethans interpreted the guilt of this deposition as the cause of the civil War of the Roses. In the play, Bishop Carlisle predicts dire consequences to England if they should depose Richard, who, for all his crimes, is still God's anointed deputy on Earth.]
Marxists maintain that there is conflict in society between the rulers and the ruled (in modern society this is a conflict between the bourgeoisie, who own capital, and the proletariat, who must labour, and hence “sell” themselves, in order to survive). It is in the advantage of the rulers to persuade the ruled to accept their authority. Making this authority seem to derive from a higher spiritual power is an effective way of making rebellion less likely. Marx says that religion is the opium of the people, by which he means that religion is used to make the people unconscious of their grievances in an unjust society.
From Marx: Contributions to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of right: Introduction
Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The overcoming of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand that they should abandon illusions about their conditions is the demand to give up conditions that require illusions. The critique of religion is therefore in embryo a critique of the vale of tears, whose halo is religion.

... Thus the critique of heaven turns into the critique of earth, the critique of religion into the critique of law and the critique of theology into the critique of politics.
In this passage Marx argues that religion is an illusion and that it masks from the people consciousness of their true situation as an oppressed class in a system that is unjust. Specifically, people are taught the illusion that the world “is a vale of tears” — or in other words, that suffering is inevitable. This makes people passive and docile — blaming life rather than the class situation.
This is an example of a general thesis that religion serves social ends, and that the religious sentiment is not a valid communication with the divine, but rather in this sense a false sentiment inculcated in us by society for the purposes of society. Marxists claim that this false religious sentiment serves the ends of the capitalist elite; however, it is possible to generalize this thesis, and rather than blame the capitalist class alone for the creation of a set of false beliefs, observe that the structure of society as a whole is preserved by this illusion.
Religion is an illusion that is fostered by society.

VI

Both the psychologists' and the sociologists' attacks on religion are applications of empiricism — that all our knowledge derives from experience. In our recent cultural history empiricism has gained an increasing hold on us — as science apparently explains more and more phenomena in terms of evidence that can be gathered through the senses, we feel less and less need in our intellectual understanding of the world for beliefs founded on a sense of the supernatural. We are coming to conclude that whatever remaining religious sentiments we have must be products of psychological or sociological forces at work in us, and we are increasingly disregarding them.
Therefore, a full defence of the religious argument for the existence of God can only stem from a complete treatment of the adequacy of empiricism as a theory of knowledge. This is not the place for that examination. Suffice it to say, that notwithstanding the considerable progress empiricism has made in our culture over the last one hundred or even three hundred years, the argument for it is not conclusively established. There is still a debate.
There is a defence of the argument from religious experience in the work of Kierkegaard.
The main point that Kierkegaard makes is that all proofs require an act of faith. The essence of Kierkegaard's approach to God is to deny any privileged status to a certain system. Science, for example, does not hold a privileged status of knowledge; even pure reason and logical deduction require justification. Every system of belief, or individual creed, requires a leap of faith. The whole essence of the attack on faith, and the demonstration that it is a superfluous psychological reaction, is based on according another system a special status.
In other words, empiricism or science are also expressions of faith. There is no absolute status that can be accorded to any one system.
Of course, this is a very wide issue and the defenders of empiricism, for example, Hume and Wittgenstein, do argue that empiricism expresses the only way in which men can think about their world.
But if it is the case that no one system has an ultimate primacy over any other, why should we place our faith in one system rather than another? All that the psychologists and sociologist succeed in doing is establishing that it is possible that religious experiences are the products of psychological or sociological forces; this mere possibility is not a proof that they actually are. Moreover, religious people have always known that their experiences are open to interpretation, and that they must question themselves. The claim to have had an experience of God is easily open to the contamination of ego-inflation. The visionary can congratulate himself on being closer to God and spiritually elevated above other men. We must be aware that this represents a temptation to believe that our experiences have a transcendent nature — the mere possibility of a religious experience exposes mankind to the dangers of self-importance. However, whilst this counsels caution in the interpretation of putative religious experiences, it does not entail that all religious experiences must be the false and deceptive products of psychological or sociological processes. That they might be does not prove that the actually are.

VII

A vision is a confirmation to the recipient of the existence of God. It is also a challenge to faith. It also is likely to convey a moral message. The message could be conveyed without a visual element - in other words a vision does not have to be visual. Indeed, without the appeal to conscience a vision lacks content. It would be simply a pretty picture.
When one has a vision this raises serious questions of doubt. Suppose you have a vision of the chariot of God telling you to go out and preach to the fallen that they must return to the love of God, then you may have some doubt about the validity of the vision. In modern terms, you might consider the possibility that you are a schizophrenic undergoing a breakdown. Visions focus the philosophical debate of the modern world - is there a God or not? If there is one, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that he communicates to you directly, through visions or promptings of the heart or whatever. If there isn't a God then visions are confused chemical happenings, and having them might be pleasant and interesting, or painful and disturbing.
Thus the issue of visions focuses the question of the problem of faith. Is God really speaking to you, and are you really the intended recipient of the vision? (It is just possible that you catch a glimpse of a vision that is strictly directed at someone else!)
The correlative of a religious experience, visionary or otherwise, is faith. Without the experience, there is no basis for the faith. Without the faith, there is no basis for the interpretation of the experience. Faith is really central to religion.
A vision is a sign, but you have to interpret it. From the religious point-of-view the interpretation of a sign comes down to purity. An impure soul will be confronted by an impure sign. To understand this we must consider the problem of projection, which is discussed in modern psychology. A projection occurs when you perceive externally a complex which is really internal in origin. People with muddy emotions tend to project. An example of projection occurs in paranoia. The paranoid person believes that the world is hostile - he thinks people are laughing at him for instance. The origin of the insecurity lies within, but he sees it as a fact about the world.
People who are insecure may well wish to hide their insecurity from themselves by imagining that they are very important. A vision is a confirmation of importance - in it God appears to be talking to you. Thus, conjuring one's own visions is a way of confirming your own importance and disguising from yourself your inferiority. Such a person is in an impure state of being. If you are pure and you have a vision, then this is a confirmation of your purity.
Purity is a central religious concept.

VIII
From The Bible: The story of Abraham and Isaac

Abraham was only granted a son, Isaac, at a very advanced age — his wife, Sarah, was well beyond the age of child-bearing, being some eighty years old.

The time came when God put Abraham to the test. 'Abraham', he called, and Abraham replied, 'Here I am.' God said, 'Take your son Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him as a sacrifce on one of the hills which I will show you.' So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his ass, and he took with him two of his men and his son Isaac; and he split the firewood for the sacrifice, and set out for the place of which God had spoken. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his men, 'Stay here with the ass while I and the boy go over there; and when we have worshipped we will come back to you.' So Abraham took the wood for the sacrifice and laid it on his son Isaac's shoulder; he himself carried the fire and the knife, and the two of them went on together. Isaac said to Abraham, 'Father', and he answered, 'What is it my son?' Isaac said, 'Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the young beast for the sacrifice?' Abraham answered, 'God will provide himself with a young beast for a sacrifice, my son.' And the two of them went on together and came to the place of which God had spoken. There Abraham built an altar and arranged the wood. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then he stretched out his hand and took the knife to kill his son; but the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, 'Abraham, Abraham.' He answered, 'Here I am.' The angel of the LORD said, 'Do not raise your hand against the boy; so not touch him. Now I know that you are a God-fearing man. You have not withheld from me your son, your only son.' Abraham looked up, and there he saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. So he went and took the ram and offered it as a sacrifice instead of his son. [Genesis, Book 22, verses 1 — 13, The New English Bible.]
This story exemplifies religious experience. Kierkegaard seeks to draw out its significance.
From Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling
In this extract Kierkegaard is discussing the nature of Abraham's faith.
I have no mind to take part in such mindless praise [of Abraham]. If faith cannot make it into a holy deed to murder one's own son, then let the judgment fall on Abraham as on anyone else. If one hasn't the courage to think this thought through, to say that Abraham was a murderer, then surely it is better to acquire that courage than to waste time on undeserved speeches in his praise. The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he was willing to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he was willing to sacrifice Isaac, but in this contradiction lies the very anguish that can indeed make one sleepless; and yet without that anguish Abraham is not the one he is. Or perhaps Abraham simply didn't do what the story says, perhaps in the context of his times what he did was something quite different. Then let's forget him for why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present? Or perhaps something to do with the ethical aspect slipped the speaker's mind, the fact that Isaac was the son. For if you remove faith as a nix and nought there remains only the raw fact that Abraham was willing to murder Isaac, which is easy enough for anyone without faith to imitate; without the faith, that is, which makes it hard.
In order to exemplify that a religious experience requires interpretation, and that without the faith that the voice of God was indeed the voice of God, instructing Abraham to murder (or sacrifice!) his own son, Kiekegaard offers different readings of the same story. These show us the alternative interpretations of Abraham's actions.
*
It was early morning. Abraham rose in good time, embraced Sarah, the bride of his old age, and Sarah kissed Isaac, who had taken her disgrace from her, was her pride and hope for all generations. So they rode on in silence and Abraham's eyes were fixed on the ground, until the fourth day when he looked up and saw afar the mountain in Moriah, but he turned his gaze once again to the ground. Silently he arranged the firewood, bound Isaac; silently he drew the knife. Then he saw the ram that God had appointed. He sacrificed that and returned home... From that day on, Abraham became old, he could not forget that God had demanded this of him. Isaac throve as before; but Abraham's eye was darkened, he saw joy no more.
*
It was early morning. Abraham rose in good time, kissed Sarah the young mother, and Sarah kissed Isaac, here delight, her joy for ever. And Abraham rode thoughtfully on. He thought of Hagar and of the son whom he had driven out into the desert. He climed the mountain in Moriah, he drew the knife.
*
It was a tranquil evening when Abraham rode out alone, and he rode to the mountain in Moriah; he threw himself on his face, he begged God to forgive his sin at having been willing to sacrifice Isaac, at the father's having forgotten his duty to his son. He rode more frequently on his lonely way, but found no peace. He could not comprehend that it was a sin to have been willing to sacrifice to God the best he owned; that for which he would many a time have gladly laid down his own life; and if it was a sin, if he had not so loved Isaac, then he could not understand that it could be forgiven; for what sin was more terrible?