Video Transcript: Lesson 5

Welcome back. We're now going to shift our topic a little bit. It's still about  religion, but instead of the definition of religious belief, we want to go to the  definition of religious experience, because I'm going to defend the point of view  that is that it is experience which generates and confirms and justifies religious  belief. Before I do, I have a comment I want to make about the stuff that we've  covered so far. It's been a lot of new material, and probably for most of you, it's  shockingly new. It's not what you expect people when they sign up to talk about  philosophy of religion, don't expect to be talking about what it is that self existent thing that's that's new and and how the non divine depends on the divine and  with circles and all that. But you have an advantage here, because you can  always stop your video and rewind and look at something again and listen to it  again. In a classroom, if I'm going on, students often get stuck on a point to get  thinking about it, and then five more have gone by and they go, whoa, wait a  minute. So and I tell them, if that happens, raise your hand and tell me, and we'll go back. We'll go over it. Well, it's important that everybody get each point  you've got that in your own control, you take care of that. So that's why I felt  comfortable putting that much material into that, those few talks, but it's a lot, but it's important, and so is religious experience, and we come to that now, and this  is a term that is so widely misunderstood that it's in just desperate need to be  defined, and it's relatively easy to do it now that we have a definition of what a  religious belief is, our definition is still on the board. We've got that, but I'm going to take these little Venn diagrams off here and put up the definition of religious  experience. Now, most people think something religious experience has to be  something really weird. That is an experience is religious if and only if the  furniture flies around the room and stuff like that. That's not true. Here's one that I think works perfectly, and I've never heard anyone give a good objection to this religious experience. And experience is religious. Again, if and only if, it  generates a religious belief, or it confirms a religious belief, or it deepens a  religious belief. So it's an experience that does one of two things. It's an  experience in which someone comes to see a religious belief as true, that's  generating it. It's a belief that deepens the religious belief that is it deepens the  commitment to it deepens the understanding, or it confirms a religious belief.  And I mean confirm in the simplest sense there, namely, that some experiences  that a person has are what they would have expected if the religious belief were  true. And that brings them that, in that sense, it confirms the belief to them. So  it's relatively simple. It does depend on having a definition of religious belief, but  we already had that, so we don't need to spend a lot of time on this definition. As I said, nobody's given me any objection to that yet, so I have none to reply to.  Let's talk about types of them here. We can follow a very seminal and great  piece of work done by the philosopher and psychologist William James. He  published the varieties of religious experience in 1901. And James is very  helpful here I'm going to follow his breakdown of types of religious experience 

and then argue that he missed one, and I want to add it so that that's, that's  what's coming up here. So first of all, there are perceptual experiences. That is,  experiences of hearing a voice, seeing a vision, dreams, tactile sensation, one  that would use our senses, a type of experience that uses our senses. There are lots of reports of these. There are a lot of them are reported in the Bible, but  there are just 1000s of reports since the close of the New Testament canon.  People have a dream. People have a vision. People some people have felt  things, I mean, literally, tactilely, with proprioceptors, things like that. But there's  there. They have to do with perception. And it's not that the perception is  distorted. It's not it's not always the case that what happens is that all of a  sudden the world looks the way it does to a drunk through a raindrop on his  eyelash. It's not that everything goes distorted. It's just that there's a particular  perception that comes across as generating deepening or confirming religious  belief. There's a second type, which starts with normal perception, but sees the  divine in back of it. It's an encounter with something that's sometimes called the  numinous or the holy or the divine. You someone is looking at the ocean  crashing on the beach on a moonlit night, and suddenly can just sense behind  that, the divine on which it depends. It's not a specific perception, but it's a very  hair raising kind of experience that's been reported many times over centuries.  Yet another kind is where someone experiences the sense of God's presence  without actually seeing or feeling by touch anything. There's a, I know a person  who had such an experience, and she described it this way. She said, I was  sitting in my living room alone for the evening, and I, I got out the New  Testament and started to read, and suddenly the room was filled with what I  could I didn't know what to call it, but it was a presence, and it was powerful, and it scared me. People have asked me, was it threatening? No, it seemed very  loving, but it still it scared me. And the woman that went on, she was a very  strong atheist, convinced atheist, and she got up and threw the Bible across the  room and yelled, go away and leave me alone. I like my life the way it is. Well,  you have to wonder who she's speaking to at that point. But any rate, she said, I figured, no, no, I'm just getting spooked. I'll go back and I'll get a shower, come  back here and try this again. And so that's what she did. She said, after all this,  it's just a book, she picked it up and opened it up again, and she said it was 10  times more powerful. And suddenly what she was reading all looked true. She  was reading the Gospel of John. That kind of sense of a presence is very  common. There are 10s of 1000s of reports of this over the centuries. And one  evening, I was with three other Christians, and all three of them had had this  experience. They're sitting there comparing it something like a veil came down  over, yeah, back and forth. I never had that. I never had any of these that I'm  going to tell you about till we come to the last one, but, but it was really  interesting to hear them compare notes, and it's very clear they're talking about  same same experience. There's also another one that's more strange than any 

of the ones I've just covered, and that's a mystical union with the divine, where  all a different difference between oneself and the divine seems to disappear, and one seems to be taken into the divine and experience it in a way that cannot be  described. It's often called a mystical union. Those experiences are not as  common among Jews, Christians and Muslims, but they exist. That's the sort of  experience that Hinduism and Buddhism recommends, wants everyone to have. That's the way to see that this is true. That's what they you must have the  mystical experience of being at one with the Divine, seeing the truth of what  we're teaching. It for the case of Jews, Christians and Muslims, it seems there's  no difference between the person having the experience and God, but there  really still is. One's a creature and the other's not. So the the theistic Jewish  Christian, Muslim take on that experience is different from the one in Hinduism  and Buddhism. The Jew the theistic take is that the experience is partly  misleading, and the Hindu and Buddhist take is this is exactly the truth, and  everything else is mere illusion. It now James comments about these  experiences. He says, one may indeed be without them, but if you do have them at all strongly, the probability is you cannot help regarding them as genuine  perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no adverse  argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expel from your belief.  He admits. In other words, these experiences generate and justify belief. They  are so strong, so powerful, that no matter how somebody argues against them,  it's not going to dissuade you from believing. And indeed, there's something, it  seems to me, importantly right about that comment, and even the great skeptic  David Hume made similar comments. Now Hume says, If you experience  something and then someone argues, gives you a very clever argument to show you that that couldn't be what you experienced. You may not be able to answer  the clever argument, but you're not going to give up the experience. And he  said, That's you shouldn't. I mean, the rationalizations come and go. You know,  there's a famous example of this. Somewhere around the turn of the previous  century, a guy published an article proving that bumblebees can't fly. He their  wings were too small for the size of their bodies. They they vibrated too slowly.  And he went on and on, and wrote this up there's and actually it included all the  knowledge of aerodynamics and mathematics up to the present. And of course,  he did it, knowing that bumblebees really do fly, of course. But that's kind of the  point here. If you have a very well worked out theory with all the arguments and  all the laws and so on, and it comes to a conclusion that's opposite your  experience. Which are you going to believe your experience, Hume says that's  what you ought to believe, of course. So that's an important thing that James  has noticed here, if you do have these experiences, probably no argument is  going to talk you out of them. I think that's right, but there's also something I  think I'm going to find fault now something faulty with James categories,  because he's regarding religious experiences only as weird experiences. I 

perceive a voice, or I hear I see a vision, I hear a voice. I encounter the  numinous through normal perception. I sense a presence which is not part of  creation. I'm mystically drawn into union with the Divine. He's confined himself to the strange and the weird. And my objection to that is that there's another kind of religious experience which is indeed the most common. It's certainly the most  common among Jews, Christians and Muslims, and it's even pretty widely  spread in Hinduism and Buddhism. And this fifth type is the experience of seeing the truth about the divine by reading the Sacred Scripture of the religion, the  experience of seeing the truth about the divine from reading the Scripture the  sacred writings. That's especially true in Hinduism, and I'm sorry, it's especially  true in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In fact, Muslims have a name for Jews  and Christians. They say that they are people of the book, like themselves. They have a holy book, a book that's been inspired, been handed to them by God,  which is a record of God's gracious redemption, reconciliation with human  beings. And I think that very clearly that's the most common, commonly, the  most common reasons that people believe in a certain view of the Divine. They  read this, and they read the development, the application they read of those  sacred writings, and it just looks right. And I think that is another type of religious experience. And notice that there's nothing about this at all that's weird. There's  no mystical union with the Divine. There's no sense of a presence. There's no  vision or voices. You just read the Scripture and it looks right. And in the case of  Christians, I want to say that the proper way of describing this is to say that in  reading the Scripture, you hear God speak to you, not that you hear a voice with your ears. But by seeing this is true, it strikes you that God has put it there for  you to see is true and that you have experienced God speaking. The furniture  doesn't I said, the furniture doesn't have to fly around the room for an  experience to be religious. Neither does it have to include some kind of miracle.  I haven't mentioned miracles at all. They may or may not be religious  experiences. Some people see miracles and they neither confirm, neither  generate, confirm, nor deepen any religious belief. Other people see miracles  and it confirms their religious belief, or it deepens it. Other people may even be  converted by it, I don't know. But in Scripture, again, in Judaism and Christianity, especially, miracles, are things done by God to show a certain group of people  that God was at work there, establishing His covenant of redemption or putting  his seal of approval on someone as a prophet speaking for him. Miracles didn't  prove God's existence. They were confirming incidents to people already  believed in God. So David Hume's great treatise on natural religion, in which he  says the main reason people believe are miracle stories, and they're all  unbelievable. So all religion goes down the toilet, goes nowhere. That's not the  reason people believe. They'd have to already believe there was God, to believe that a miracle was caused by God. And since the topic, I've raised the topic of  miracles, I want to add this a miracle. Is not an event that has to break a natural 

law. It doesn't have to break laws. In fact, if the natural laws didn't continue in  existence, you wouldn't know that this was a weird result of a certain action  instead of the normal result of a certain action. Look, put it this way, if I hold this  book up, it doesn't fall to the ground. That's not a miracle, because the book isn't an unsupported object. If I take my hand away and God holds it there, it's still  not an unsupported object. So it doesn't break the law of gravity. Doesn't violate  it seems to me, most, if not all, the miracles reported in Scripture are like that.  Jesus turns water into wine yeast and grape juice. Does that all about by itself  all the time. It takes a lot longer. But why think? Why would anybody suppose  that the power of God couldn't speed up the process? That doesn't break any  laws either? There's more power there than there was before, and it's of just the  right kind to speed up the process. It doesn't seem mysterious to me. They're  just confirming actions. So the fifth type of religious experience that I want to  point to is the experience of seeing the scripture to be the truth from God, about  God, and in that sense, it's the most widely experienced, I don't know of any  true, truly believing Jew, Christian or Muslim that doesn't see the Scripture as  the word of God, and at times, hear God speaking to them through it. So it  initiates the belief, generates it. It also deepens it. It confirms. I know that's a  view that it's that it does not come out of the Quran itself bit it is widely held in  Islam. I heard an Imam. I've read an Imam's essay on this for the importance of  reading the Quran isn't just to memorize it and and use it like a formula to tell  you what to do. It's that you meet God. That's exactly right. That's That's what  Scriptures are for. So it's not the case that you should treat the Old Testament,  the New Testament, or the Quran as some kind of a scientific treatise. It's a  theory. It's got all the answers. No, it doesn't. It's not perfect. Does it have  discrepancies and mistakes? Sure. So what the question is, do you meet God?  Do you hear God speak? That's what it's there for. So that's the fifth kind of  religious experience, and that's the one I want to focus on from here on seeing  the scripture to be the truth about God from God that experience, and that's  what we'll come back to next session