Roy Clouser on Religious Experience

What Is Religious Experience?

WHEN I ASKED YOU TO TALK WITH ME ABOUT HOW ANY EDUCATED person in this scientific age could still believe in God, I expected you to start our discussions with arguments for God's existence. Instead, you start by talking about religious experience! Does that mean you're kissing off the proofs for God's existence? Are you conceding right away that none of them work?

Yes. I'm skipping the arguments for God's existence; first, because in my opinion none of them succeed. Let me hasten to add that I don't believe their failure matters much. I totally reject the view that belief in God is justified only if proven and that otherwise it's blind faith. Proving is actually an inferior way of coming to know something, a way we resort to when we can't directly experience what we want to know. That's why proving is standard procedure in philosophy and the sciences. Both seek information we can't get directly from experience. So we make hypotheses (educated guesses) and then construct arguments and weigh evidence to prove or disprove them. But genuine belief in God doesn't regard God as a hypothesis, and it doesn't need proof. It's a belief that is both acquired and justified by experience.

The second reason for skipping the arguments is that you asked me why I believe God is real and is the sort of being the Scriptures say God is. If I am to answer candidly, my answer has to be a confession - an admission - of my real reasons. If instead invent arguments intended to make that belief look good to you, they won't be my reasons for believing, since I don't believe in God because of any arguments (and I don't know of anyone else who does either). So that's why I want to start our discussions by talking about religious experience.

Fair enough. I did ask how you can believe something that sounds like a convenient fairy tale. But to be as candid with you as you want to be with me, I have to say that I'm at least as skeptical about an appeal to religious experience as I am about the proofs of God's existence. I've never had any such experience nor do I know anyone who has.

Anyway, most of the claims I've heard about such experiences sound a lot like the reports of people who claim to have been kidnapped by aliens from outer space! So even if belief in God is "acquired" by some sort of experience, I don't believe it can be justified by it!

Perhaps no other topic is in as much need of having its name explained as is "religious experience." So before we go any further, I need to clarify the meaning of that expression. That will take some doing, but when the dust clears I hope to have shown you that it does not refer only - or even primarily - to weird events such as mystical states of consciousness, visions or miracles; an experience isn't religious only if the furniture flies around the room.

Of the two terms in the expression, the meaning of "experience" is easier and can be cleared up pretty quickly. I'm going to use it in the broadest possible sense: An experience is being aware of anything whatever, regardless of the nature of what is experienced or the sort of capacity by which we become aware of it. The content of experience, then, is everything of which we are in any way aware; acts of experiencing are all the ways we are aware of anything. Thus the expression "religious experience" refers to any experience by which a religious belief is acquired, deepened, or confirmed.¹ For the rest of these discus­sions, we can concentrate on the experience by which religious belief is acquired, since that is what you specifically asked about. So from now on, I'll only be speaking about experiences that generate belief in God rather than those that deepen or confirm it.

Hold on a moment. You seem to be switching back and forth just now between talking about religious belief in general and belief in God in particular. Which one are we going to discuss?

The account I'm going to give will first be general and then focus on belief in God in particular. To be clear about what religious experience is, we have to inquire about its role in the acquisition of any religious belief whatever. Once that is clear, we'll be in a position to examine its role about belief in God specifically. After that, we can go on to discuss belief in God in comparison to other religious beliefs.

OK, I think I understand what you're up to. We start by taking experience in the broadest sense, concentrating on experiences that generate religious beliefs. Then we examine how such experience constitutes the basis for belief in God.

But doesn't that mean we have to be able to tell whether a belief is or is not a religious belief to be able to tell whether or not an experience is?

Exactly! As I said, clarifying the term "experience" is the easy part. It's a lot harder to differentiate religious beliefs from nonreligious beliefs. But we must do exactly that if the meaning of the expression "religious experience" is to be clear enough to guide the rest of our discussions. So our first task has to be to arrive at a definition of religious belief. I wish this could be defined as easily as "experience." But there is a lot of confusion about religious belief, and some of the most deeply entrenched popular ideas about it are the most misleading. For that reason, we need to talk about why some of these widely accepted ideas fail, and try to come up with a definition that successfully covers all religious beliefs. This means tackling some of the most difficult issues first.

If you can give a definition of religious belief that covers all religious belief, it will be worth the effort. But why is that hard? And what's so bad about the popular ideas?

Before we tackle the popular ideas of religious belief, let's take a moment to recall what's involved in arriving at the sort of definition we need. We have to identify the list of features that are true of all religious beliefs but are true of only religious beliefs. This is the hardest sort of definition to get, so often in philosophy and science we have to settle for other ways of delimiting what we mean by a term. Nevertheless, this type of definition would be the most helpful to our subject if we could get it - and I think we can!

Any attempt to form this sort of definition must overcome two main difficulties. On the one hand, if it fails to cover certain beliefs that are obviously religious, then it is too narrow; on the other hand, if it covers all religious beliefs but also applies to clearly nonreligious ones, then it's too broad. These difficulties can often baffle our best attempts. But even when such a definition can be formulated, there are still other difficulties that plague its acceptance. Since it can be disturbing to pare back the characteristics of a type of thing till we're left with only the features that are shared by all of them and only by them, such definitions are often both surprising and disappointing. And they are frequently rejected for those reasons.

Take the case of defining what counts as a tree. Everyone easily recognizes trees, of course, and yet it is hard to state just what features are shared by all trees but are shared only by trees. The definition can be disappointing because so much that is obvious or valuable about trees is not included - their beautiful foliage, shade, or uses as wood, for example. Likewise, the definition may be surprising. Did you know that there are mature trees only a foot tall? So we need to recognize at the outset that this sort of defining often has such results. In fact the more initial confusion there is about the definition of a type of things, the more certain it is that formulating a definition to clear up the confusion will have such results.

Consider an actual example of this. Many years ago whales were classified as fish. Their bodies were shaped like fishes' bodies, they lived their lives in the oceans, and they swam. But as time went on, they were reclassified as mammals. There were good reasons for this. Whales have four-chambered hearts and are warm-blooded; lacking gills, they breathe air with lungs; and they bear their young alive and nurse them. So despite their very fishlike tails and fins, despite the fact that they can't live on land but spend their lives swimming in oceans, whales are defined as mammals. Perhaps this redefinition was disappointing or surprising to some people when it was first put forward since it means that whales have more in common with humans than they do with fish! But it was not wrong for that reason.

I get it. You're about to drop a definition on me that's disappointing and surprising, so you're saying in advance that it doesn't matter.

Exactly right! The task of identifying the defining features of religious belief is no different in these respects from defining trees or whales. The process must inevitably leave out many of the most prominent and treasured features of each religious belief in order to state what is common to all of them - hence the disappointment. At the same time, the only definition I know that really covers every sort of religious belief also results in many beliefs' turning out to be religious that are not popularly thought to be - hence the surprise. Yet neither the surprise nor the disappointment is, all by itself, a good objection to this definition. The issue is only whether the essential core of what is being defined has been identified correctly. So please remember that we're not now trying to define religion as a whole, nor are we yet addressing the question of how to tell which religious belief is true. For now, we are only trying to distinguish religious belief from nonreligious belief.

OK, I've buckled my seat belt. So what exactly is wrong with popular ideas about religious belief?

One of the most widespread ideas about religious belief takes it to be the same as belief in God or a supreme being. Many people even suspect that all religions actually believe in the same supreme being under different names. This idea seems plausible in Europe and North America because the three most widely held religions on that continents - Juda­ism, Christianity, and Islam - all believe in one God who created the universe (though they have different beliefs about how to stand in the right relation to God to obtain his favor). In other words, this definition would be quite right if these three were the only possible religions. But that is far from being the case.

Many religions are polytheistic, which means that they believe in many gods and goddesses. Some of these religions do not recognize anyone god as supreme. If belief in a supreme being were the right definition of all religious belief, we would have to say that such polytheisms are not religious beliefs at all. Still, other religions are literally atheistic and do not believe in any gods. Brahmin Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism are examples.² According to Brahmin theology, the gods of popular Hindu worship and practice are but mythological ways of thinking that accommodate religious truth to the level of the average person. The divine, called Brahman-Atman, is not a person or even an individual being. It is rather being-itself, which alone is real, in contrast to our everyday world which is an illusion. Teachings such as these also show that religious belief cannot be defined as belief in a supreme being. If it were, Brahmin Hinduism, Theravada Buddhism and polytheisms with no supreme god would all be ruled out as religious beliefs. So I reject this definition as too narrow.

Interesting! I know the US. Supreme Court has ruled more than once that the US. Laws do assume the existence of "a Supreme Being," although there is no official religion in the United States. So that ruling doesn't allow for complete religious freedom?

I'm afraid it doesn't. It's biased toward Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Another widely accepted idea holds that religious belief is any belief that induces or supports worship or worship-related rituals. But insisting on worship in the definition is also defeated by the counterexamples of Brahmin Hinduism and the Theravada form of Buddhism since neither practices worship. Nor are they the only counterexamples. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed in a being he called both the "prime mover" and "god." But he also held that this god neither knows nor cares about humans, so he neither advocated worship of that god nor engaged in it. Similarly, his later compatriots the Epicureans believed in many gods but never worshiped them for the same reason; the gods, they thought, neither know nor care about humans. So the trouble with making inducement of worship the defining feature of a religious belief is that there are forms of two major world religions that lack worship, as well as other cases in which belief in gods also lacked worship.³

But if the beliefs central to those forms of Hinduism and Buddhism are not religious beliefs, what are they? And why should we suppose that Aristotle's and Epicurus's beliefs in gods were not religious beliefs when they themselves thought they were? It seems clear to me that belief in a god must count as a religious belief if anything can, so I'm going to insist (without argument) that any definition that makes belief in a god turn out to be nonreligious is to be ruled out.

What happens if we don't concentrate narrowly on worship but look instead far whether a belief induces rituals of many kinds?

That sounds more promising but still leads to a dead end because there are a lot of rituals that are not religious. Think, for example, of swearing-in ceremonies, graduations, inductions into clubs, national anniversaries and even birthday celebrations. All involve ritual. Gathering around a cake with candles on it and singing "Happy Birthday" is surely a ritual, but not a religious one. If there were a specific list of rituals that accompanied only religious beliefs, this might work. But there's a long list of activities that are at times religious but at other times not: burning down a house, setting off fireworks, fasting, feasting, having sexual intercourse, singing, chanting, cutting oneself, circumcising an infant, covering the body with manure, washing, killing an animal, killing a human being, eating bread and wine, shaving the head and many more. It seems clear that the only way to characterize certain rituals as religious and others as nonreligious is to determine what the people who take part in them believe about them. Without that, even an act of prayer can't be distinguished by an observer from someone’s talking to himself. This is why we need to know whether the beliefs that motivated the ritual actions were religious in order to know whether the actions were. And it's also why we are trapped in a vicious circle if we tried to determine which beliefs are religious by looking at the rituals to which they give rise.

But suppose we expand our idea of what must accompany a belief to make it religious. Suppose we include an ethical code as well as worship and ritual. Wouldn't that work?

There can be no question that most religious traditions actually include all those things. The question is whether such accompaniments make a belief religious. I think the examples of Aristotle and Epicurus already show that the answer is no, since those thinkers never connected any ethical teachings to their belief in the prime mover or the gods. Nor are those the only examples. Ancient Roman religion had no moral code or ethical teachings connected to its belief in the gods, and neither does the Shinto tradition. So the resulting definition still looks too narrow.

By the way, depending on just what sort of relation to ethics is supposed to render a belief religious, this definition can also be too broad. Surely there are many beliefs that are clearly not religious but are importantly connected to ethical teachings. Many clubs and other organizations have a code of behavior as well as rituals (think of the Boy Scouts), and even some criminal enterprises have both initiation rituals and an unwritten code of "honor among thieves." But these don't make a criminal's accep­tance of the purposes and code of his organization an article of religious belief.

I must admit that I'm surprised at how badly these ideas have turned out. But none of these objections defeats another idea I've read about. Some scholars think the most plausible definition is that a religious belief is whatever a person believes to be of supreme or highest value. Is there anything wrong with that?

Yes, there is. This definition appears more plausible than it is due to the way we sometimes speak of peoples' obsessions as their "religion." For example, we say that golf is a golf fanatic's religion or that a worka­holic's career is his religion. But just because such expressions have value as metaphors doesn't mean that they can provide a definition. It's true that there are ways in which someone's love of golf or career can be like the devotion and fervor of saints or prophets, but that won't make it true that whatever people value most is their religious belief. And there are good reasons to think it’s not true.

For starters, we can notice that there are polytheistic traditions in which there are gods who are little valued or even hated. So if belief in these gods is religious belief, then this definition can't be right. But it’s not just a few tribal religions that count against this definition: Christianity also counts against it. To be sure, what a person values most figures importantly in Christian teaching. A Christian is one who believes that God's favor is to be valued above all else. Jesus himself said that a person's highest value should be the kingdom of God and the righteousness God offers to those who believe in him (Mt 6:33). Therein lies the difficulty, however. Belief in God is belief in a divine personal being, not in a value. Belief in God is neither itself a value nor the belief in a value, but is the basis for the proper ordering of all values. Unless a person already believed in God's existence and in the faithfulness of his covenant promises, that person could not possibly value God's favor and kingdom above all else. As the New Testament puts the point: to properly approach God one must believe that he exists and rewards those who seek him (Heb. 11:6). The belief that God is real and his promises trustworthy is thus the precondition for valuing God's favor above all else. To put the same point another way: God's favor is to be valued above all just because God is the divine Creator on whom all humans and their destiny depend. So belief in God is not religious because of what a Christian values most; rather, what a Christian values most is a result of believing in God. For that very reason the belief in God and the valuing that results from that belief cannot be identical.

This is not to deny that what people value most can often be an indicator of what they believe to be divine. But the fact that a person's highest value can reflect his or her religious belief does not mean that it always does, let alone that the belief can be defined that way.⁴

I see what you're saying. But it still seems to me that there's a sense in which a believer can be said to be valuing God, not just the right relation to God. We do really value other humans, don't we? I know I value my wife, for example.

0K. But in that case I'm going to say that "value" is too weak to describe the believer's relation to God. Remember, belief in God is much more than belief that God exists. Belief in God is a wholehearted love for God that commits the believer's entire being to God in unconditional trust. That's not simply a value. It goes beyond all valuing and is different from valuing our loved ones. In the case of valuing people, the valuing is still a combination of appreciation and preference. But God is never just a preference, not even the one that outranks all others. The commandment to have no other gods "before" the Lord doesn't mean "have nothing ahead of God on your list of other gods and values." In Scripture, the term "before" signifies a covenant relationship between God and his people: to "swear before the Lord" or "eat a meal before the Lord" means to ratify or reaffirm unconditional trust in God's covenant promises.

Look, maybe we're on a wild-goose chase here! If religious belief can't be defined as belief in a god or a supreme being, as belief that induces worship or ritual, sanctions ethics, or concerns what is valued most highly, what can work? There are such wide differences among religious belief that I don't see any way to pick out something they, and only they, all share in common. Perhaps religious belief can't be defined this way at all, and we should try some other sort of definition to delimit it.

That suggestion puts you in distinguished company! Around sixty years ago a number of scholars of religion tossed in the towel, and gave up on any essential definition of religion at all^.5 They were attempting a slightly different task, of course, since we're concerned only with religious belief and they were trying to define religion as a whole. But their conclusion - that religions have only family resemblances - is one they would surely apply to our quest too. And it's easy to see why they felt driven to say that.

Suppose, for example, we were to reply to them that every religious tradition regards something or other as divine. That seems true enough but is not very enlightening; it simply shifts the problem to defining the term "divine." How, they would ask, can we find a common element among the ideas of divinity, even if we confine that search only to the major world traditions of the present? What common element can be found in the biblical idea of God in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in the Hindu idea of Brahman-Atman, in the idea of Dharmakaya in Mahayana Buddhism, and the idea of the Tao of Taoism? To isolate a common element among just those few seems daunting enough, but if we could do it we would then also have to be able to discover that same common element in all the other ideas of divinity: those of ancient Egypt, Babylon, Palestine, and Greece; the divinities of China and Japan, of the Pacific islands, of Australia, of the Druids, and of the tribes of Africa and North and South America. So, they would ask, isn't it painfully obvious that there is no common feature to the divinities of all these traditions, and no single belief they share in common?

Part of this point I agree with. If we look for a common element in what each tradition regards as divine, then it's true that the natures of those divinities are so diverse as to have no feature in common. But I now want to suggest there is another way to go at the matter, a way that I think succeeds in finding something common to all religions. Suppose that instead of looking for common features among the natures of all the various putative divinities, we were to seek the common denominator in the status of divinity itself ?

Since this seems to be an important point for you, I want to be sure I'm understanding it. Can you be a bit more precise about the difference you're pointing to?

The difference between these two approaches is like the difference between two possible ways we could answer someone visiting the United States who asks, "Who is the president of this nation?" We could answer by naming the person who holds that office, then going on to describe that person by giving the president's gender, height, build, political affiliation and other distinguishing features. Or we could answer by describing the responsibilities, powers and limitations of the office of the presidency. The difference is important. Even if an election were in dispute so that people did not agree on who was really elected president, they would still be in agreement on what it means to be the president. In a parallel way, it is possible that although the ideas of what is divine are so diverse as to have no common element, there could still be common agreement among all religions as to what it means to be divine. If this were the case, the disagreements among religious beliefs would be disagreements about who or what has divine status; they would all still agree about what it means for anything to have that status.⁶

Now this is exactly what I have found to be the case. In all my reading and study, I have never found a single exception to this: In every religious tradition, the divine is the self-existent reality produces whatever is not self-existent and is that on which all that is nondivine depends. Put another way: the divine is whatever has independent reality and all that is not self-existent depends on the divine. (Logically speaking, the cleanest way to put this is to say that “self-existent” means unconditionally nondependent.)

Please do not misunderstand this point. I am not saying that there are no disagreements whatever about what defines the divine status. There are. But although there are disagreements over what else may be true of whatever is believed to have divine status, all ideas of it include nondependence. Nor am I saying that every myth or body of teachings has used the expression "nondepen­dence" or its equivalent. Some trace everything nondivine back to an original something, the status of which is not emphasized or not ex­plained. But in such accounts that original something is still spoken of as though it has independent reality; there is nothing that it is said to depend on. Thus, at the very least, that something is tacitly given nondependent status; it is nondependent so far as the teaching goes.

Does this definition cover every known religion, though? It sounds plausible, but so did the others till a few minutes ago.

It seems to me that it does succeed. For openers, it can locate a common element among beliefs in the biblical God, Brahman-Atman, the Dhar­makaya and the Tao, which was the brief list that appeared so daunting just now. Moreover, it also covers such conceptions of the divine as Nam in Sikhism, Ahura Mazda (Ohrmazd) in early Zoroastrianism or Zurvan in its later development, the soul-matter dualism of the Jains, the high god in the myths of the Dieri aborigines, the belief in Mana among the Trobriand Islanders, Kami in the Shinto tradition, the Raluvhimba of Bantu religion, and the idea of Wakan or Orenda found among various Native American tribes. It also holds for the ancient Roman idea of Numen, and for Chaos or Okeanos found in the myths of Hesiod and Homer.

I can't, of course, claim to know about every religion that ever existed or to know that there's no religion yet to be discovered that doesn't have this idea of divine status. But I can say that no idea of divinity I have ever come across fails to regard the divine as the nondependent reality that all the nondivine reality depends on.

Your proposal is clear enough and seems plausible. But as I said, so did several other definitions until a few minutes ago. Can this one really stand up to criticism?

I believe it can. For one thing, it simply avoids the sorts of difficulties we found with the other definitions (which is perhaps the reason it keeps getting rediscovered).⁷ More than that, it both covers and helps clarify some of the most important differences and unique features of various religious beliefs.

For example, it is well-known that in Judaism, Christianity and Islam there is but one God who is the only divine reality, so that God and divinity are identical. In these traditions everything other than God is creation, and the creation is not divine. By contrast, however, many religions believe there to be a difference between divinity per se and the gods. They believe in a divine reality that is the source of the gods and goddesses as well as of humans and the rest of the nondivine world; for them every nondivine thing is partly divine. The ancient Greek and Roman myths are examples of this. Hesiod and Homer called this divine reality Chaos or Okeanos, whereas it was called Numen in ancient Roman religion. And there are similar beliefs in many other polytheisms, both ancient and contemporary.

This explains why the gods of these religions do not fit the definition just given for "divine." The gods of these traditions are called divine only in the sense that they have more divine power than humans have; they do not have unconditional existence. Their religious importance lies in their superhuman powers and in their being the ones through whom humans can approach and relate to divinity.

This definition also sheds light on how it can be that in certain polytheisms where there is more than one divinity or god, and where the divine and the gods are not identical, there are (as I mentioned earlier) idle or evil divinities or gods: ones that have no important relation to human affairs or are malevolent.⁸ Some scholars have puzzled over how belief in such divinities or gods could persist despite the fact that they aren't valued and aren't thought to do anything good for those who believe in their existence. The definition makes it clear why such belief is possible. It is not beneficence or usefulness to humans that is the defining characteristic of divinity or of a god, but nondependence that characterizes divinity and greater partici­pation in divine power that characterizes a god. Thus the definition allows for the possibility that either a divine principle or a god can be one on which nothing, or nothing important to humans, depends. The signifi­cance of this point is that it is a confirming feature of our definition that is able to allow for, and make sense of, the fact that idle divinities or gods occur in certain teachings.

Yet another feature of the different conceptions of the divine that this definition accounts for is the large variety of ways the nondivine can be thought to depend on the divine.⁹ For example, there are religions that believe in two or more divine principles and understand every nondivine thing as partially dependent on both divinities simultaneously. By con­trast, others hold that one range of nondivine things depends on the first divinity while another range of nondivine things depends on the second divinity. Still other religions believe in a whole realm of divine beings, thus increasing the number of ways these can be thought to relate to one another and to the nondivine world-including that some of them are idle with respect to humans.

So it appears that this definition not only isolates a common element in all ideas of divinity but also allows for the great diversity of ways the nondivine is thought to depend on the divine.

No doubt belief in divinity is crucial to religion, but you now seem to have made it everything! Even if worship and ethics and values can't define religious belief, surely they shouldn't be left out altogether. Aren't such beliefs also religious in some sense - at least when attached to belief in a divinity?

Absolutely! We've already noticed there's more to religious belief than just holding something or other to be divine. I alluded earlier to beliefs about how to stand in proper relation to the divine as religious. So the full statement of my definition is as follows: A belief is religious provided that it is (1) a belief in something as divine or (2) a belief about how the nondivine depends on the divine, or (3) a belief about how humans can stand in proper relation to the divine, where (4) anything is believed to be divine if it is believed to be the self-existent reality that humans and their world depend on, no matter how it is further described or thought of. (That is, it need not be personal, or an individual, or good, and so on.)

Perhaps this helps make clear the main problem with the popular definitions of religious belief that I found to be faulty: they focus almost entirely on the third part of the definition. In a way that's under­standable since those are the most obvious, public features of religious traditions: their creeds, rites, rituals, holy days, meditations, pilgrimages, codes of behavior and range of values. Important as these are, however, they are not the most fundamental aspects of religious belief or practice. They are secondary for the purpose of definition. What is fundamental is identifying what is divine, since every belief about how to stand in proper relation to the divine is determined by the nature of what is taken to be divine, and of how the nondivine depends on it.