OCR A Level RS Help

I have just completed my A Level exams, and decided to make this page to post my OCR Religious Studies notes and A* essays.

Most of my notes were made from the textbook, so they will be very similar, although I tried to put in some extra reading where I could.

Essays were marked by teachers who also mark for the OCR exam board.

Notes:

Philosophy

Christianity

Ethics

Omniscience

Omniscience means God knows everything and there is nothing that he cannot know, and he has no false beliefs and cannot be mistaken – if God knows something, then that thing is true. If he is omniscient, God’s knowledge includes things that are unavailable to the human mind, such as details of history that humanity has forgotten, or whether there is life on other planets.

It is also closely linked to the idea of wisdom. God always knows the right thing to do, the best choices to make, which moral rules to give and when to intervene. If God does something, that action is the best action and is done at exactly the right time. However, this raises some issues. Does God know events in the future as well as the past? If so, does he know in advance all of the moral decisions that people will make in their lived? If he does, do people have any real freedom of choice because his knowledge is always certain and never mistaken. God’s certain knowledge may ‘fix’ the event and make it unchangeable.

For example, if I were to steal something, I have no choice but to steal it because there is no possibility I could choose at the last minute not to steal it, because God already knew I would. This limits free will, and means people cannot be blamed for their actions.

Evidence for omniscience:

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?”” – No one knows what God knows or to what extent.

“Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”

HOWEVER, surely if God was omniscient, he would know that Adam and Eve would disobey him? He was shocked and disappointed at them when they ate the forbidden fruit.

Schleiermacher

Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that there is a possible solution to the problem of whether God’s omniscience restricts our freedom. He drew up an analogy of close friends, in which he said we can know what a friend is going to do without restricting their freedom. For example, I could go to a restaurant with a friend and be fairly certain that they’ll choose their favourite meal – this does not restrict their freedom of choice. Although I know what they’ll choose, I’m only making a reliable guess. There is nothing in my knowledge that forces their choice, which for Schleiermacher, is comparable to God’s knowledge of our actions. His knowledge does not force or affect what we choose to do and therefore we can still be held morally responsible and make free choices.

However, God’s knowledge is not like human knowledge, it is infallible. I can be wrong in my guess, but God can never be wrong, for he never makes mistakes, and he knows the future, rather than making a reliable guess. Therefore, our freedom to act morally is merely an illusion, which is dangerous as a genuine freedom of choice is considered by ethicists to be essential as a basis for morality – Kant said without freedom there are no moral choices.

If God’s omniscience determines our choices, then God cannot justifiably punish us when we do wrong or reward us when we do good. Also, if God intends and creates every individual life, then he knew exactly what we would choose at every point of our lives, and so he could be held responsible for all kinds of evil, including moral. He would also know each person’s religious choices, so who would have faith in him or disbelieve – he knows who will go to heaven or hell, there’s nothing we can do about it.

However, if he didn’t know, then this means he is less than all-powerful. This suggests he can be surprised, or make unwise choices, which restrict his capabilities.

God’s relationship with time

God being eternal can mean two things:

God is timeless, in that he exists outside time and is not bound by time because he is the creator of time. He is described as ‘eternal’ or ‘atemporal’.

God is everlasting, in that he moves in the same timeline that we do but never begins or ends. The past is the past for God as well as for us, past events are fixed for God just like for us. Future events are unknown to us, and also to some extent at least, unknown to God because it has not happened yet. In this view, he is described as ‘sempiternal’.

The view that God is timeless (atemporal)

This view is more popular among Christian thinkers, supported by Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, Shleiermacher. It argues that God is outside the concept of time and can see the past, present and future, all with perfect knowledge. Time is an aspect of the created world and God is in control of it, He is not bound by space or time and exists in every part of history and every part of the future whilst being present in the world today.

God is not limited because time is introduced by Him, it is not something to which he is subject. God is immutable (unchangeable) because his omnipotence is not threatened by the constraints of time – a God who could not know the future is less powerful than one who could.

If God were bound by time, he would be limited because he wouldn’t know what the outcomes of actions might be; he would have to wait to se how events pan out before deciding what to do next. His plans may be thwarted so he’ll have to resort to a different plan, which reduces his omnipotence and omniscience. A sempiternal God couldn’t be ‘a being than which nothing greater can be conceived’ because we can conceive of a greater being who wouldn’t be constrained by time.

God can bring about changed in time and cause changes without being changed because he is not a person like we are. There are things that are possible for God because of the unique nature of his existence that we cannot comprehend because of our limited understanding.

This is refuted because it seems to limit our free will as the future appears fixed (according to His knowledge) and we cannot influence or change, and therefore should not be held responsible. How can a fixed God be loving (feel compassion and respond to suffering) if he is fixed – he becomes more like Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

The view that God is everlasting (sempiternal)

The view that God is everlasting seems to limit our free will because God knows what we are going to choose and how things will work out, so there is nothing we can influence and change as everything is fixed. Therefore we cannot be held responsible.

The problem of evil also raises these difficulties because how can a loving God that knows that terrible natural disasters and diseases will happen not step in? How can God act in the world if there is no ‘before’ or ‘after’ for God. Therefore, scholars such as Swinburne and Hartshorne take the view that God acts within time, responding to events and to people as they happen and as they act.

God as timeless in the thinking of Augustine and Aquinas

In Augustine’s view God must be immutable and timeless if he created time, otherwise what was he doing for the infinite time before creation? Genesis suggests a timeless God, creating time through days and seasons. God is absolutely immutable, completely unchangeable and cannot be other than he is. Aquinas followed this view, adding that the language that we use when speaking about God is analogical and not univocal, meaning it cannot be applied to God directly because he is not like us. We have to use words from our own experience of the world because they are the only words we have, but God is not like anything else in the world, so when we use language, we have to use analogy.

For example: when we say God ‘moves’ in mysterious ways, we’re not saying he goes from one place to the other, and when we call him ‘loving father’ we do not mean he is limited to the love human beings experience, or he is like a human father. Aquinas said that the philosophical difficulties people have arise because we are using our language too literally.

Some scholars question whether an unchanging being that is outside of time can be capable of love because love involves an emotional response, rather that feeling the same at all times, but Aquinas held that God could be both loving and unchanging just because he is God. God is different to humans, and anything is possible for Him, for his nature is perfect. He can still have relationships, as although he doesn’t change, his creations do, meaning there is a dynamic relationship. He goes on to argue that humans are temporal beings so we only have knowledge of the present and make choices within time – as we make these choices God knows what will be decided but as He is beyond time, He does not influence these choices so we still have free will.

The omnipotence paradox is when the whole notion of total power seems to be self-contradictory. For example: Can God create a stone too heavy for God to lift? On one hand, omnipotence involves being able to do absolutely anything. On the other hand, there are some actions that seem impossible for an omnipotent being to do, such as ‘fail at a task’ or ‘be defeated by another being’. If omnipotence itself is impossible, then there cannot be any omnipotent beings.

It is also questioned whether omnipotence can be compatible with other characteristics traditionally ascribed to the Christian God, such as omnibenevolence – it would be illogical for God to be able to do evil (because He’s all powerful) and unable to do evil (because he is all loving). Also, omniscience – how could God add to his knowledge (because he has the power to do anything) and unable to add to his knowledge (because he already knows everything).

Passages in the Bible that support his omnipotence:

“And God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.”

“He who made the Pleiades and Orion, who turns midnight into dawn and darkens day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land – the Lord is his name”.

“God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie”.

“God cannot fail”.

“With God all things are possible”.

Christian theologians take the view that if God did not have supreme power, he would not be able to do the things necessary for human salvation. For example, to create and carry out his plans for the universe; to resurrect people from death; to give eternal life in heaven. Anselm and Descartes developed on this when they formed the ontological argument: God is ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’, so if God were anything less than omnipotent, we would be able to conceive of a greater, more powerful being; so, God, by definition, must be omnipotent.

Descartes

Descartes argued that God can do absolutely anything, even that which is logically impossible, such as making a square circle or making 2 + 2 = 5, because God is the supreme perfection and so cannot have any limitations. He is the source of logic and has the power to suspend it or replace it whenever he wants to, so the laws of mathematics only exist because God created them that way, and he has the ability to override them. He believed any other understandings of omnipotence put restrains on the greatness of God and dishonoured it. God can see how to be contradictory because he is omnipotent.

However, most Christian scholars argue that this understanding of omnipotence is mistaken – logical contradictions are not ‘things’. It is not lack of power that prevents God from creating a square circle, but the fact that a square circle is nonsense.

His view turns God into an unpredictable tyrant who might do anything, so we cannot rely on him. If he has power to do anything, he could turn against us or do evil at any time, or his moral rules might change at any minute, so it makes it impossible for people to have a relationship with God or trust him for their salvation. It creates difficulty for theodicies which suggest that God could not act in any other way he does without depriving us of our free will. Suffering is a price that has to be paid in order to make free choices, but if Descartes is correct and God is capable of absolutely anything such as suspending the laws of logic even to prevent evil, it prevents God from being perfectly loving.

Aquinas

Aquinas argues that God is completely omnipotent in the sense of being in charge of the whole world, creating it and keeping it in existence. Aquinas said that God is omnipotent because: ‘he can do everything that is absolutely possible’, qualified by saying that ‘everything that does not imply a contradiction is among those possibilities in respect of which God is called omnipotent’. So he can do anything logically possible, but of it is not logically possible that it cannot be done by God, because something like a square circle cannot be made at all. Therefore, God cannot do anything that is inconsistent with his nature because that would imply a contradiction – he has no body, so he cannot swim or die and he is perfectly good, so he cannot deceive or do any other form of evil.

Swinburne

Swinburne takes Aquinas’s view in saying that God’s omnipotence means he can do anything, but this has to be understood properly. He can do and create all ‘things’ but self-contradictory definitions do not refer to ‘things’. A square circle is not a ‘thing’, a stone too heavy for God to lift is not a ‘thing’, so God couldn’t make them. This is not a challenge to his omnipotence.

Vardy

James Vardy suggests that God’s omnipotence is much more limited than previous Christians have suggested – he is not in control of the whole of history, or able to move things around like pieces on a chessboard, and it is wrong to suggest that everything happens because of the will of God. Instead, he created the universe in such a way that his ability to act is necessarily limited, because if not everything would not be able to exist in the way it does. However, this limitation is self-imposed – nothing limits his power except when he chooses.

John Macquarrie

Macquarrie emphasises that any limitations on God’s omnipotence are self-imposed. He is not constrained by logic, nor the physical world, nor by the actions of human beings, but is constrained in his omnipotence merely because he chooses to limit his own power out of love for humanity.

This idea of God’s self-limitation has been explored particularly in the context of Christology to answer questions based around how Jesus could be the Son of God if he didn’t always showcase God’s attributes. Theologians have developed a doctrine known as ‘kenosis’, meaning self-emptying’, in which Jesus emptied himself of some of his divine attributes before coming to Earth to make his encounter with humanity possible.

Macquarrie and other thinkers emphasise the need for believers to remember that when they speak of the power of God, they are using analogy, and His power is very different from our own. The word ‘power’ refers to power within this world, so when it is applied to God it cannot be applied literally because He is infinitely greater than we are. Following Aquinas, he argues that there will always be aspects of God’s nature that remain unknowable to us – we can understand/express them partially with the use of analogy, but we only have small fallible human minds so they’re difficult to comprehend. Issues with religious language are a key to understanding the attributes of God.

However this raises the question, how can a God who has limited his own power still be omnipotent? Whether it is self imposed or not, it is still limited – His power is not absolute.

A.N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne

They argued that absolute omnipotence in the sense of total power would not be a perfect quality and that we should think of God as a being whose power cannot be surpassed by any other being rather than as a being with total power.

Hartshorne considers that total power means that nothing else is able to put up any resistance at all to that power, so a totally omnipotent God would have total control over everything, and nothing would be able to do anything unless God allowed it and controlled it.

If I am trying to cut a branch, it will show some resistance so I will have to squeeze the clippers quite hard, but I am stronger than the branch so I can do the clipping. However, if I had total power, it would offer no resistance at all and would be like slicing through melted butter. There is nothing impressive about conquering something that puts up no resistance, like praising someone who came first in a race with no competitors.

The Idea of Divine Power

Divine Omniscience and God's Relationship with Time

The Omniscience and Justice of God in Relation to Human Free Will

The Omnibenevolence and Justice of God

John Hick further developed Irenaeus’s theodicy. He describes the world as a ‘vale of soul-making’, where things happen to us for our own good. He argued that evil and suffering in this world are not accidents or problems that God could not overcome, but rather deliberate. God gave us a world in which we would have the best circumstances under which to choose a free and loving relationship with Him, including struggles and hardship through which we develop human virtues, and these virtues are more meaningful than if they were simply graced to humans by God.

It also includes ‘epistemic distance’, a distance in knowledge. God deliberately chooses to remain partially hidden from humanity so we can make genuinely free choices about whether we want to believe in Him or not. If there was no doubt of his existence, then faith would not be a choice, but God wants us to have this choice, turning to him because we want to and not because we were forced to.

He justified evil by arguing that something’s goodness relies on its purpose: instrumental good, in which something may not be good in itself but good for something. This is however highly controversial as it leaves no room for dysteleological evils.

Hick’s theodicy only works if there is a possibility of life after death – if someone dies from a long and painful illness or a baby is abused, then it cannot be seen as ‘all for the good’ unless it works out for the best ‘in the end’ i.e. the afterlife. In his view, during the afterlife people continue with their growth and development towards a relationship with God, and eventually everyone will be saved, which is again controversial.

Discussing Hick

Universal salvation can be criticised: what was the point in Jesus dying on the Christ if everyone will go to heaven?

If everyone will freely come to God eventually, can this be free? We can be free to choose different options, but if in the end we all arrive at the same destination, perhaps our choice is only an apparent choice and not a genuinely free one.

Is it really worth having to live in a world where evil and suffering is so apparent just for the sake of human freedom? Wouldn’t it be better if God never made the world?

Irenaeus argued that God allows evil and suffering to have a place in the world alongside goodness so we can develop and grow as human beings into a mature and free relationship with God. He argued that there had to be evil in the world for us to be able to appreciate good, just as we may not appreciate summer days unless we were cold in the winter. Good is a qualitative judgement, a comparative, and so there have to be other, less good things for goodness to exist at all. As well as this, evil is necessary for us to develop as free individuals who make their own moral decisions and are responsible for them – if everything went our way, we could never learn anything.

When God created us in his ‘image’, He created us with free will. Irenaeus drew a distinction between God’s image and his likeness. He argued that God created humans imperfectly so they could develop from the image of God to likeness of God by using the reason and free will He has given us: ‘let us make man in our image, after our likeness’. Therefore, evil is necessary for us to make real choices between right and wrong - achieving the likeness of God requires the willing co-operation of humans, rather than us being given the right choice every time and so there has to be the possibility of choosing good instead of evil. Irenaeus writes: “if we had no knowledge of the contrary, could we have instruction in that which is good?”. If God were to intervene, we would lose our free will and reason. Evil and suffering must also necessarily occur so we can strive to meet challenges in order to gain perfection, supported by St Paul: “We rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, character and hope.” However, this does not justify unnecessary evils, such as the example of the fawn dying in the forest fire, or babies who suffer and cannot learn from it.

Discussing Irenaeus

More optimistic as it suggests God knows what He is doing and good will come out of every situation

Some people suffer more than others, does this mean God wants some people to grow to spiritual maturity, but doesn’t care whether those who lead peaceful and contented lives learn very much?

Some people may suffer and not be able to learn from it, such as babies being ill, or a person with learning difficulties being injured in a fire.

Animal suffering is hard to justify – there is no learning or life after death for them, and often they suffer when no one is around so no one can learn from it (see William L. Rowe’s example of fawn)

Augustine argued that evil is not a real, actual quality in its own right, but rather a ‘privato boni’, a privation (lack) of good. He argued that God could not have created anything evil because in the Bible it says, “God saw all that he had made and it was good.” So, evil did not have its own separate existence of powerful force, but was an absence of good, just as darkness is an absence of light. He argued that humanity was created perfectly, but fell away from God through the misuse of free will.

In his view, evil stems from entities with free will, first coming into the world through the ‘Fall’ of the angels. Angels were created perfectly, but some received less grace (assistance from God in their attempts to be holy) than others, as a part of the variety of things (he argued that variety is part of the goodness and perfection of the created world, but as a result of this difference some creatures will be more limited than others). The angels then fell away from God as a result of their misuse of free will, deciding to rival Him rather than worship Him. This caused a loss in natural order, and so angels are responsible for natural evil.

Augustine then argued that because of this, Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan to eat the forbidden fruit, leaving God’s perfect plan and causing inherent sin for man. Because they were told that the consequence of knowing the truth of good and evil was death, they went from immortal to mortal. He goes on to say that because we were seminally present in the loins of Adam, we carry the original sin with us. This is often criticised as it is illogical to suggest a just God would blame us for someone else’s sins, supported by the Old Testament quote “should the children’s teeth be set on edge because their fathers ate sour grapes?” Evil is therefore a result of man no longer being in a close relationship with God, which destroyed the delicate balance of the world, so humans are to blame for moral evil. God not responsible for evil because if he were to intervene, it would not be right as the punishment is ‘justice’ for human sin and God is ‘just’. Augustine’s theodicy is described as a soul-deciding theodicy as we decide to obey God or not.

Further discussing Augustine:

A strength of Augustine’s argument is that he never suggests that God in any way tolerates evil, or suggests that evil is not really that bad – he never allows the idea that God wants to have anything to do with evil.

However, evil is much more than ‘privato boni’ – deliberate cruelty towards a child or animal seems a lot more powerful and harmful than a lack of goodness.

Christian Scientists explain evil as some kind of illusion: sin, sickness and death would disappear if they were understood to be nothingness and in total contrast to the ‘allness’ of God.

However, even if they are ultimately illusions, these illusions are real enough and has real symptoms which cannot be satisfactorily ignored.

Augustine does not explain why there is a lack of perfection in the world. Friedrich Schleiermacher argues that there is no reason for the angels to sin unless they were created imperfectly in the first place. Evil cant come out of the world from nowhere unless God made it, and if it did, this limits God’s omniscience and ominipotence.

It also poses a logical contradiction: if the world was perfect, no one would have knowledge of good and evil so how is there freedom to obey/disobey God?

Natural evil refers to parts of existence which cause suffering, but not from human wrongdoings, such as earthquakes, suffering that animals inflict on one another and illness. Moral evil refers to evil and suffering which stem from humanity’s choice to do bad rather than good, such as suffering caused by bullying, greed and selfishness, and violence. It also refers to suffering caused by humanity’s failure to do good when the opportunity arises, such as the loneliness felt by elderly people or absence of clean drinking water in poorer countries.

The evidential problem of evil is an a posteriori approach that begins with our own experience of evil and suffering and then look for the best possible explanation for our observations. It focuses on both the presence of natural and moral evil in the world and questions why God would create the universe knowing such examples of evil and suffering would occur.

John Stuart Mill argues that the natural world is full of evidence of evil, giving powerful examples of the way in which people and other animals suffer. He argues against those who use a posteriori arguments in support of the existence of a good God, claiming that the evidence rather points to a sadistic God. He writes that the things we punish humans for, nature does every day, such as killing and torture. In saying this, he argues against supporters of the teleological arguments such as William Paley.

He thus uses this argument to support the view that if there is a God, He does not seem to be benevolent – we cannot look to Him or to nature as a guide for our own moral behaviour, and we cannot worship him for His goodness.

William L. Rowe also gave some examples of evil. "In some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering." Arguably, God could have prevented this suffering, but doesn’t. Rowe also cites the example of human evil where an innocent child is a victim of violence and thereby suffers.

The logical problemof evil is an a priori, deductive argument in that in begins with an idea of God, and then looks to defend this idea in the face of the observations of evil and suffering. It criticises the Judaeo-Christian God, questioning how an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent being can coexist with evil and suffering in the world.

It is a view supported by David Hume, but J. L. Mackie is the best known modern proponent of the logic form of this argument, writing “The problem of evil […] is a problem only for someone who believes that there is a God who is both omnipotent and wholly good,” and clarifies it is a logical problem, not a “scientific problem that might be solved by further observations, or a practical problem that might be solved by a decision or an action.”

It sometimes makes reference to the inconsistent triad, an idea from Epicurus, which consists of three premises:

That God is perfectly good.

That God is all-powerful.

That evil and suffering exist.

However, these three things cannot coexist.

If God was perfectly good, he would seek to eliminate evil, as his all-loving nature would not want humans to suffer. If there is a God who is all powerful, we can presume he has the abilities to make any kind of world, or no world at all. He could create a world without evil and suffering, and yet he chose not to, which is inconsistent with the claims he omnibenevolent and omnipotent. If he is truly all-powerful, he would be able to eliminate the evil in the world. Therefore, God’s attributes are mutually exclusive, and He cannot exist, just as a square circle cannot exist. God is logically inconsistent with the existence of evil.

To argue against this, the premises can be broken down. Attacking one premise destroys the entire argument.

Premise 1, that an omnibenevolent God would seek to eliminate evil assumes it is better to have no evil than have evil. Irenaeus, Hick, and Swinburne all argue against this. There could be reasons why God doesn’t seek to eliminate evil, as it is necessary for us to mature and develop a relationship with God. Therefore, it may be more loving to provide us with a ‘vale of soul-making’ rather than a world in which we have little freedom.

Premise 2, that an omnipotent God would have the power to eliminate evil works on the assumption that an omnipotent God can do anything at all – how can He restrict our freedom whilst simultaneously allowing us free will? Richard Swinburne argues that God can do anything that is possible, but allowing human freedom while at the same time not allowing evil is impossible, and a logical contradiction: “The less he allows men to bring about large-scale horrors, the less freedom and responsibility he gives them”. (Could also mention the omnipotence paradox).

Different Presentations of the Problem of Evil:

Logical Problem of Evil

Evidential Problem of Evil

Responses to the problem of evil:

Natural and Moral evil

Augustine: soul deciding

Irenaeus

Is personal testimony or witness enough to support the validity of religious experience?

Yes:

The strength of someone’s belief that they have encountered God could be considered as evidence that it must really have happened – subjects of religious experiences speak so convincingly of their certainty of what happened, their accounts can be very persuasive.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it is true: people could be convinced that what they’ve seen is true but have been mistaken in their interpretation.

William James: the evidential force of personal religious experience can be tested for validity by its long term effects.

No:

The experiences cannot be tested by others and so cannot be used as evidence. We have no way of recreating these accounts to conduct a repeatable experiment, and even if we try to copy the circumstances of other people, say by fasting or reading the Bible, we can never make the same experiences happen for ourselves.

Caroline Franks Davis argues against Swinburne’s Principle of Testimony, saying that we should only take someone’s word at face value when he issue is relatively trivial, not something like God’s existence.

Biblical writers point out the need to distinguish those who have had genuine experience of God from those who are simply attention seeking: “watch out for false prophets”.

Bertrand Russell: the good effects a religious experience might have on someone provides no evidence that the experience comes from God – we can be profoundly affected by fictional stories for example.

Does religious experience provide a basis for belief in God or a greater power?

People argue that they cannot, for several reasons:

Members of different faiths encounter God in a way that matches their previously held beliefs: a Catholic might see the Virgin Mary, whereas a Hindu might see the Lord Shiva, so these experiences may just be wish fulfilment.

However, surely if God wants his followers to recognise him when he reveals himself, He’ll appear in a form they’ll understand.

People may interpret experiences in different ways, even if they hear the same voice saying the same words. Some may interpret it as God, whereas others as a hallucination or coincidence. It is impossible to tell which interpretation is correct.

Religious experiences may just be cases of hallucination/psychotic episodes – Francis of Assisi had religious experiences after severe illness, so may have been hallucinating, and those at the Pentecost may have been carried away with emotion given that Jesus had just died.

However, people argue against this by saying why wouldn't God appear to those with psychological problems? A loving God is likely to wnat to make himself known to people at times when they are vulnerable and in need of reassurance.

Can corporate religious experiences be considered more reliable or valid than individual experiences?

They have more evidential force than solitary ones – in science, the more times an experiment is repeated, the more weight is added, so if several people share the same religious experience, perhaps it is more likely to be veridical.

Several people can give reports to support the account, making it more credible, such as in the court of law

For example, all the children at Medjugorje described the Virgin Mary in the same way even when interviewed separately.

However, they may have been brought up knowing what her statues looked like, so knew what the expectation was.

The view that religious experiences are a union with great power

Many people believe that religious experiences happen because God chooses to reveal himself to particular individuals for reasons of his own. Many people have reported these encounters, and are a common art of human experience so deserve to be taken at face value.

Richard Swinburne supports the view that religious experience can be taken as evidence for the existence of God, making a case that we should treat reports of religious experience in the same way that we treat reports of other, non-religious experiences, unless we have good reason to be suspicious of these reports. If someone thinks they can hear someone at the door, they probably can; and, Swinburne argues, if someone thinks they can hear the voice of God, then they probably can.

His principle of credulity says that experience is normally reliable, and the balance of probability says that experience can be trusted, despite the fact that some experiences can be misleading. He is not saying that experience is infallible, but that what our senses tell us is more likely to be true than not, and therefore we should accept them unless we have convincing reasons not to. We need to accept our own instincts: if we see someone on the street and think they are a friend, there could be the possibility that they are a stranger, but we should not feel the need to be suspicious that perhaps our senses are deceiving us. In the same way, Swinburne argues that if we think we are experiencing God, we should be prepared to believe that it really is God, rather than immediately doubting our own perceptions. Our sense perceptions are normally, though not always, reliable.

His principle of testimony works similarly – we find that people usually tell us the truth, and so we should go with the balance of probability and believe what we are told. According to Swinburne, we shouldn’t make different rules for religious experience, and so if someone tells us they’ve had a personal encounter with God, we should be prepared to take it seriously rather than immediately assuming they are lying.

A psychological interpretation of religious experience

Ludwig Feuerbach argued that when people think they are worshipping God or experiencing His presence, they are in fact worshipping their own human nature. People created God in their own image, to meet their own needs, taking the most admirable aspects of human nature (creativity, hope for the future, heroism, compassion etc) and subconsciously ‘project’ these aspects outside themselves and hold them up as something to worship. People want to feel cared for, and so they invent a God who loves and values them, and they want the world to be a fair place, so they invent a God who rewards the good and punishes the wicked.

Sigmund Freud recognised the human ‘psyche’, composed of the ego, id and super-ego, works on more than one level, as people have unconscious as well as conscious mental processes. He thought that people who think there is a God and believe that they encounter one are fooling themselves, unable to cope with the idea of adult life and so invent an imaginary parent-figure to look after them. They may believe that this parent-figure talks to them directly in personal encounters, but this is ‘infantile neurosis’, something they need to grow out of to live with better mental health.

Donald Winnicott was interested in the importance of the bond between a child and a mother in early life, and the transitions needed to be made for that child to become a mentally healthy adult. He argues that children often have a ‘transitional object’ that belongs in a stage between imaginary and reality, to which they have a very strong emotional attachment and helps them make the step between relying completely on their mother and the self-reliance that comes with growing up. He argues that people still need this illusion when they are adults, but those who cannot make the distinction between these delusions and reality have the ‘hallmarks of madness’. However, illusion is a necessary part of life, allowing us to make sense of ourselves and enjoy creativity. He argued that religious experience is therefore an illusion, but unlike Freud, doesn’t believe that we would be mentally healthier without this illusion, unless we try to impose these illusions on others.

A physiological interpretation of religious experience

Neurophysiology is an area of science which studies the brain and the nervous system.

In a study led by Michael Persinger, volunteers wore a device which transmitted weak magnetic signals through the brain and a significant proportion of them reported symptoms that were strikingly similar to those reported by subjects of religious experience. This study has been criticised as some have argued that participants knew in advance what the investigators were hoping to find and others who have repeated the experiment haven’t produced such convincing data. However, it raises the possibility that religious experiences can be explained by natural rather than supernatural causes – people may be unknowingly in the presence of magnetic fields.

Within near-death experiences, people often report the sensation of having left their own bodies, being able to look down on the resuscitation scene as if from a height, feeling they are in a loving presence as well as seeing a bright light ahead. This could indicate that there is real hope of life after death in the presence of a loving God. However, Mobbs and Watt suggest through physiological studies that these can be explained through observation of the parietal and prefrontal cortices of the brain, as well as measuring the release of emotion-altering hormones in the body at times of stress.

Corporate (‘as a body’) religious experience is where several different people have the same, or similar, religious experiences at the same time. A Biblical example is the story of Pentecost, where everyone felt the same sensation of a rushing mighty wind, and saw the same tongues of fire appearing.

Other examples:

In the town of Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina, six young teenagers allegedly had regular visions of the Virgin Mary, claiming that she appeared to them, giving them secrets and messages of peace, telling them the world needed more prayer.

This example may be convincing as six people reporting the same experience may have more evidential force, especially the fact that they were all children, as they could be considered to be less calculating than adults and less able to present a convincing/coherent narrative.

However, the six may have been encouraging each other, influencing one another’s memories and encouraging them to believe they saw and heard things that didn’t happen. The Catholic Church is sceptical about the claims but has not completely disowned them, although Pope Francis didn’t visit the shrine when nearby.

The ‘Toronto Blessing’ is a modern phenomenon, in which groups of people all worshipping together in a Church appeared to have the same ecstatic religious experience. They had been said to be overcome by the Holy Spirit, causing them to weep or laugh uncontrollably, or speak in strange ‘languages’ and fall to the ground.

Some take this as a sign of God’s blessing, where people experience the Holy Spirit so intensely that they lose all sense of self in religious ecstasy.

Conversion experiences can be dramatic, or gentler and slower to develop. A ‘conversion experience’ refers to the kind of experience where someone abandons his or her old way of life and belief system, and adopts a new one, based on an inner experience which he or she is convinced comes from God. This tends to follow a basic pattern:

The individual is dissatisfied with his or her current ‘system of ideas’ – people do not tend to be converted if they are content as they are.

The person searches at both an intellectual level and an emotional level for a basis on which to make a decision, for example, tuning to the Bible, going to an evangelical meeting or listening to other conversion stories.

There is a point of crisis, a time of intense emotion, sometimes with both physical and emotional symptoms. Often this is described as a sese of the presence of God, a sense of sinfulness and repentance, sometimes described in terms of visions, bright lights and voices.

This is followed by a sense of peace and joy and a loss of worry, as week as a desire to share the new faith with other people and talk about the experience.

In the longer term, they experience a hange in direction a anew sense in the purpose of life and sometimes a complete change in career.

William James writes “to say that a man is ‘converted’ means, in these terms, that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness, now take a central place, and that religious aims form the habitual centre of his energy”. In other words, a religious experience can change someone’s whole outlook on life. James thought that psychology could describe conversion but was unable to account for all the factors in any given case, and asserted that the conversion experience can be interpreted by its results. If after the experience the person is happier, kinder, more loving and positive, this is enough evidence to suggest the experience was valid. This is supported by the Bible where it says “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

Conversion experiences have been the focus of many psychological studies, where psychologists have attempted to determine whether there are particular personality traits/circumstances that make individuals more susceptible to conversion experiences than others. Conversion experiences can be the subject of controversy as it is impossible to tell if outside social or psychological factors have influenced them, rather than the activity of God.

Mystical experience encompasses many different kinds of religious experience, including dramatic events where people see visions/hear voices, when people feel the overwhelming presence of God, and when feel as if they’ve been united with God/ultimate reality. People who have had mystical experiences feel as if they have reached an understanding of spiritual truth which cannot be accessed through the use of reason and ‘normal’ sense experience alone. When a religious experience is called ‘mystical’, it carries connotations of the idea that underneath the different doctrines and practices, perhaps everyone is connecting with the same God, even though this may be in very different ways.

Happold’s study of mysticism

Happold reflected on the sense that a personal search for truth might involve looking at religious belief systems outside, as well as inside, traditional Christianity. He writes about how mysticism underlies religion in all of its forms, and depends on the non-rational, intuitional side of human understanding. He argues that although it is found throughout the world in all different cultural contexts, there are strikingly similar features and conclusions drawn from it:

The mystic understands hat this physical, material world is only a part of reality, and that it comes from a ‘Divine Ground’.

Human nature is such that people can know the ‘Divine Ground’, not through reason but through intuition.

People have two distinct natures: the ego, which is the part of which we are always conscious, and the spiritual ‘eternal self’, the ‘spark of divinity within him’.

The purpose of humanity is to discover this ‘eternal self’ and to unite it with the ‘Divine Ground’.

Christian mysticism and numinous experience

In the Bible, Isaiah ‘saw God’ and afterwards was able to give a detailed description of the different heavenly beings he encountered. When people hear voices, this can be equally dramatic, and they give reports of exactly what was said to them. In the story of the boy Samuel in the Temple, he is woken from sleep by a voice he believes to be his master Eli because the voice is so vivid, suggesting that this is not meant to be understood metaphorically but as a real sound. In many reports, visions and voices are combined, such as when Bernadette claimed she both saw and heard the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.

Numinous experiences are hard to define, as some class them as a subset of mystical experiences, whilst others put them in a class of their own. Otto claims they are at the heart of all religious experience: ‘the distinctive experience of God’. Numinous experiences are times when the individual gains a new and deeper sense of understanding of reality and feels as if he or she has touched on a different dimension, becoming filled with a sense of awe and wonder.