1. What is a religious Experience?
A religious experience (sometimes known as a spiritual experience, sacred experience, or mystical experience) is an experience which causes someone to believe they have felt the presence of God or seen God at work.
E.G. Someone is miraculously cured from an incurable disease/someone sees a vision of Jesus or a religious figure/someone hears the voice of God speaking to them/someone says that they felt God’s presence surround them.

2. Arguments For & against religious experiences as proof that god exists
The religious experience argument…
Arguments For & against religious experiences as proof that god exists

3. The cumulative argument
If you take ALL the different accounts of religious experience throughout history then it seems that there are too many similar experiences from different countries, languages and religions for them all to be coincidences or made up.
BUT…!

4. The cumulative argument
BUT:
Several weak arguments put together cannot form one strong argument. In fact they just form one large weak argument!

5. David Hume said:
“There is not to be found in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning as to secure us against all delusion.”
This means that there has never been an account of a religious experience that was so convincing that it proved the existence of God.

6. The principle of testimony
Richard Swinburne:
After all, we don’t doubt the basic facts about the world, even though we haven’t directly experienced them. (Example from the class…..?)
People, in general, tell the truth! We cannot realistically work on the basis of always doubting what they say about religious experiences.

7. The principle of testimony
Unless we have evidence to the contrary, we should believe what people say when they claim to have had a religious experience.
“In the absence of special considerations, the experiences of others are (probably) as they report them.” Richard Swinburne

8. The principle of testimony
Since people usually tell the truth, there are only 3 types of evidence that should make their testimonies unreliable...
Circumstances make it unreliable (e.g. hallucinatory drugs)
Evidence to suggest they are lying
There are other explanations (e.g. mental illness)
Could ALL religious experiences be explained in these 3 ways?

9. Religious experiences cannot be verified!
We can’t scientifically determine whether these experiences do prove that God exists.

10. Ludwig wittgenstein
Each person sees their experiences differently – some may think they’ve experienced God, others think they’ve experienced something else. This means all testimonies of religious experiences are unreliable.

11. RICHARD DAWKINS
In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins tells a story from his student days. He recalls that a fellow undergraduate was camping in Scotland and claimed to have heard “the voice of the devil – Satan himself”.
In fact, it was just the call of the Manx Shearwater (or ‘Devil Bird’), which has an evil sounding voice.
For Dawkins, personal experiences are often used in an appeal to God because people are ignorant of more straightforward physical or psychological explanations for what they perceive. It is an argument based on ignorance.

12. God on the Brain

13. Rudi Affolter and Gwen Tighe have both experienced strong religious visions.
He is an atheist; she a Christian.
He thought he had died; she thought she had given birth to Jesus.
They have one thing in common
Both have temporal lobe epilepsy.

14. Like other forms of epilepsy, the condition causes fitting but it is also associated with religious hallucinations. Research into why people like Rudi and Gwen saw what they did has opened up a whole field of brain science: neurotheology.

15. The connection between the temporal lobes of the brain (near your ears) and religious feeling has led one Canadian scientist, Michael Persinger, to try deliberately stimulating the lobes to see if he could induce a religious feeling.

16. 80% of Dr Michael Persinger's experimental subjects report that an artificial magnetic field focused on those brain areas gives them a feeling of 'not being alone'. Some of them describe it as a religious sensation.

17. How did he do this experiment?
The device consisted of computer-controlled solenoids that fit over the skull and stimulate the brain with electromagnetic pulses.
The subjects weren’t told the purpose of he experiment – just that it was about relaxation

18. Persinger’s conclusion was
"Feeling something beyond yourself, bigger in space and time, can be stimulated"

19. The bigger question….. Do some people have a ‘talent’ for religion?
Is religion ‘wired’ into some of our brains & not others?

20. So what could this mean?
Should we be wondering whether Biblical mystics such as Moses & St Paul were actually epileptic?
The BBC’s drama doc on Paul asked that question. It showed Paul having what looked like a fit on the Damascus Road
The presenter, Jonathan Edwards, a famously Christian sportsman, started to lose his faith as a result.
To him, it undermined the reality of Paul’s vision

21. Conclusions?
If it can be shown that some people with epilepsy have visions .....
If religious feelings can be induced by magnets .....
If some people, neurologically, have more sensitivity to religious feelings ....
Does any of this make an individual’s mystical experience any more real?

22. Suggested Further REading
Youtube video religious experience