(Originally written February 27, 2007 in Book 13)
Philosophy of Religion 2nd Edition
Norman Geisler & Winfried Corduan
Wipf and Stock Publishers
Eugene, OR 2003
Part 1 - God and Experience
1. The Nature of Religious Experience
"Religion is an experiential issue, not a merely intellectual one" (Geisler, 13).
The Meaning of Experience
Experience is the awareness of a subject that individuals have.
Experience can be viewed two ways:
1) Generally
2) Specifically
General experience is the totality of consciousness.
Specific experience is the experience of a certain event in one's life.
Experience in general is the basis for particular experiences.
Primary awareness is the most basic level of experience. It's the basic unreflective consciousness of an individual.
Secondary awareness is the consciousness of being conscious. Remembering, reflecting, relating and reasoning occur in secondary awareness.
Secondary awareness presupposes primary and awareness.
The Meaning of Religion
Religion is difficult to define in a universally accepted way.
By using Wittgenstein's notion of "family resemblance", philosophers of religion can state that no two religions have identical characteristics, but all religions exhibit typical characteristics to some degree.
Awareness of the Transcendent is usually included in most definitions of religion.
There are at least two senses in which religious experience involves transcendence:
1) Self-Transcendence: the process of overcoming the conditions of one's finitude
2) The Transcendent: the object of religious experience
The Christian God is one form of the Transcendent. The two terms are not equivalent.
Transcendent means two things:
1) Going beyond one's immediate consciousness while is somehow always known to be there.
2) Religious transcendent is the ultimate, that which is Beyond beyond where no more beyonds can be sought for.
Religious Experience Distinguished from other experiences
Religious experience is often closely associated with three other types of experience:
1) Moral
2) Aesthetic
3) Secular
Religious experience in contrast to moral experience
Some equate religious experience and moral experience. Kant defined religion as "the recognition of all duties as divine commands".
Soren Kierkegaard drew the sharpest distinction between a moral duty and a religious duty. Moral duties express one's universal duty, but that religious duties hold the individual as a particular as higher than the universal. Basically Kierkegaard claimed that a moral experience responds to a moral law, whereas a religious experience responds to the moral Law-giver.
Morality is a responsibility to the world; religion is a responsibility to beyond the world. "Morality tells a person what he ought to do; religion can help him do it" (20).
A religious experience has a broader scope of commitment, the commitment is different in kind, the object is higher, and its object has the power to overcome and unify.
"Morality is a matter of duty; religion is a matter also of desire" (21).
Moral mistakes can be overcome by religious experience.
Religious Experience in contrast to Aesthetic Experience
Schleiermacher states that science is speculative, art is practical and religion is intuitive.
Kierkegaard views the aesthetic, moral and religious as three dimensions of one's life:
Aesthetic - level of feeling
Ethical - level of deciding
Religious - level of existing
Aesthetic is simply knowing, religion is what one chooses to live.
"Aesthetics involves a sense of wonder and amazement; religion involves a sense of worship and adoration" (24).
The religious experience experiences what is ultimate; the aesthetic experience, regardless of how profound, is not ultimate.
Religious Experience in contrast to purely secular experience
There is a difference between humanistic and secular experience.
Humanistic experience can still be an experience of that which is transcendent.
"The fact that purely secular experiences are difficult to find is testimony to how incurably religious man is" (25).
That which is unable or unwilling to transcend in any direction is non-religious.
The transcendent is difficult to find, so some have given up the search. Others are completely unwilling to search for it.
Some refuse to commit to the Transcendent because they wish to honor themselves as the ultimate.
There are two ways in which a person can be irreligious or purely humanistic:
1) He is unable to see the Transcendent
2) He is unwilling to submit to it
The universality and reality of religious experience
Few, if any, have attained a state of complete secularism. "Most secular experience is quasi religious" (26)
Human kind as a whole has been religious. "To be human means to reach toward God" (27).
"The mere universality of religious experience is by no means a guarantee of its reality or a sure indication of its unreality" (27).
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