Religious Experience and Rational Appraisal

1974 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith E. Yandell
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Rational Justification ◽  
Rational Support

Appeal to experience for rational justification of religious belief is probably as old as the question whether religious belief has any rational support. The issues relevant to such appeal range widely, and I will have to be content to deal with only a few of them.

The Varieties of Religious Experience

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
William James
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Asking Questions ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Urgent Necessity

‘By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is William James’s classic survey of religious belief in its most personal, and often its most heterodox, aspects. Asking questions such as how we define evil to ourselves, the difference between a healthy and a divided mind, the value of saintly behaviour, and what animates and characterizes the mental landscape of sudden conversion, James’s masterpiece stands at a unique moment in the relationship between belief and culture. Faith in institutional religion and dogmatic theology was fading away, and the search for an authentic religion rooted in personality and subjectivity was a project conducted as an urgent necessity. With psychological insight, philosophical rigour, and a determination not to jump to the conclusion that in tracing religion’s mental causes we necessarily diminish its truth or value, in the Varieties James wrote a truly foundational text for modern belief. Matthew Bradley’s wide-ranging new edition examines the ideas that continue to fuel modern debates on atheism and faith.

Affective Rationalism and Religious Insight

2019 ◽  
pp. 182-228
Author(s):  
John Pittard
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Religious Disagreement ◽  
A Minor

This chapter considers further what implications rationalist weak conciliationism has for religious belief. Rationalist weak conciliationism may seem to imply that justified religious belief is a philosophical accomplishment reserved only for the analytically sophisticated and that personal religious experience plays at best a minor role in accounting for the rationality of religious belief. Resisting these alleged implications, the chapter argues against an “austere rationalism” that sees all rational insight as a product of dispassionate analytical faculties. A case is made for an “affective rationalism” that emphasizes the essential role played by the emotions in facilitating insights into evaluative questions, including evaluative questions that bear significantly on the plausibility of competing religious and irreligious outlooks. The chapter concludes with a discussion of examples that illustrate more concretely how rationalist weak conciliationism applies to situations of religious disagreement.

The Human Face of Naturalism: Putnam and Diamond on Religious Belief and the “Gulfs between Us”

The Monist ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 103 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-414
Author(s):  
Sofia Miguens
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
Human Face ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Cora Diamond

Abstract Hilary Putnam and Cora Diamond both wrote on Wittgenstein’s Three Lectures on Religious Belief. They did it quite differently; my ultimate aim in this article is to explore this difference. Putnam’s view of religion is largely a view of ethical life; I look thus into his writings on ethics and his proposals to face the relativist menace therein. Still, in his incursions into philosophy of religion, describing religious experience through authors such as Rosenzweig, Buber, or Levinas, Putnam deals with what Diamond calls, after Wittgenstein, “the gulfs between us.” Such gulfs, and the threat of relativism they bring, need to be accounted for. With that purpose in mind I complement Putnam’s reading of the Three Lectures with Diamond’s own reading.

scholarly journals Objective, Intersubjective Mystical Relationships: Justification and Reality

Open Theology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 198-216
Author(s):  
Michael Barber
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Rational Justification ◽  
William Alston ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Personal Character ◽  
Bodily Presence ◽  
Phenomenological Account ◽  
Analytic Philosopher

Abstract Amplifying the idea of religious experience as occurring within an encompassing “religious province of meaning” and developing the personal character of the experience of God in the Abrahamic religious traditions, this paper argues that mystics in those traditions experience God “objectively.” Their experience of God is that of experiencing God as what Alfred Schutz called a “Consociate,” despite the lack of God’s bodily presence. Such a phenomenological account of religious experience converges with the description by analytic philosopher William Alston of religious experience as an objectively given, non-sensual perception of God, even though the personal Consociate model is preferable to the perceptual one, given the Abrahamic traditions. Conversely, Alston and Alvin Plantinga show how ascending levels of rational justification of religious experience are possible with reference to the experiential level, and such levels can be accommodated within the Schutzian “theoretical province of meaning” in its collaboration with the religious province. Both the Consociate and Schelerian/personalist accounts of God resist any explaining away of religious experience as mere phantasy, and the religious finite province of meaning provides a more comprehensive explanation of religious experience than either Alston’s or Plantinga’s approaches. However, the strategy of envisioning religious experience as taking place within a finite province of meaning is more noetic in character than Scheler’s view of an eidetically elaborated noematic absolute reality that precedes the rise of consciousness itself and that counterbalances the noetic portrayal of religious experience.

Scepticism, Evidentialism and the Party Argument: A Pascalian Perspective

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Holyer
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Positive Contribution ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Epistemic Standards ◽  
Rational Support

Sceptical arguments, it is commonly claimed, may succeed in disarming some powerful objections to religious belief, but they do nothing more than establish a state of parity between the believer and the objector. For this reason, they make no positive contribution to the justification of religious belief and therefore are of value only to the fideist who insists that religious beliefs do not have and do not need rational support. However, while this opinion is widely held by philosophers of religion, it ignores the fact that sceptical arguments have given rise to a constructive tradition in epistemology: what is often referred to as naturalism. In what follows I shall develop a suggestion from this tradition, and that is that sceptical arguments lead not to an abandonment of claims to justified belief but to a revision and contextualization of our epistemic standards. Though this suggestion can be found in a number of philosophers in this tradition, my inspiration for it comes from Pascal, who made an important place for scepticism in the evidentialist argument for Christianity which we find in the Pensées. To develop this suggestion, I shall first sketch a position inspired by Pascal and then argue that the possibilities it suggests have been insufficiently considered in a number of recent discussions of the importance of sceptical arguments in the epistemology of religious belief.

Science, Religion and a Culture of Life

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Dilley ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Sensus Divinitatis ◽  
The Relationship

For those who wish to affirm a culture that values human life, the relationship between science and religion continues to be of import. Some, like Edward O. Wilson, think that naturalistic science will eventually account for all phenomena, even religious experience itself. This essay considers Wilson's hypothesis by surveying three classic explanations of universal religious belief: Sigmund Freud's projection theory, Charles Darwin's evolutionarry paradigm, and John Calvin's sensus divinitatis. Both Freud's and Darwin's views suffer from self-referential and evidential problems. In contrast, Calvin's model handles well major objections of religious pluralism and atheism. Of these three, Calvin's view is superior. Religion may not be reducible to a naturalistic explanation, and those who wish to promote a culture of life ought to view the relations between science and religion in a non-Wilsonian fashion, eschewing reductionism.

A Measured Faith: Edwin Starbuck, William James, and the Scientific Reform of Religious Experience

2008 ◽  
Vol 101 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 431-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher White
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
William James ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Questionnaire Data ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
First Americans ◽  
Enormous Number

A number of recent studies have drawn attention to how the study of religion and religious seeking were intertwined in European and American cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ann Taves, Leigh Schmidt and Hans Kippenberg, for example, have pointed to ways that particularly Protestant anxieties and dilemmas shaped scholarly thinking about categories such as experience and “mysticism.” Scholars have been less interested, however, in the other side of the exchange—less interested, in other words, in how scholarship has reshaped religious belief and practice. The first Americans to study religion scientifically, American psychologists of religion, serve as a particularly useful illustration of how scholarly methods influenced modern ways of believing, but there is still little historical scholarship on the key figures involved. There remain few critical works, for example, on the pioneer psychologists of religion—Edwin Starbuck (1866–1947), George Coe (1862–1951), James Bissett Pratt (1875–1944), and G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924)—and their ways of studying and attempting to reform religion. The notable exception is, of course, the literature on William James, which includes an enormous number of dissertations and monographs, including several important studies examining the Varieties of Religious Experience and James's other efforts to help fashion a science of religion. But even the scholarship on James does not consider how he and others used the sciences to reform religious belief and revitalize American culture. Given the fact that James identified himself as a psychologist, engaged a wide range of neurological, physiological and psychological thinkers in his work, and drew extensively on psychologists like George Coe and Edwin Starbuck, it is remarkable that these contexts have been overlooked. His debt to the psychologist Edwin Starbuck is particularly striking. In his Varieties, he uses or refers to Starbuck's empirical work twenty-six times, he draws from Starbuck's questionnaire data thirty-seven times, and he mentions Starbuck by name a total of forty-six times, which is roughly the equivalent of once in every six pages of text.

scholarly journals Transformative Experience and the Problem of Religious Disagreement

2021 ◽  
pp. 127-141
Author(s):  
Joshua Blanchard ◽  
L.A. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Peer Disagreement ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
Religious Disagreement ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 6 considers how peer disagreement over religion presents an epistemological problem: How can confidence in any religious claims including their negations be epistemically justified? Here, it is shown that the transformative nature of religious experience poses a further problem: to transition between religious belief and skepticism is not just to adopt a different set of beliefs, but to transform into a different version of oneself. It is argued that this intensifies the problem of pluralism by adding a new dimension to religious disagreement, for we can lack epistemic and affective access to our potential religious, agnostic, or skeptical selves. Yet, access to these selves seems to be required for the purposes of decision-making that is to be both rational and authentic. Finally, the chapter reflects on the relationship between the transformative problem and what it shows about the epistemic status of religious conversion and deconversion, in which one disagrees with one’s own transformed self.

scholarly journals First Person and Third Person Reasons in Religious Epistemology

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Zagzebski
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Religious Epistemology ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Religious Disagreement

In this paper I argue that there are two kinds of epistemic reasons. One kind is irreducibly first personal – what I call deliberative reasons. The other kind is third personal – what I call theoretical reasons. I argue that attending to this distinction illuminates a host of problems in epistemology in general and in religious epistemology in particular. These problems include (a) the way religious experience operates as a reason for religious belief, (b) how we ought to understand religious testimony, (c) how religious authority can be justified, (d) the problem of religious disagreement, and (e) the reasonableness of religious conversion.

Introduction: Modernism and the Turn to Religion

Renascence ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Craig Woelfel ◽  
Jayme Stayer ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
The Other ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Religious Dimensions

This Introduction contextualizes the volume in modernist tensions between belief and unbelief, and subsequent debates about the nature of secularization. An opening moment considers Pound and Woolf’s rejection of T. S. Eliot’s religious conversion as emblematic of a “subtraction” theory of secularization, in which secularity and religious belief are taken as mutually exclusive horizons of understanding. Such thinking, it is argued, has precluded a more nuanced approach. Criticism has largely ignored more complex and fragmentary religious dimensions of modernist production; or, on the other hand, taken up religion only in the narrow and anachronistic sense of traditional Christianity. This volume attempts to explore the religious dimensions of modernism in a more modernist sense: taking modernist art as a critical liminal space for exploring new modes of religious experience in complex and resonant ways -- often in open rejection of traditional modes of faith, and in authors beyond the usual suspects.

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