You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Religious experience is one of the most personal and compelling reasons people give for believing in God. Across cultures and throughout history, individuals have reported encounters with the divine — experiences of awe, transcendence, conversion, and mystical union. But do these experiences provide genuine evidence for God's existence, or can they be explained by psychology, neuroscience, and cultural conditioning? This lesson examines the types of religious experience, the philosophical arguments for and against their evidential value, and the key thinkers in this debate.
Religious experiences are diverse, but philosophers and theologians have identified several major categories:
Mystical experiences involve a direct, immediate awareness of God or ultimate reality — a sense of union or oneness with the divine that transcends ordinary consciousness. Mystics across different religious traditions have reported strikingly similar experiences: a sense of timelessness, the dissolution of the boundary between self and God, overwhelming joy and peace, and the conviction that the experience reveals a deeper truth about reality.
Famous mystics include St Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), who described ecstatic visions and the experience of God's presence piercing her heart; Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), who spoke of the soul's union with the divine ground; and Rumi (1207–1273), the Sufi poet who described the soul's longing for reunion with God.
Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), in The Idea of the Holy (1917), introduced the concept of the numinous — a distinctive type of religious experience characterised by the sense of encountering something wholly other (mysterium tremendum et fascinans). The numinous experience has three elements:
| Element | Description |
|---|---|
| Mysterium | A sense of encountering something utterly beyond human comprehension — the wholly other |
| Tremendum | A feeling of awe, dread, and overwhelming majesty — the creature-feeling of being small before the infinite |
| Fascinans | A sense of fascination, attraction, and grace — the experience is terrifying yet irresistibly compelling |
Key Definition: Numinous — Rudolf Otto's term for the experience of encountering the "wholly other" — a presence that is simultaneously awe-inspiring, terrifying, and fascinating. The numinous is not a moral or rational concept but a unique category of experience.
Conversion experiences involve a dramatic, often sudden transformation of belief, attitude, and way of life. The classic biblical example is St Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus (Acts 9) — a blinding light and the voice of Christ transformed Saul the persecutor into Paul the apostle. Modern examples include John Wesley (1703–1791), who described his heart being "strangely warmed" at Aldersgate Street in 1738, an experience that launched the Methodist movement.
Many believers report experiencing God's presence through regular practices of prayer and meditation. These experiences are typically less dramatic than mystical or conversion experiences but are often described as deeply meaningful — a sense of being heard, guided, or comforted.
Some religious experiences occur collectively — entire groups of people simultaneously experiencing the divine. The Toronto Blessing (1994), in which congregants at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church experienced uncontrollable laughter, weeping, and falling, is a modern example. Pentecostal worship regularly involves collective experiences of speaking in tongues and ecstatic worship.
William James (1842–1910), the American philosopher and psychologist, conducted the most influential study of religious experience in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). James identified four characteristics of mystical experience:
| Characteristic | Description |
|---|---|
| Ineffability | The experience defies adequate expression in language — the subject says it must be directly experienced to be understood |
| Noetic quality | The experience conveys knowledge or insight — the subject feels they have gained a deep truth about reality that reason alone could not provide |
| Transiency | The experience is temporary — it cannot be sustained for long periods, though its effects may be lasting |
| Passivity | The subject feels that their own will is in abeyance — they are grasped by a superior power rather than actively producing the experience |
James adopted a pragmatic approach: he evaluated religious experiences not by their causes but by their fruits — their effects on the person's life. If a religious experience transforms someone positively — producing love, compassion, moral improvement, and a sense of meaning — then it has pragmatic value regardless of its origin.
Key Definition: Pragmatism — The philosophical approach, associated with William James, that evaluates beliefs and experiences by their practical consequences and effects rather than by their theoretical truth or causal origin.
Richard Swinburne (b. 1934) has argued that religious experiences should be taken as genuine evidence for God's existence unless there are specific reasons to doubt them. He formulates two key principles:
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.