Religious Experience

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.

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Types of Religious Experience

Religious experiences are diverse, but philosophers and theologians have identified several major categories:

Mystical Experience

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.