ارزش معرفت شناختی تجربه دینی

by Caroline Franks Davis (نویسنده), علی شیروانی (مترجم)

Caroline Franks Davis provides a clear, sensitive, and carefully argued assessment of the value of religious experiences as evidence for religious beliefs. Much more than an 'argument from religious experience', the inquiry systematically addresses underlying philosophical issues such as the role of interpretation in experience, the function of models and metaphors in religious language, and the way perceptual experiences in general are used as evidence for claims about the world. The author examines several arguments from religious experience and, using contemporary and classic sources from the world religions, gives an account of the different types of experience. To meet sceptical challenges to religious experience, she draws extenisvely on psychological and sociological as well as philosophical and religious literature, probing deeply into the questions whether religious experiences are merely a matter of interpretation, whether there is irreducible conflict among religious experiences, and whether psychological and other reductionist explanations of religious experience are satisfactory. She concludes that religious experiences, like most experiences, are most effective as evidence within a cumulative style of argument which combines evidence from a wide range of sources.

Genres: Philosophy, Spirituality

First published September 28, 1989

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine you live in an apartment building, The corner apartment next to you is, as far as you know, empty. However, there is a long standing rumour circulating through the building that someone lives in that apartment. In fact, the majority of the people who inhabit the building affirm this is the case, though you often hear them bickering in the common area about exactly what the mysterious denizen of the apartment is like. Occasionally one of the residents of the building corners you in the laundry room and assaults you with a barrage of arguments designed to prove to you incontrovertibly the room is inhabited. Once an old and yellowed slip of paper fell through the mail slot asserting quite forceably that the room is inhabited. Another time when you were leaving for work you noticed a discarded chocolate bar wrapper outside that apartment door and speculated briefly whether someone had come and gone. But you were never quite sure. And then one day it happened. On your way home from work you almost ran into the apartment dweller as he was rushing out the door. Inferred reality had become actual reality.

The first three instances (roughly analogous to philosophical arguments for the existence of God, the testimony of holy books, and evidence from the natural world) are all inferred realities but the last, inasmuch as there is anything to it, is an actual reality. That was the question being pondered in this book: are religious experiences evidence of an actual reality above and beyond the realm of the five senses? Written in an academic rather than a popular format, this book was very linear and precise in its approach. The author begins by attempting to define and then classify what a religious experience might be. She breaks them down into six categories:

1) Interpretive Experiences
2) Quasi-sensory Experienced
3) Revelatory Experiences
4) Regenerative experiences
5) Numinous experiences
6) Mystical experiences

This was followed by a chapter on arguments for religious experience which, at the risk of being pedantic, are not so much arguments as analogies from the natural world seeking to explain some of the troubling issues surrounding this phenomenon; things like the fact that some people seek after religious experiences and never have them while others never seek them – never even give God a thought – and do have them. Examples of the type of analogies advanced are things like the spiritual equivalent of being tone deaf or lacking one of the five traditional senses.

The chapter on challenges to religious experiences divides the challenges down into three broad sections:

1) Description Related Challenges: these challenges centre on the description given of the experience and seek to find flaws in it due to either what the experiencer conveyed or what the listener understood to be being said
2) Subject Related Challenges: these challenges centre on the subject of the experience, their character, their psychology, their cultural background, and the like
3) Object Related Challenges: these challenges centre on the object of the experience, seeking to show that the object is not what it appears to be. Asserting that someone has been misled by the Devil because their experience is different than your own is the most common example of this.

An entire chapter was spent on what the author referred to the conflicting claims challenge. This was interesting. Whereas it is common enough to read about conflicting doctrinal beliefs (ie. God stating in the Old Testament that you are not to eat certain types of animals and then seemingly doing an about face in the New Testament era and stating it is now okay to eat those types of animals), the author instead examined the phenomenal aspects of religious experiences and noted where they diverged and where they didn't, seeking to distill some common elements. The word ineffable gets bandied about a lot; some people consider this cheating. I am not convinced of that. What should one expect a reality that stretches out in every direction throughout all of time and space (and quite possibly even beyond such finite limiting concepts) to be like? A final chapter considered the challenge against religious experience from reductive physicalism.

In the end the author reached the same conclusion I hold, that religious experiences in and of themselves are not sufficient evidence for the existence of God. If I were to see a ghost, that might be good evidence for me that ghosts exist (it also might not be if I am sufficiently skeptical) but there is no reason why I should suppose the rest of the world would consider my experience of seeing a ghost as incontrovertible evidence that ghosts exist. They didn't see what I saw. I could just another crank, another loony, another attention seeker making up stories. Indeed, you might be thinking that even as you read these words :-) However, something I would note where religious experiences are concerned is that it is glibly dismissive to write off something spread out geographically and historically as nothing but the work of cranks and liars (unless you want to make the audacious claim that the larger part of the human race has and continues to be cranks and liars.) Religious experience could work as part of a more comprehensive case that God exists, one small puzzle piece slotted into place to form an overarching picture that marries the inferred with the actual at the individual level.