Philosophy of Religion

Do we have a religious experience?

Introduction: Religious experience as hierophanic experience.

1. Religious experience as experience of the mysterium tremendum. (Otto, Rudolf. 1950. The idea of the holy.)
   • Religious experience as experience of tremendum.
     • Religious experience as experience of mysterium.
       • Religious experience as experience of fascinosum.
2. Religious experience as experience of crucial events. (Smith, John E. 1967. The experience of the holy and the idea of God.)
   • Religious experience as experience that calls attention to life's total quality or worth.
     • Religious experience as experience as experience of momentous choice.
       • Religious experience as experience that is self-revealing.
         • Religious experience as experience that reveals the precariousness of existence.
3. Religious experience as experience of finding God in all things. (St. Thomas Aquinas. 1964. Is there a God?)
   • Religious experience begins with the experience of a specific thing that requires an explanation.
     • Religious experience proceeds with the principle of causality that explains the changes.
       • Religious experience continues with the insight into the contingency of causes that explains the absurdity of infinite regress.
         • Religious experience extends into the realization that gradation of properties explains the co-existence of necessary and contingent beings.
           • Religious experience arrives at the idea that directedness to an end explains the creation of contingent beings by the necessary being.
             • Religious experience concludes that the thing experienced points to a Being whom we call God.

Conclusion: We have a religious experience.