Key Words  - 

Ineffability

Passive

Noetic

Transient

Mystical

Conversion

Corporate

• Principle of Testimony

• Principle of Credulity

• Defeaters

• Naturalist explanation

Strengths

Brain Davies: Religious experiences are a type of sensory experience 

• Swinburne appears right that we should accept religious experiences like other experiences 

  • ANOLOGY: We accept a bed in a room by seeing it so too we should accept God if we see him Swinburne’s Principles work in everyday scenarios

•  The two principles we use implicitly all the time when making judgements about ordinary situations so it seems reasonable to use them about religious experiences too Swinburne acknowledges the presence of defeaters 

• Sometimes defeaters cancel out the principles

  •  EXAMPLE: He argues that you cannot accept the testimony if you have reason to believe you are being deceived. 

  • EXAMPLE: He argues that you cannot accept your senses if you are in a situation in which you senses are unreliable (i.e. on LSD) 

Weaknesses

J.L. Mackie: Deluded people may think they are telling the truth

• Mackie notes that the principle of testimony says that people don’t usually lie. 

• However, people can be mistaken and so testimony can be unreliable even if people aren’t deliberately lying

Caroline Franks Davis: Religious experiences require more evidence than other experiences 

• Davis notes that we should proportion the amount of evidence we require to believe something to how extraordinary it is

• Therefore, religious experiences require more evidence that other sensory experiences because they are extraordinary

Michael Martin: You can use the principles to prove there is no God 

• Martin argued that an atheist could testify that they have experienced the world as Godless. 

• Under Swinburne’s principles we too should accept this testimony of a Godless world

Strengths

Feuerbach: The idea of projecting a God seems reasonable 

• Frued based his idea of projection on ideas from Ludwig Feuerbach who argued that humans project the best human qualities onto something to worship 

  • EXAMPLE: Actors thanking “God’ for their talent at the Oscars 

People tend to have religious experiences under stressful situations 

• Scientific studies have found that people typically experience God under stressful situations or in near-death experiences which supports Freud’s view that people are fooling themselves to make themselves feel better 

Weaknesses

Kate Lowenthal: Not all religious experiences are projective 

• Lowenthal has argued that some religious experiences don’t fit with Freud’s account as they are not always done under stressful situations Michael Persinger: Neurology may explain religious experiences better than psychology 

• It can be argued that recent medical studies have shown that religious experiences are actually caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain not some psychological condition o

  • EXAMPLE: Michael Persinger was able to create religious experiences in test subjects by putting a magnetic helmet on them