Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Religious Experience;
The Argument
- 'If there is a God there are likely to be experiences of him.
There are religious experiences, therefore there is a God'
- These two sentences are not
logically linked
- William James
- Took a pyschological approach; religious
experiences indicated the probability of God
- Interested in the effects of
religious experience on
people's lives
- The validity of a religious experience
rests upon the effects it produces
- Are lives changed?
- Does it work opposed to is it true?
- The phenomena of religious
experiences point to a higher order of
reality
- Richard SWINBURNE
- Defence for Religious Experience
- Principle of Credulity
- We must accept what appears to
be the case unless we have clear
evidence to the contrary
- Might mean that you have good reason to doubt
the person, you prove that God does not exist
- Or you show that the experience was not caused by God
- Principle of Testimony
- Unless we have positive evidence
that they are misremembering or
are untrustworthy, we should
believe the testimony of the
experience
- 'Other things being equal, we usually
think that what others tell us that they
perceived probably happened'