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hawkwing_lbSo, the topic for theology this week was religious experience, and its nature. I feel moved to discuss it here, if only to clarify to myself how I feel about it. Somebody should probably stop me.
Some - many, in fact - theologians hold that there is a universal experience of the divine or supernatural. Some, like Friedrich Schleiermacher, hold that it is the experience of a sense of 'absolute dependency' on a greater power, or, like H.D. Lewis, argue that it comes from an apprehension of the limitations of human existence and the human world and the awareness or feeling that there must exist some unconsidered, infinite, or absolute being beyond human existence and upon which human existence is utterly dependent. (Others, like Feuerbach, contend that 'God' is a projection of human desires, but that's not entirely germane to my discussion.)
Theologians who generalise from their own specific experience of religion overlook one thing, however: the problem of the observer.
The problem with constructing theories from specific or personal experience in theology or philosophy is similar to the problem of adjusting for bias in science: one cannot, quite literally cannot, divorce the observer from the thing observed. Thus all conclusions that the Observer reaches about the Phenomenon (unless one takes adequate care to adjust for bias, which is sometimes done in science and never in philosophy or theology) are therefore coloured by the Observer's preconceptions.
'Religious experience' can be intrepreted in different ways. The experiences which believers term 'religious' could be communications from an absolute Being or reality; or they could be an effect of the brain chemicals; or they could be some mix of the two; or nothing of significance at all.
But if one is raised with religion*, in a culture wherein belief in a supreme Deity is the rule rather than the exception, is one not predisposed to view such experiences as communications from the specific Deity which one has been raised to think is present and active in the world? If one is a Christian, one would be predisposed to believe it was God or the Christ, if Muslim, Allah, if Jewish, YHWH, not so?
So how, therefore, can a theologian generalise from their specific experience to a 'universal' theory of religious experience, and thus the validation of a specific framework of belief?
I mean, I've had 'religious' experiences, and I'm a freaking agnostic.**
(I was a deist at the time, and felt quite comforted by the thought that there was Something out there. I've since come to believe it was a false comfort, and self-deluding. There is no redemption and no absolution, and if nothing has meaning, then everything must, and one owes it to oneself and the world to be the best, most decent freaking human being one can be.)
I still have 'religious' experiences, in fact, only now I intrepret them in terms of fluctuations of the brain chemicals. So what makes my interpretations less valid, in the eyes of certain sections of society, than anyone else's, simply because I prefer not to believe in a Deus Pater? Or, for that matter, in the authenticity of revealed scripture?***
*
*Note that my experience and field of study is with Christian religion, and that I'm an agnostic and a skeptic by inclination. As such I hope to wear my biases on my sleeve.
**I was raised by the latest in a long line of Lapsed Catholics, attended a non-denominational - for which read Anglican - primary school and Catholic secondary one, and decided early I had no use for hypocrisy. My declared agnosticism is really a logical progression (from childhood Christianity through adolescent Deism to adult agnosticism) but you know, I still catch shit about it from some people. And not just when I call them on grounds of hypocrisy, either.
***I'm a historian-in-training. The Bible contradicts itself multiple times. If it was indeed 'inspired by God', then to paraphrase theologian Keith Ward, God was very definitely not interested in making himself clear - as a Omnipotent Being ought to be able to, if It so desired.
Some - many, in fact - theologians hold that there is a universal experience of the divine or supernatural. Some, like Friedrich Schleiermacher, hold that it is the experience of a sense of 'absolute dependency' on a greater power, or, like H.D. Lewis, argue that it comes from an apprehension of the limitations of human existence and the human world and the awareness or feeling that there must exist some unconsidered, infinite, or absolute being beyond human existence and upon which human existence is utterly dependent. (Others, like Feuerbach, contend that 'God' is a projection of human desires, but that's not entirely germane to my discussion.)
Theologians who generalise from their own specific experience of religion overlook one thing, however: the problem of the observer.
The problem with constructing theories from specific or personal experience in theology or philosophy is similar to the problem of adjusting for bias in science: one cannot, quite literally cannot, divorce the observer from the thing observed. Thus all conclusions that the Observer reaches about the Phenomenon (unless one takes adequate care to adjust for bias, which is sometimes done in science and never in philosophy or theology) are therefore coloured by the Observer's preconceptions.
'Religious experience' can be intrepreted in different ways. The experiences which believers term 'religious' could be communications from an absolute Being or reality; or they could be an effect of the brain chemicals; or they could be some mix of the two; or nothing of significance at all.
But if one is raised with religion*, in a culture wherein belief in a supreme Deity is the rule rather than the exception, is one not predisposed to view such experiences as communications from the specific Deity which one has been raised to think is present and active in the world? If one is a Christian, one would be predisposed to believe it was God or the Christ, if Muslim, Allah, if Jewish, YHWH, not so?
So how, therefore, can a theologian generalise from their specific experience to a 'universal' theory of religious experience, and thus the validation of a specific framework of belief?
I mean, I've had 'religious' experiences, and I'm a freaking agnostic.**
(I was a deist at the time, and felt quite comforted by the thought that there was Something out there. I've since come to believe it was a false comfort, and self-deluding. There is no redemption and no absolution, and if nothing has meaning, then everything must, and one owes it to oneself and the world to be the best, most decent freaking human being one can be.)
I still have 'religious' experiences, in fact, only now I intrepret them in terms of fluctuations of the brain chemicals. So what makes my interpretations less valid, in the eyes of certain sections of society, than anyone else's, simply because I prefer not to believe in a Deus Pater? Or, for that matter, in the authenticity of revealed scripture?***
*
*Note that my experience and field of study is with Christian religion, and that I'm an agnostic and a skeptic by inclination. As such I hope to wear my biases on my sleeve.
**I was raised by the latest in a long line of Lapsed Catholics, attended a non-denominational - for which read Anglican - primary school and Catholic secondary one, and decided early I had no use for hypocrisy. My declared agnosticism is really a logical progression (from childhood Christianity through adolescent Deism to adult agnosticism) but you know, I still catch shit about it from some people. And not just when I call them on grounds of hypocrisy, either.
***I'm a historian-in-training. The Bible contradicts itself multiple times. If it was indeed 'inspired by God', then to paraphrase theologian Keith Ward, God was very definitely not interested in making himself clear - as a Omnipotent Being ought to be able to, if It so desired.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 02:57 am (UTC)I majored in Religion in college, and while taking simultaneous classes in both Islam and Therevada Buddhism, noticed that the mystics of both faiths sounded like they were talking about the same experience. I wound up writing my term paper for the Buddhism class on comparative mysticism. My teacher approved the topic, warned me not to make the mistake of assuming that the same language = the same experience, but did not point out the book by Aldous Huxley where he makes the exact same observation. Since I'm overly ambitious, instead of limiting my comparisons to Buddhism and Islam, I also pulled in writings from Christian, Jewish, and Taoist mystics for good measure. (The Cloud of Unknowing is great material for anyone who wants to prove that Christian and Buddhist mystics are having a similar experience.) Anyway, I got an A- on the paper, so I probably made at least a half-decent case for myself.
My friend Dave said that he'd noticed the same thing, but had always assumed that this just meant that malnutrition, sleep deprivation and hypothermia did the same things to your brain regardless of your religious beliefs.
Some years later (probably in 1996) I read a newspaper article where scientists revealed that they'd found the part of the brain responsible for transcendent experiences. It's related to a form of epilepsy that is strongly related to religious experiences (meaning, people with this form of epilepsy frequently report transcendent experiences). There are a whole host of interesting things about this (including that Paul is thought to have possibly been epileptic) but one of the things I liked was that the scientists noted very specifically that this discovery was neutral as to the truth of religious experience. This could mean that all religious experience was just a random misfiring in that area of your brain. OR, it could mean that God uses this area of the brain when communicating with us. Either is possible.
I have a close personal friend now (the mother of one of Molly's friends) who has really intense transcendent experiences; she became a Quaker in part to try to make sense of what she'd been experiencing since childhood. We talked a bit once about the whole issue of how you know when you're experiencing God vs. just crazy, which is a question I've found really interesting for a long time. E. certainly does not act at all crazy most of the time and she's nowhere near as woo-woo as a good third of the people I knew growing up in Madison. Anyway, it's certainly possible that her experiences are just a bunch of hyperactive neurons in the part of the brain responsible for transcendent experiences.
I find stories of personal experiences of the divine to be really interesting. A non-negligible minority run counter to what the mystic might expect to see or hear. I read up on apparitions of Mary at one point; there was one apparition that appeared in Egypt, IIRC, to a large crowd of Muslims. The Muslim interpretation of the apparitions of Mary is that djinni are doing it as a hoax on humanity, which certainly for lots of them makes as much sense as any other explanation I've heard.
I do believe in God, FTR, though what precisely I believe about God often varies by the hour.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 05:24 pm (UTC)Wow. That's really interesting. And makes a hell of a lot of sense.
I'm waffling about theology on LJ partly because I dislike most theologians' (at least the ones I've been assigned reading on) a priori assumption that God exists, and that all they have left to do is justify why it's one particular view of God(the Christian one, since this is a course in Christian theology) that's the right one. It leaves me stumbling through what I see as holes in their logic, but to the theologians themselves, there are no holes there at all.
Having transcendant experiences as a teenager led me to agnosticism. There is awe in contemplating the vastness of the universe, but that vastness is not necessarily conscious or directed, and imagining it to be so in any humanly comprehensible or compassionate way strikes me as excessively optomistic, to say the least.