Religious experience is always understood by those who have it as pointing beyond itself to some reality regarded as divine. For the believer, religious experience discloses something other than itself; this referent is sometimes described as the “intentional” object that is meant or aimed at by the experiencing person. Analysis of religious experience, interpretations placed upon it, and the beliefs to which it gives rise may result in the denial that there is any such reality to be encountered or that the assertion of it is justified by the experience in question. This conclusion, however, does not change the fact that all religious experience, whether that of the mystic who strives for unity with God or of the naturalist who points to a religious quality in life, purports to be experience “of” something other than itself. The question of the cognitive import or the objective validity of religious experience is one of the most difficult problems encountered in the philosophy of religion. In confronting the question, it is necessary to distinguish between various ways of describing the phenomena under consideration and the critical appraisal of truth claims concerning the reality of the divine made on the basis of these phenomena. Even if describing and appraising are not utterly distinct and involve one another, it is generally admitted that the question of validity cannot be settled on the basis of historical or descriptive accounts alone. Validity and cognitive import are matters calling for logical, semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical criteria—of the principles of rational order and coherence, meaning, knowledge, and reality—and this means that the appraisal of religious experience is ultimately a philosophical and theological problem. The anthropologist will seek to identify and describe the religious experience of tribal peoples as part of a general history and theory of humanity; the sociologist will concentrate on the social expression of religious experience and seek to determine the nature of specifically religious groupings in relation to other groups—associations and organizations that constitute a given society; the psychologist will seek to identify religious experience within the life of the person and attempt to show its relation to the total structure of the self, its behaviour, attitudes, and purposes. In all these cases attention is directed to religious experience as a phenomenon to be described as a factor that performs certain functions in human life and society. As William Warde Fowler, a British historian, showed in his classic Religious Experience of the Roman People (1911), the task of elucidating the role of religion in Roman society can be accomplished without settling the question of the validity or cognitive import of the religious feelings, ideas, and beliefs in question. The empirical investigator, as such, has no special access to the critical question of the validity of religious experience.

The most radical form of the denial that religious experience has cognitive import was advanced by the early logical positivists, who held that all assertions or forms of expression involving a term such as “God” are literally meaningless because there is no way in which they can be verified or falsified.

Others who hold that religious utterance based on experience is without cognitive import regard it as either the expression of emotions or an indication that the person using religious language has certain feelings that are associated with religion. Those who follow the lead of Wittgenstein regard religious utterances as noncognitive but attempt to determine the way in which religious language is actually used within a circle of believers. Some psychologists have denied cognitive status to religious experience on the ground that it represents nothing more than human beings’ projections of their own insecurities in the face of problems posed by life in the world and therefore has no referent beyond itself.

Immediacy and mediation

Revelational and mystical immediacy

Among defenders of the validity and cognitive import of religious experience, it is necessary to distinguish those who take such experience to be an immediate and self-authenticating encounter with the divine and those who claim that apprehension of the divine is the result of inference from, or interpretation of, religious experience. Two forms of immediacy may be distinguished: the revelational and the mystical. Christian theologians, such as Emil Brunner and H.H. Farmer, spoke of a “divine-human encounter,” and Martin Buber, a Jewish religious philosopher, described religious experience as an “I-Thou” relationship; for all three, religious experience means an immediate encounter between persons. The second form of the immediate is the explicitly mystical sort of experience in which the aim is to pass beyond every form of articulation and to attain unity with the divine.

Mediation through analysis and critical interpretation

A number of thinkers have insisted on the validity of religious experience but have denied that it can be understood as wholly immediate and self-supporting, since it stands in need of analysis and critical interpretation. Some, like Paul Tillich, held that there are certain “boundary experiences,” such as having an ultimate concern or experiencing the unconditional character of moral obligation, that become intelligible only when understood as the presence of the holy in experience. Others, such as H.D. Lewis and Charles Hartshorne, found the divine ingredient in the experience of the transcendent and supremely worshipful reality but demand that this experience be coherently articulated and, in the case of Hartshorne, supplemented by rational argument for the reality of the divine. Dewey envisaged a religious quality in experience pointing to God as an ideal that stands in active and creative tension with the actual course of events. Whitehead identified the presence of the divine with an apprehension of a “permanent rightness” in the scheme of things and based the validity of the experience on the claim that an adequate cosmology requires God as a principle of selection aiming at the realization of the good in the world process. James found the justification of religious experience in its consequences for the life of the individual: valid experience is distinguished by its philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness. Finally, some have sought to combine experience and interpretation by taking the traditional proofs of God’s existence and pointing to their roots in the experience of perfection, of the contingency of one’s own existence, and of the reality of purpose in human life. On this view, the arguments for the reality of God are not wholly formal demonstrations but rather the tracing out of intelligible patterns in experience.

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