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Religious Experience Research Paper

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Richard Swinburne states in Natural Theology, “We should seek explanations of all things” (pg. 542). This is often more difficult than one could expect. Consequently, in seeking explanations, numerous obstacles such as personal experience and bias can impede the way of getting to the veracity of those explanations. Ultimately, this paper is challenged to seek an explanation of whether religious experience provides adequate justification for the existence of God. Moreover, the process in which this work will undertake, commences with the explanation of what is a religious experience, the justification for the arguments, and finally, the conclusion which by no means is the definitive answer to the question. (It might even raise additional …show more content…
Therefore, we will confine our discussion to the religious experiences that solely pertain to experiencing God, the all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), and all-good (omnibenevolent) being. (pg. 458). First, there are three basic principal components that we constitute as key to having a religious experience. The initial component is that the Religious Experience (hereafter referred to as RE) is clearly a perceptual experience. “Just as sense experience can give us knowledge of natural things, some people claim that RE can give us knowledge of supernatural things” (pg. 493). For the purpose of this discussion the perceptual experience would be the difference between celestial voices being heard in the mind as opposed to seeing the Virgin Mary in a bagel. The second component is that RE triggers a mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding of something. The third is that it is solely a personal …show more content…
Additionally, Trueblood makes the valid point that the sheer volume of REs reported over the years by individuals render it impossible to ignore or deny the experience they think is from God. For this point, I will concede that RE is a real phenomenon and individuals believe them to be of God. Moreover, I recognize that their RE does not need to necessarily conform to the hallucination hypothesis, “which says that REs are caused by abnormal conditions of the body” (pg. 493) as a reason to deny the fact of a veridical RE. According to our text, every experience we have causes some sort of bodily reaction. “What we experience is determined by the state of our body at the time of the experience…We can’t discount REs simply because they occur under abnormal conditions” (pg. 494). Further, these experiences are often life changing, which causes the experient to take a drastic turnaround in their life’s course because they believe the RE is of God.
However, in light of the previous argument, there is still a very important detail, which is overwhelmingly compelling not to believe in the existence of God. The individual RE is personal and dependent on the experient’s background and religious indoctrination. The RE is so heavily dependent

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