RS question on religious experience help please :)
the question is:
'To what extent is it possible to verify a religious experience?'
it is worth 15 marks
im kinda stuck, so any help would be greatly appreciated :)
tiger~torah Tue 02/12/08 19:27
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Who do you need to prove it to?
Satisfy yourself and have done with it.
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Question Author
urm its a school homework question lol i dont really have a choice
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Your teacher's meeean.
I suppose in terms of miracles you'd need a witness, crikey I don't really know.I can prove it to myself which is good enough for me, but I doubt they'll give you a mark for that.LOL
I suppose you could look up the history of Lourdes that would give you some insight.
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If it's possible to verify it then it ain't a religious experience.
The whole point about religion is that it's based on faith, not verifiable facts.
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I'd give twenty marks for ↑ that ↑ answer.
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To determine that, you would need to decide what are the physical/functional facts about an experience or a feeling? Of course ‘happiness’ and ‘sadness’ are easy, assuming the signs are obvious (smiles, tears etc) and these are assumed by facial expressions. But how do we determine – as we do – that someone is smiling but is not happy. This can be through knowledge of the person and what they are experiencing, facial expression, or sometimes just a ‘feeling’ that summink aint right. So when a girl asks her bloke, do you love me? And he says ‘yes’. Many factors would help her determine whether that was true, or whether she had any nagging doubts.
How could you verify her doubts, and the smiling sadness without the signs, when they are just human feelings/experiecens? Biotheology and the study of neurons tries to find the answers, sometimes it does, often it doesn’t. Can we all agree what love is? It is everything to everyone. There can be no doubt that love and a religious (subjective) experience are functions that involve neurons, but it is, so far, doubtful they could actually be ‘verified’ as such. Just random brain patterns, which implies something is going on, but not what.
So what we have is qualia, with your qualophiles and your qualophobes. Depending upon a person’s persuasion, you can have those that believe the experience is a phenomenon – sometimes a religious one - and those that just think brain matter is playing up, feeding imagination, or just misinterpreting signals. Sometimes though, attempts at verification is presented in physical form, like a smile or a kiss, some flowers etc. or for religious experiences, things like apparitions experienced by many at once, stigmata and miracles. True verification – in proving these things have actually happened as phenomena or subjective experience - is virtually unfeasible.
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It isn't possible to verify a religious experience, so perhaps your teacher is hoping you will realise that, and that you will answer the question accordingly.
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Marvelous, Octavius: What I said in 3 lines and Naomi said in 4, you said in over 30.
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So you did. Well done, have a biscuit.
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Thanks, but don't imagine that that means you get 10 biscuits :-)
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Question Author
thanks for the ideas guys lol
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