Broad Categories Of Religious Experience

According to the traditional Christian theistic tradition, God exists and is an omniscient, omnipotent and omni-benevolent being that desires to be in an intimate relationship with his creation. One way that God chooses to connect and communicate with his creation is through religious experiences. There are accounts throughout history of people such as Paul, or Saul (Acts 9), Joan of Arc and Teresa of Avila (P&R 220) being privy to these types of experience. Over time these religious experiences have been used as evidence for the argument for the existence of God. In this paper I will address this argument originally defined by C.D. Broad as well as the objections raised against it showing that these religious experiences are indeed sufficient

The first are experiences which epistemically seem to the subject to be experiences of God or another supernatural being in perceiving a perfectly ordinary non-religious object. An example of this experience would be a theist seeing God’s handiwork in the night sky. The second kind of experience occur when perceiving very unusual public objects which may or may not violate a natural law. An example of this experience are the resurrection appearances of Jesus as described in the bible. The third kind of experiences occurs when the subject has a religious experience in having certain sensations private to herself that can be described with a normal vocabulary used for describing sensations resulting from use of our 5 sense. Another example from the bible is in Matthew when Joseph dreams he sees an angel telling him to leave Bethlehem and go to Egypt with Mary and Jesus. The fourth kind of experience is when the subject has sensations private to herself that cannot be described by a normal vocabulary. This is the type of experience that people find difficult if not possible to describe yet feel as there is something to be described. The final type of religious experience is one the subject does not have by having sensations. The subject seems to be aware of God or some timeless reality but not because she is having certain sensations only because it

Broad. His argument is important because it solidifies the reliability of the mystics having the experiences. If mystics are considered unreliable then there is no need to continue on with the argument from religious experience. Broad creates an analogy between those who have religious experiences to those who have an ear for music. Those who have certain recognizable religious experiences are equivalent to those who have an ear for music. Those who do not have certain recognizable religious experiences are equivalent to people considered tone-deaf (Broad 120). Going along with this line of thinking, it would be absurd for someone who does not have any recognizable religious experience to not only consider themselves superior then those who do but to also construct their own theories. One should also not expect too much of people who have these religious experiences. Just because they have these experiences does not mean there is a guarantee of high intelligence. In the words of C.D. Broad, “He may also be almost as ignorant about other aspects of reality as the non-musical or non-religious man is about musical or religious experience.” (Broad 121). Those opposed such as Bertrand Russell accuse those who have these religious experiences as having certain neurological problems or physical ailments that cause them to have delusions that they consider religious experiences. This theory is