The Importance Of Religious Experience

Religious experience is defined as a case where people encounter deity or experience, thoughts or feeling about the greatness of God, and it is one of the most compelling reasons for people’s belief in God. The photo presents a shadowed figure of a praying man. With a beautiful sunset at the background, this seems to give a sense of solemnness and sacred feelings which might inspire religious followers or non-believers to believe in the existence of a higher being(s). Rudolph Otto referred such experience as ‘numinous’ in his book The Idea of the Holy. By numinous experience, he meant “the feeling of the ‘holy’ and includes awe, fascination, religious awareness and the smallness of self”(Jordan, 2008 p.15). Otto referred to such experiences

I can also see many comments from the viewers, presumably atheists, disagreeing with the testimony and questioning whether those celebrities’ experiences were real. As appealingly sound as testimonies to religious followers, non-religious followers may find it difficult to ‘logically’ understand the religious experience itself and could question whether those celebrities experiences are genuine. Similarly, we sometimes unconsciously distort our memories and, though unintentional, testify one piece of memory incorrectly or untruthfully. It is also possible to say that sacred experiences are mere hallucinations. A famous atheist philosopher Richard Dawkins draws a comparison between testimonies of divine encounter and insane statements, such as ‘I had an experience of a pink elephant’. He then comments “religious experiences are different only in that the people who claim them are numerous (Dawkins, 2007 p. 113)”. He also brings on how our eyes deliver distorted images of what happened to our brain which is quite contrasting to Swinburne’s claim about our experience. According to his book ‘The God Delusion”, our eyes do not present neither accurate nor faithful image of what happened in the real life, and optical illusions are good examples of this. Therefore, believing in

It is also worth noting that rational evaluation of religious experiences may not achieve many because it is in a disagreement between believers and philosophers. Whether description of deity or divine experience can be meaningful may not be as important since a significance of numinous experiences seems to be independent of any rational explanation. Furthermore, perhaps considering reasonableness or rationality of numinous experience itself is meaningless because, as I said, it is almost impossible to rationalize significance of one’s transcendental experience. However, it seems unreliable, as numinous experience is private and unverifiable. Also, empirical evidence seems to be too unfaithful because our sense perceptions, especially eyes, can distort our vision and then our memory. Therefore, although its significance may be independent of any evaluation or reason, I would rather conclude that religious experience is not reasonable ground for existence of God, and, therefore, religious experiences cannot be strong evidence of existence of