Religious Experience Essay

The qualities of religious experience are of great debate today hand have been of great debate for several centuries. This is because of the inability for philosophers to “explain away” the cause or source of such experiences by the way of the epistemological methods available. Furthermore, in his essay “the Varieties of Religious Experience”, William James makes the claim that religious experiences can be explained away by the way of referring their cause to the subconscious aspects of the brain. (pg. 145) In making this claim, he admits to being challenged by certain religions that pose the influence of a transcendental and, therefore, defeat his thesis of there being only physical events in the process of a religious experience. Nevertheless,
he continues to hold that this scientific approach seems to be the most justified in current, for his time, that is, philosophical and scientific knowledge.
With this being said, in this paper, I will demonstrate an argument that shows why it is that there could not possibly by a justified correlation with the subconscious aspects of the brain in some forms of religious experience.
I will do this by supplying a recorded religious experience and then reasoning the possibility of such an experience being the result of a brain state or a brain cause. In doing this, I will expose some inabilities of a physical system to accommodate such and miraculous event in light of what is generally known of our brain's potential; thus, I will provide an inductive justification for some cause of religious experience that is, at least, more than the individual in
question.
To begin, a quasi-sensory, numinous, mystical, and interpretive types of religious experience seem to be well able to be explained on the basis of a sub-conscious brain function.
However, the revelatory and regenerative revelations seem likely to require some sort of, at the very least, extraordinary event to occur; an event that, at times, is so unnatural and unprecedented that induction leans in favor of a divine intervention rather than a misunderstood subconscious brain function. I will make this clear so that my claim can be easily analyzed. In the case of a regenerative religious experience, a subject undergoes some kind of improvement to “spiritual, moral, physical, [or] psychological well-being”. (pg.
169)
With this being said, some experiencers of the regenerative religious experience have claimed to be, for instance, miraculously and suddenly cancer-free. (pg. 170) Now, if there is an empirical witness to such an event, then it seems hard to justify all religious experience to be simply a response to differentiating subconscious brain functions. For every religious experience to be that of the subconscious, a suddenly and completely ridding of cancer brain function must occur. While conceptually such an occurrence seems physically possible, intuitively, this does not seem physically probable; that is, without some sort of extraordinary occurrence. And, as I have suggested, such a brain function seems better attributed to a brain function that is beyond natural capacities and ,therefore, very able to be of divine intervention.
So, James claim that all religious experiences can be best understood by the way of subconscious brain states seems to fail in light of the marginal case of a regenerative religious experience. It is, in other words, better to assume an unnatural cause to the sudden and complete ridding of cancer than to assume some misunderstood sub conscious brain state on inductive grounds. However, as I will admit, this does seem to be a matter of science and the most probable answer will be determinable once quantitative methods are developed for the crannies of the human subconscious in a thorough manner. Until then, it will be safer to assume an unnatural phenomena when dealing with certain marginal cases of religious experience.