The Status of Religious Experience

Does religious experience (whatever you may count that to be) indicate anything about the world, or not? I've been thinking that, before we can answer this question in any way, we need to be clear on what is being asked. There are at least three different questions: (1) does r.e. point to anything real? (2) can r.e. be reduced to anything else? and (3) can r.e. be translated into anything else?

The first question is whether r.e. gives evidence for anything real. Does it indicate something about the world as it is? It seems that the answer to this question is clearly yes. Even if religions are merely about wish-fulfillment and social cohesion, then they are still concerned with features of us as psychological and sociological beings. We actually have to deal with our minds and our societies as structures of the world given to us, and so they are real. If r.e. is anything more, then it is all the more real.

The second question is whether r.e. is reducible to any other field of experience. R.e. may indicate something real, but this reality may be merely psychological features of experience. I would argue that r.e. is not merely reducible to these other areas of experience, although this may not be quite as clear as my answer to the first question. What is experienced in r.e. is experienced in a different way than anything in any other area of experience. The religious believer is not experiencing exactly the same thing as the psychologist or the sociologist. At very least, the religious believer is concerned with the phenomena as presently experienced, while psychology and sociology are concerned with the phenomena as caused and related to factors of mind and society. The perspectives are different.

I don't regard that as necessarily saying too much, though; I'm highly resistant to reducing any area of experience to any other. Even if there is a sense in which chemical laws are reducible to physical laws, the way we experience chemistry is not merely the way in which we experience physics, and so as domains of human experience the one is not reducible to the other. So to say that r.e. is not reducible to psychology or sociology does not mean that r.e. gives evidence for what the religious believer wants, but merely that it has its own legitimate field of empirical inquiry.

So there needs to be a third question: is r.e. translatable into another field of experience? While chemistry may not be reducible to physics as a domain of human experience, there is a sense in which it seems that chemical laws are shorthand for physical laws (something I'll assume for the time being for the sake of illustration). Statements about chemistry can be translated into physics, although not all statements about physics can be translated into chemistry; therefore, we consider physics to to more basic. So the real question about r.e. is whether it is translatable into any other area of experience. Can religious statements be translated into psychological and sociological statements? Can the reverse be done? Does r.e. have something of its own, fundamentally distinct from anything presented anywhere else?

I'm not sure how to answer this last question. I'm also unclear on whether analyzing the experience itself could tell us anything one way or another. On the one hand, it seems perfectly coherent to say that, no matter what the believer experiences, her account of her experience could be completely false and self-delusional as well as brought about by perfectly natural causes. This explanation may or may not be true, but there seems to be nothing impossible about this hypothesis (and in many cases, I admit that it seems quite plausible). On the other hand, I do want to preserve the uniqueness of all experience, and there does seem to be something qualitatively different about r.e., some peculiar stance in relation to the mystery of being that sets it apart. This is in part due to phenomenological concerns (from looking at the experience) and in part due to metaphysical concerns (from reasoning about the world). So for the time being, my hunch is to say that r.e. is untranslatable, though this still does not entail that it means what people think it means. Looking at the experience itself may give grounds for establishing its uniqueness, but cannot in itself tell us how that experience relates to other aspects of our experience.