Criticisms of Religious Experience

Religious Studies: KS3, topic 2.6.13

Not everyone accepts that experiences like visions and miracles are really religious experiences.

Sometimes criticism is directed at the person who says they had the religious experience.
Quite often, for example, people simply do not believe the people who had the experience.
Critics say that they only have the person’s word that the experience happened, so they could easily have made it up.
That would makes it poor proof of the existence of God as you just have to accept someone’s word for it.

Another criticism of religious experiences is that it could be a hallucination.
This could have been the result of physical illness or drugs, or even extreme heat or tiredness.
Whatever the cause, the religious experience is not real - they have imagined it.
There is a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy, for example. This can cause people to see unusual lights and sounds that are difficult to describe.

Some critics of religious experiences have suggested that they happen to people who are poorly educated.
Or, they are people who have had a very religious upbringing.
The argument is that this can make them more likely to interpret normal experiences in a religious way.

This is often a response to someone’s claim to have seen a miracle, such as miraculous healing.
If a person becomes better, and science cannot explain this, then this is because of the limits of our scientific knowledge.
Science is constantly evolving, and one day will be able to provide an explanation for the miracle.

In brief, these criticisms say that a person who claims to have had a religious experience could be lying.
Or, they are too eager to describe an experience as religious.
They also could be having a hallucination that medical science can explain.
Or what they have experienced could be something that science will be able to explain one day.
People who make these criticisms say that these are more likely explanations than believing they have come from God.

Test yourself on Criticisms of Religious Experience

Which criticism of religious experience uses schizophrenia as an example?
Why do some critics not believe people who have had religious experiences?
Which criticism says that people who claim to have religious experiences are poorly educated or very religious?