The weaknesses of the Religious Experience argument could lead to its rejection. Discuss (12m)

The psychological challenge offers a questionable argument against the Religious Experience argument. Hobbes said, ‘when a man tells me he has seen God in a dream, he is telling me that he has dreamt he has seen God’, which is potentially true. But due to the subjective nature of RE (Religious Experience), one cannot prove what truly occurred. Nevertheless, Freud’s naturalist explanation provides a dissatisfactory argument against RE. According to Freud, religion is just wishful thinking in the mind and an illusion to deal with the outside world, the fulfilment of sexual frustration, and as he calls it; ‘universal obsessional neurosis’, which projects a father figure. However, Jung offers a valid counter argument, suggesting that if there is a God, there is no reason why he cannot work through the psyche. If RE is not in the mind, this begs the question, where does it occur? Moreover, Jung stressed the importance of religious experience to the well-being of the psyche, but refused to discuss whether RE was an expression of the reality of God, or whether it is of something within, believing that psychologists could answer no such question. Thus it is evident that the psychological viewpoint gives a flawed argument to reject the RE argument.

The physiological criticism of the RE argument provides a strong argument to suggest that the RE argument should be rejected. A key example of which is Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus being viewed as an epileptic fit – he fell off his horse, saw flashing lights and was temporarily blind – all the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy. This is therefore an extremely valid explanation of Paul’s experience, in scientific terms. This was further supported by Persinger’s Helmet. Known as ‘the God helmet’, it stimulates the brain with magnetic fields connected to the temporal lobe. From this neurotheological experience, Michael Persigner argued the religious tended to say they had experienced God. However, he went on to suggest that it is possible that interpretation is the cause of religious experiences, as the religious see what they expect to see, but the non-religious, on the whole, did not refer to a presence of a greater being. Hormones are also used as a physiological cause of RE as there is evidence if an increase in RE in girls during puberty and males between 45-55 (believed to be the midlife crisis stage). The argument to counter this is unsuccessful, as it argues this makes them more sensitive to God, however there is no empirical evidence for this. Furthermore, drugs can be the cause of hallucinations and drink can cause similar effects. It is valid to argue that we cannot dismiss all experiences just because of the experiences influenced by drugs and alcohol. As Swinburne argues, a loving God would want to interact with his creation. Nonetheless, the physiological argument validly criticises the RE argument, but it is near impossible to rule experience out entirely and one has to rely on probabilities, and thus the RE argument cannot be completely dismissed.