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,
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
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.