Notes · Religious StudiesUK · A-Levels

Religious experience

Religious experience is a first-person encounter that the subject interprets as an experience of God or of a transcendent reality. This topic classifies the main types — the numinous (Otto), the mystical (James, Stace), visions, conversion and corporate experience — expounds their defining features through named scholars, and evaluates what, if anything, such experiences show about the nature and existence of God.

4 sections~17 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 2 · Advanced 1

T·0333 / 16

Exam profile

AO1 · Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the types of religious experience and their key thinkersAO2 · Analyse and evaluate what religious experiences suggest about God, reaching a justified judgement

Operators:explainanalyseassessevaluate'...' Discussto what extent

basic level

At AS-Level, describe the main types of religious experience with named examples and scholars.

higher level

At full A-Level, analyse the defining criteria (Otto's numinous, James's four marks), and evaluate the inference from experience to the reality of its object.

Depth

Text

Contents · 4 sections

Religious experience

Defining religious experience; the numinous#

FoundationAQA 7062/1 Section A: Religious experienceDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

Types of religious experience

Fig. 1The specification distinguishes several types, of which the numinous and the mystical are the most analysed.

A religious experience is a non-empirical, subjective encounter that the experient understands as an awareness of God, the divine or a transcendent reality — something more than ordinary sense-perception delivers. Such experiences are typically self-authenticating for the subject (they carry their own conviction), often ineffable (resistant to description in ordinary language), and are interpreted through the religious framework the subject already holds, so that the 'same' experience may be described as an encounter with Christ by a Christian and with Brahman by a Hindu. Classifying the phenomena is the first task: the specification distinguishes the numinous, the mystical, visions and voices, conversion experiences, and corporate experiences, and a strong answer can define each and give an example.

Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy (1917), coined the term 'numinous' to name the distinctive quality of religious experience that is prior to and deeper than any moral or rational content. The numinous is the experience of the 'holy' as a mystery encountered as wholly other. Otto captures it in the phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans: mysterium, the wholly other that transcends comprehension; tremendum, the awe, dread and sense of one's own creatureliness before overwhelming majesty; and fascinans, the fascination and attraction that simultaneously draws the subject towards the holy. The experient feels themselves to be, in Abraham's words, 'but dust and ashes' before God — a 'creature-feeling' of absolute dependence.

The numinous is, for Otto, sui generis: it cannot be reduced to any other kind of experience (aesthetic, moral, emotional) and can only be evoked, not defined, through analogy and example. Biblical instances include Isaiah's vision in the Temple ('Woe is me, for I am undone') and Job's response to God from the whirlwind. Otto's account is important because it identifies a common phenomenological core across religions while insisting that its object is a genuine reality encountered, not a projection — the holy is experienced as coming from outside, addressing the subject.

Otto's account is not without critics. Because the numinous is defined as ineffable and non-rational, it is hard to see how it could be tested or distinguished from intense but purely natural feelings of awe (before a mountain, a symphony, the night sky). Otto might reply that the numinous carries a specific sense of the presence of a personal 'other', absent from merely aesthetic awe; but the critic can insist that this interpretation is added by the subject's prior beliefs rather than given in the experience — the recurring objection that religious experiences are shaped by expectation, which the next topic examines in detail.

Worked example

Classifying an experience

A worshipper reports feeling overwhelmed by dread and wonder before an unseen, majestic presence during prayer. Which category does this fit, and why?

Identify the features
Dread and wonder before a majestic 'other' are the marks of awe, not union.
Match to Otto
This is the numinous: mysterium (unseen other), tremendum (dread), fascinans (wonder).
Rule out mystical
There is no reported sense of union or oneness, so it is not mystical experience in James's sense.
Note the interpretation
The subject reads the presence as God; the experience is interpreted through their existing faith.

Result: The experience is numinous in Otto's sense — an awe-filled encounter with the wholly other — rather than mystical, since it involves confrontation rather than union.

Typical mistakes

Using 'numinous' and 'mystical' interchangeably — the numinous is awe before the wholly other; the mystical is a sense of union or oneness (see next section).
Reducing Otto's account to 'a feeling', ignoring that he insists the numinous has a real, encountered object experienced as other.

Active revision

Explain what Otto means by the 'numinous' and illustrate it with examples. (Structured AO1 response)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

Mystical experience (James, Stace)#

StandardAQA 7062/1 Section A: Religious experienceDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

James's four marks of mysticism

Fig. 2For James, an experience is mystical if it exhibits all four marks; together they characterise the mystical state.

William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), takes mystical experience to be the 'root and centre' of personal religion and offers the most influential analysis of it. Rather than defining mysticism, James identifies four marks by which an experience qualifies as mystical. The first is ineffability: the experience defies expression in words, so that it must be directly experienced and cannot be conveyed to others, more like a state of feeling than of intellect. The second is the noetic quality: despite being like feeling, mystical states seem to those who have them to be states of knowledge — insights into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect, carrying authority and a sense of revelation.

The third mark is transiency: mystical states cannot be sustained for long — usually half an hour, rarely more than an hour or two — after which they fade, though they can recur and develop, leaving a lasting effect on the inner life. The fourth is passivity: although the onset may be facilitated by practices such as prayer or meditation, when the state sets in the mystic feels their own will in abeyance, as if grasped and held by a superior power — the experience happens to them. James treated these marks descriptively and empirically, collecting first-person testimonies, and drew a cautious 'over-belief': the experiences are evidence that our normal waking consciousness is only one type, and that there exist wider realities with which we may make contact, though he stopped short of proving any particular theology.

W. T. Stace and others refined the study of mysticism by distinguishing extrovertive mysticism (a unifying vision that looks outward, seeing the One in and through the multiplicity of the natural world) from introvertive mysticism (an inward turn to a pure, contentless consciousness, a unity beyond all images and concepts). Stace argued there is a 'common core' to mystical experience across cultures — a sense of unity or oneness — even though its interpretation varies by tradition (the Christian union with God, the Hindu identity of Atman and Brahman, the Buddhist nirvana). The classic Christian mystics — Teresa of Avila, with her 'interior castle' and stages of prayer culminating in spiritual union, and John of the Cross — illustrate the introvertive type.

Mystical experience raises a sharp interpretive dispute. The 'perennialist' position (Stace, Huxley) holds that the common core is a genuine, cross-cultural contact with the same ultimate reality, differently interpreted; the 'constructivist' position (Steven Katz) holds that there is no unmediated experience — every mystical experience is thoroughly shaped by the mystic's prior tradition, concepts and expectations, so that a Christian and a Buddhist do not have the same experience differently described but genuinely different experiences. This dispute is decisive for evaluation: if Katz is right, mystical experiences cannot serve as independent evidence for a single divine reality, because they are products of the very beliefs they are invoked to support.

Worked example

Reconstructing the argument from mystical experience

Set out the inference from mystical experience to a transcendent reality and its main weakness.

The data
Across cultures and history, people report mystical states with James's four marks and a strong sense of unity with the ultimate.
The noetic premise
These states present themselves as knowledge, with authority, not mere emotion; the subject takes them as veridical.
The best-explanation move
The persistence and cross-cultural similarity are argued to be best explained by contact with a real transcendent reality (perennialism, Stace).
The constructivist objection
Katz: experiences are shaped by prior belief, so their similarity is limited and their content is supplied by the tradition, not the reality.
Weigh
If experiences are belief-laden, they cannot independently confirm the belief; the inference is question-begging unless a common core survives Katz.

Result: The argument from mystical experience has real force from the noetic, cross-cultural data, but the constructivist objection shows it cannot be independent evidence unless a genuinely unmediated common core can be established.

Typical mistakes

Listing James's four marks inaccurately (e.g. confusing 'noetic' with 'ineffable') or reducing them to three; each has a precise meaning.
Assuming all mystics experience the same thing — the constructivist challenge (Katz) directly denies this.

Active revision

'Mystical experiences are evidence of a genuine encounter with a transcendent reality.' Assess this claim. (Extended essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

Visions, conversion and corporate experience#

StandardAQA 7062/1 Section A: Religious experienceDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

James on conversion

Fig. 3James distinguishes gradual (volitional) from sudden (self-surrender) conversion, both producing a unified self.

Visions and voices are experiences in which the subject sees or hears something taken to convey a divine message. Following a long scholastic tradition, visions are often classified as corporeal (an external figure apparently seen with the eyes, e.g. Bernadette at Lourdes), imaginative (seen in the mind or in a dream, e.g. Joseph's dreams, Jacob's ladder) and intellectual (a purely non-sensory illumination of the understanding, e.g. Teresa of Avila's intellectual visions). Auditory experiences range from external voices to interior 'locutions'. Their evidential value is contested because they can be produced by illness, drugs or psychological states, and their content always requires interpretation; but defenders note that many are followed by verifiable effects — new knowledge, moral transformation, or accurate predictions — that resist purely pathological explanation.

Conversion is a religious experience of a different structural type: a reorientation of the self in which a divided, unhappy or morally inferior consciousness becomes unified, happy and consciously right, in consequence of holding firmly to religious realities. James analysed conversion at length, distinguishing the volitional type, a gradual and deliberate building-up of a new set of moral and spiritual habits, from the self-surrender type, in which the crisis is resolved suddenly and involuntarily when the subject stops striving and 'lets go' (the sudden, dramatic conversion). Whether gradual or sudden, James identified common features: a sense of higher control, a loss of worry, a perception of truths not known before, and an appearance of newness in the world. The archetypal example is the conversion of St Paul on the Damascus road, combining vision, voice and total reorientation.

Corporate religious experience is experience shared by a group rather than an individual, and is significant because it appears to answer the objection that religious experiences are merely private and unverifiable. Examples include the Day of Pentecost in Acts, the phenomena of revivalist movements (the eighteenth-century Great Awakening, the ministries of Wesley and Whitefield), and, in the twentieth century, the charismatic phenomena of the Toronto Blessing (1994), where large numbers reported laughter, weeping, falling ('resting in the Spirit') and other manifestations. The corporate character provides multiple witnesses to a common event; critics reply that crowd psychology, emotional contagion and suggestion (as studied by social psychology) can generate shared experiences without any transcendent cause, so that numbers do not by themselves establish authenticity.

These varied types are unified by the interpretive question that dominates the topic's evaluation: in every case the raw experience is described in religious terms only through an act of interpretation, and the same phenomena admit of naturalistic redescription. This does not by itself show the religious interpretation is false — to assume so would beg the question in the other direction — but it means that no single experience, however vivid, compels the religious reading. The strongest theistic case therefore appeals not to any one experience but to the cumulative weight of many, across types and cultures, together with their transformative fruits, an approach that leads directly into the tests for authenticity examined next.

Worked example

Evaluating a conversion account

How should a candidate assess the claim that Paul's Damascus-road conversion is evidence for God?

Describe the experience
A sudden, self-surrender conversion combining a vision of light, an auditory locution, and total moral reorientation from persecutor to apostle.
Note the fruits
The transformation was lasting and costly (persecution, martyrdom), which counts against a merely self-serving fabrication.
Give the naturalistic reading
Critics propose epilepsy, guilt-driven breakdown, or later legendary embellishment as alternative explanations.
Weigh
The dramatic, verifiable change of life is real data, but it underdetermines its cause; it supports Paul's sincerity more than the truth of his interpretation.
Judgement
As one strand it strengthens a cumulative case, but taken alone it cannot compel the religious over the naturalistic reading.

Result: Paul's conversion is strong evidence of a sincere, transformative experience, but its evidential value for God's existence is cumulative rather than decisive, since the experience underdetermines its explanation.

Typical mistakes

Treating all visions as literal external sightings; imaginative and intellectual visions are non-corporeal and matter for evaluation.
Claiming corporate experience 'proves' authenticity because many witnessed it — shared experiences can have shared natural causes (contagion, suggestion).

Active revision

'Corporate religious experiences are more convincing than individual ones.' Discuss. (Extended essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

What experience suggests about God; evaluation#

AdvancedAQA 7062/1 Section A: Religious experienceDfE GCE Religious Studies subject content

Numinous and mystical experience compared

Fig. 4The two chief types point to different conceptions of the divine: a personal 'other' versus an impersonal unity.

Considered as evidence for the nature of God, religious experiences are strikingly ambiguous. The numinous suggests a personal, transcendent, morally overwhelming 'other' — supporting classical theism's holy and majestic God; the mystical, by contrast, often suggests an impersonal unity or ground of being into which the self is absorbed, which fits pantheism or monism better than a personal creator. This internal tension is itself evaluatively important: religious experience does not speak with one voice about God's nature, and the diversity of reports across traditions (a personal Christ, an impersonal Brahman, the emptiness of nirvana) suggests either that different experiences have different objects, or that a single reality is being variously interpreted, or that the experiences are projections of prior belief — the three options already met in the constructivist debate.

As evidence for God's existence, the strongest form is the inductive argument from religious experience: the widespread, persistent, and often life-transforming testimony of religious experience is best explained by supposing that at least some such experiences are genuine perceptions of a divine reality. Its force is that it treats religious experience like any other experience — as prima facie evidence for its object — and that the sheer volume and consistency of testimony would, in any other domain, be taken seriously. This is where the topic connects to the next: Swinburne's principles of credulity and testimony are designed to license exactly this inference, and the scientific and psychological challenges are designed to block it.

The decisive evaluative issue is whether religious experience can be self-authenticating evidence. On one side, the experient's conviction is often unshakeable and the noetic quality presents the experience as knowledge; to dismiss all such testimony wholesale looks like dogmatic scepticism, and would, if applied consistently, undermine our trust in ordinary perception too. On the other side, religious experiences are private, unrepeatable, admit of naturalistic explanation, conflict across traditions, and are demonstrably shaped by prior expectation — features that, in any other area, would make us cautious about treating the experience as veridical without corroboration. The believer says the experiences carry their own authority; the sceptic says extraordinary claims require external checks that religious experiences cannot provide.

The most defensible judgement is proportioned to what is claimed. Religious experience cannot prove God to a neutral enquirer: its evidential value is defeated for the outsider by the availability of naturalistic explanations and by cross-tradition conflict. But it is not therefore worthless. For the experient, and within a cumulative case that already includes the arguments of the previous topics, religious experience can rationally raise the probability of theism and supply the 'acquaintance' that the abstract arguments lack — turning a possible God into an encountered one. Whether that inference is legitimate depends entirely on the tests for authenticity, which is why this topic is completed only by the next. A strong essay therefore judges religious experience to be suggestive rather than probative, and locates its real force within the cumulative case rather than as a stand-alone proof.

Worked example

Model evaluation plan: experience as evidence

Plan an essay assessing whether religious experience is good evidence for God.

Thesis
Religious experience is suggestive, not probative: it can rationally strengthen theism within a cumulative case but cannot prove God to a neutral enquirer.
Case for (AO1/AO2)
Treat experience as prima facie evidence for its object; the volume, persistence and transformative fruits are impressive; Swinburne's credulity principle.
Case against
Privacy, unrepeatability, cross-tradition conflict, belief-ladenness (Katz), and naturalistic explanation (next topic).
Distinguish audiences
For the experient the experience may be rational grounds; for the outsider it is defeated by conflict and alternative explanation.
Judgement
Proportioned verdict: suggestive, cumulatively significant, but not a stand-alone proof; its status hinges on the tests for authenticity.

Result: Religious experience is best judged suggestive rather than probative — genuine evidence for the experient and a real strand in a cumulative case, but not a proof that could compel a neutral enquirer.

Typical mistakes

Assuming religious experience uniformly supports the personal God of theism; the mystical strand often points elsewhere.
Concluding that experiences either prove God or prove nothing — the defensible verdict is proportioned (suggestive within a cumulative case).

Active revision

'Religious experience provides the best evidence for the existence of God.' Evaluate this claim. (Extended essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies (Department for Education)

References & sources

Sources

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for religious studies

Religious experience

4 sections~17 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 2 · Advanced 1

Religious experience

Key points

Classifying an experience

Key points

Reconstructing the argument from mystical experience

Key points

Evaluating a conversion account

Key points

Model evaluation plan: experience as evidence

Sources

Religious experience

Key points

Classifying an experience

Key points

Reconstructing the argument from mystical experience

Key points

Evaluating a conversion account

Key points

Model evaluation plan: experience as evidence

Sources