Religious Experiences Are a Convincing Argument for the Existence of God, Dya?

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However, I would argue against this on the grounds that experiences stem merely from the mind and not from a superior being. As stated before a possible answer to Saul’s experience was sunstroke and this is key to a big factor regarding religious experiences. That being the psychological and physiological factors. The psychological factors are things like the placebo effect, hallucinations and a set belief in God. Physiological factors are things like sleep deprivation, illness and mind-altering substances. Placebo effect especially, I believe, is a key component of why people have ‘experiences’. Looking back to the Toronto Blessing where seemingly hundreds of people were all having experiences. Based on principles of herd mentality and placebo I believe there is a more convincing argument that people were subconsciously bringing about an experience or even just pretending in order to fit in with the crowd. These supplemented with their no doubt rigid belief in God caused this. While evidence for this is almost impossible to find, I believe the best evidence lays in the fact that not all who visited the church in Toronto felt an experience through the Holy Spirit. This seems incredibly unusual to me. Surely if the Holy Spirit was there and giving these people in the churches a religious experience then everyone present would feel the presence of the Spirit. It seems almost ridiculous that the Spirit would ‘leave out’ some of the people who had come to visit the church and thus it seems more logical that the experiences were came more from peoples’ minds than the Holy Spirit. This idea that a belief in God results in an experience with God as opposed to a belief in Allah results in an experience with Him is another crucial argument against the essay’s title. The philosopher Wittgenstein developed the concept of ‘seeing-as’ which is how we interpret experience in a particular way. Thus, two people of different faiths could have the same experience but one would argue it was evidence for his faith and vice versa. While this could be an argument for God in that he appears to others in a different form it seems inherently flawed and contradictory. Why would a God who clearly laid down in the Ten Commandments ‘do not worship any other God but me’ appear to those who believed in other gods in the form of said gods. This, surely, would only strength their belief in these other gods and essentially lead them further away from a belief in the Judaeo-Christian God. As with any argument for the existence of God and indeed any other god that claims omnipotence when compared with other gods it stands true that only one can exist. Therefore, any religious experience that does not involve God is instantly dismissed as false in order for God to exist. Again, this does not seem legitimate to allow for your faith’s religious experiences to be true but all others false.

In conclusion, I do not believe that religious experiences are a convincing argument for the existence of God. I do not doubt that for the most part when people say they have experienced or even seen God they are telling the truth to an extent. However, what they have truly seen or experience is merely a subconscious projection of their own beliefs and that the contradictions faced by religious experiences from those who believe in different gods show that they cannot be convincing enough to prove God’s existence.