Mind, Matter and Religious Experience

Glenn Statile

1) THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

When William James so eloquently wrote about the varieties of religious experience just over a century ago little could he count the ways by which the future of science might be able to tackle the issue of our religious sensibility.  Today, for example, the direct investigation of the brain is approaching a commonplace, but its correlation to and possible causal connections with consciousness are still by no means well understood.  This is especially true when trying to wade through  the vague and thoroughly ambiguous waters of what is commonly called religious experience, where belief runs strong but evidence is most often in short supply.

What exactly is religious experience?  This of course is a very good, very old, and very persistent question.  I do not intend to answer it here.  In fact it might seem that the very best of questions are often the very oldest, since these are the ones which solicit answers to those puzzles which have proven the most resistant to resolution.  The literature of  religious experience, in its most expansive sense, is split between the supernatural and the natural modes of contact with reality, thus compounding the problem.   For every visionary who comes into ecstatic contact with the supernatural source of created reality, there is a down to earth figure such as a Gerard Manley Hopkins, who perceives the world and everything mundane as charged with the grandeur of God, or an intoxicated Wordsworth for whom the world of commerce is but a pale substitute for the beauty of nature.  And whereas Thomas Aquinas is reputed to have had a religious experience so intense that it drove him to abandon his Summa, poor unfortunate old Saint Anselm had nothing so extraordinary to show for his inspired and solitary Ontological Argument, which just goes to prove that perhaps Five Ways are better than one.