Q&A: The Religious Experience — from an Epistemic and Emotional Perspective
The Religious Experience — from an Epistemic and Emotional Perspective
Question
Hello Rabbi,
After we distinguished between understanding and feeling, I wanted to ask about a person's religious experience.
Among believers, it is commonly accepted that religious experience reflects something real "out there."
Does the Rabbi think that this is indeed the case? Or is it merely an emotion that reflects nothing external?
I'm prompted to ask this because not long ago I spoke with someone who grew up in a very conservative and closed environment (far beyond the average Haredi person), and at home he absorbed this from all the talk about simple faith, whether at Sabbath meals at home or from the sermons impressed upon him about the importance of innocent faith, and so on.
And in any case, that person has defined himself as an agnostic-atheist for many years already, but what fascinated me was that he claims he can't free himself from religious feelings or from "talking" with God and feeling His existence, and he experiences these things almost all the time; I think he mentioned every less than an hour, if not much less. At the same time, he is sure that from his perspective this is just an emotion.
And so my question is whether one can rely on religious feelings as reflecting some spiritual truth out there. There is no doubt that for most of the world this exists in one form or another:
(And for those who don't have it, there are certain ways to arouse this experience, for example through prayer, music, dancing, especially group-religious settings, extreme pain/difficulty, meditation, certain kinds of drugs, and more.)
But against this there are several basic questions:
1. The feelings contradict one another. For example, the Jew may feel God, but the Christian will speak about Jesus; in the past people experienced idolatry, and so on.
2. More than that, if so, the person experiencing something must also explain why he is right and the other is wrong.
3. Quite a few people grasp that same feeling as a "feeling" and not as a realistic understanding, and if so that weakens the assumption that this is something epistemic.
4. There are many psychological explanations that try to explain the existence of religious feeling: father figures, early childhood experiences, inner tensions, anthropomorphism, innocent children with a tendency to believe, and so on.
5. There are explanations that it is something like an imaginary "friend," and we find that someone can experience a relationship with something that isn't real.
6. There are neurological explanations that the areas of religious experience or meditative experiences in the brain are connected to areas of certain disorders, and they can be stimulated by drugs.
7. The same feeling can be aroused, as mentioned, in various different ways, especially ones that affect the emotional system, so that strengthens the hypothesis that this is merely an emotion.
8. All sorts of phenomena can be given a naturalistic reduction, yet some believers interpret them (in the experiential sense) as connected to God. If so, that shows that this feeling is not correct, assuming the natural explanations for the phenomena are the correct ones.
9. According to history, for example in times of idolatry, it seems that one can arouse religious feelings such as prayer even toward inanimate objects.
Answer
It's hard to answer such a question, but as you wrote, the multiplicity of religious feelings and their variety suggest that they do not necessarily have their source in reality itself. The fact is that people feel that Jesus is speaking to them, or that some stone has powers (idolatry), and so on. Usually your religious feeling fits very well with the education you received. I haven't heard of someone who grew up in a religious Jewish home and feels a pagan or Christian religious feeling, or vice versa. Again, there is an indication here that this is not something with an epistemic root.
It is difficult to rule out the claim that there are religious feelings that reflect reality, but I tend not to believe that.
The fact that it is also possible to stimulate these areas in the brain artificially doesn't say much. You can also stimulate them to see your neighbor. Would you therefore think that when you really see him, it is an illusion?
Discussion on Answer
1. I don't think I've ever experienced that (on the emotional plane). But I don't understand the question. If I believe in God, then in my opinion God exists. What do you mean when you ask whether the feeling represents reality?
2. Maybe yes and maybe no.
3. Feeling and intuition are two completely separate things. I've written about this in several places (Two Carts, Truth and Stability, and more).
4. I didn't understand the question.
Sorry that it wasn't clear; it was just written in a double assumption and briefly.
First, the question arises from the concrete religious feeling: does a state of concrete feeling describe some objective connection?
0. Second, in the general sense, does religious feeling point to the existence of God? Meaning, even if it is very misleading, does it still point to "a higher power," especially since so many people experience it in one way or another? One might perhaps think that just as a radio can receive electromagnetic radiation, so too the soul can receive vibrations, whether from holiness (or the Other Side).
Meaning, even if at every given moment one can dismiss the concrete feeling, at the end of the day its very existence + the very fact that it is so widespread, or the very fact that it exists potentially in a person, does constitute strong evidence for the existence of a higher power. Here, of course, the Kantian distinction joins in, together with the assumption that a person pours "preconceived" ideas into that feeling.
In any case, now several questions clearly arise, because I think your conclusion may be simple, but it should raise quite a few questions for a religious person, and maybe it would even be worth opening a new discussion for this? (I'm not discussing the great controversy about individual providence, although maybe one can connect the two, but here it is more from the direction of cleaving and connection, whether the Holy One, blessed be He, responds or answers to what passes through him.)
1.A. I was very surprised to read that the Rabbi claims he has never experienced religious experience on the emotional plane. It may be inferred that he has experienced it on the intuitive plane; I'll give three examples for the sake of discussion in the hope that they may help sharpen things:
For example, the Rabbi certainly studied in a yeshiva where many of the students swayed during prayer. Didn't they feel some religious emotion? Clearly yes; they weren't swaying only because they were trying to concentrate… Also regarding private prayer, he has certainly heard about some forest where a Breslov follower goes out alone in meditation.
A second example can be found in the feeling of ecstasy that is expressed, for example, in a campfire-style singalong, maybe even at Sabbath meals, or in moments of the Ne'ilah prayer, etc. (The counterpoint is that I can give you videos where you'll also see developed religious feeling among Christians in church.)
1.B. Now the obvious question arises: when the Rabbi stands in the Amidah prayer, or in personal prayer, and suppose one of his students from the Hesder yeshiva in Yeruham experiences such a feeling — would you think that this feeling indeed expresses something real of some sort, or negatively, that it is nothing more than a purely internal sensation? Or is he praying before God ממש, just like someone who prays on the assumption that God exists, and the feeling adds nothing and subtracts nothing?
This can be understood from two directions:
First direction, before tradition: would this feeling itself have been enough, or even merely the sense of prayer moving from inside outward and upward, to believe in the existence of that particular "outside"?
Second direction, after tradition: when the Sages and the entire Book of Psalms, in the sense of "The Lord is near to all who call upon Him," say that there is such a concept as prayer and perhaps also a concept of cleaving, something like "I have set the Lord always before me… because He is at my right hand." So does there indeed exist a concept of objective connection / a feeling of cleaving? More than that, if one already believes in God, then if this exists for human beings it doesn't seem reasonable to think that it would not reflect something real to some extent — at least regarding service of the true God. Or is it just a deception within us!?
—– Up to this point this was discussed apart from the value of it, only whether factually, ontologically, it is true — whether the feeling is like a telephone or a radio (and one should distinguish between them) — a priori before tradition, a posteriori after it — or not at all, and it is purely an internal feeling —
1.C. If, as I claim — and at least from what I've seen in yeshivot and certain places this is common (or else our definitions differ) — then even if one believes in God independently of that feeling, is the very existence of such a feeling not of some religious significance? Or in your opinion is it completely valueless?
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2. Sorry for repeating, but it somewhat sounded like on the intuitive plane, or another plane that is not emotional, you do in fact "experience" belief in God. Can you sharpen what that means?
We're stuck. I'll answer now according to your branching and suggest ending it with this.
First, I didn't understand. If you're talking about concrete perception, it is supposed to connect to something concrete. A feeling is your internal matter, which may perhaps respond to something from outside. I don't know how to answer such a question in general.
About any feeling one can ask whether it is cognition or feeling, or whether the feeling is a response to something coming from outside or not. I have no answer to that question. Sometimes it's this way and sometimes it's that way. Intuition guides us here, but even about it one can ask who guaranteed to us that it is reliable (perhaps it too is a feeling). To that there is a second-order intuition, and so on ad infinitum.
0. Religious feeling in itself does not indicate the existence of God. Intuition maybe does. And if so many people experience it in different ways, that raises question marks about it. The claim that what is common to all of them is perhaps intuition and not feeling — that is possible. I am even inclined to think so. But I don't know what more to say about it than that. "Strong" evidence it certainly is not.
1.A. I have intuitions and not feelings/experiences on the emotional plane. I see around me all sorts of people swaying, but that is not my experience but theirs. Does it testify to something? See above.
1.B. I don't know. I answered.
1.C. I have written more than once that the existence of a feeling is devoid of significance and value. Unless that feeling expresses a perception, and even then it is only an expression of that which has value, but the feeling in itself has no value.
See 1.A.
Yes, I understand that you're not that style 🙂 I think there's some evasion in that.
But I did want to note three things:
Actually, some Christian philosophers see this as sufficient evidence, or at least fairly strong evidence, to the best of my knowledge.
A.1 That's an annoying/evasive answer. Suppose it were you — what would you think? Maybe it would be worth organizing a campfire singalong for the Rabbi's group and bringing in the greatest masters of emotion and Hasidic music. Then the Rabbi could check his experiences.
I know another Haredi ex-atheist(?) friend who maintains that he can experience religious feelings in cases like these and even with much less, and in personal prayers, I think in less than a month. He calls it a kind of autosuggestion.
I didn't understand C1:
"Unless that feeling expresses a perception, and even then it is only an expression of that which has value"
Interesting. (As for brain stimulation, I completely agree, but I understood that some philosophers for some reason see this as a strong difficulty, even though it seems skeptical to me.)
If so, I have a few questions:
1. When the Rabbi stands in prayer, and at least once managed to experience a religious feeling as though he were indeed standing before God, does he think that feeling is an illusion? Or since you believe in God, do you think that this feeling is indeed correct and reflects something real, etc.?
2. What do you think of the opposite claim: because this feeling is so widespread, then even if it is contradictory one can say that they are indeed experiencing something real, they just usually interpret it on the basis of some particular external baggage. For example, the religious feeling of Jews is close to the Christian feeling if they were not aware of the existence of Jesus. And especially after the Kantian separation between noumena and phenomena. And one clothes this external baggage onto this basic emotional capacity. But if so, perhaps the basic feeling is דווקא correct, especially since it is so widespread.
3. How does this understanding of yours fit with the Platonic approach, of intuition, which seemingly grants much more epistemic force to these feelings? And especially with the argument from morality and meaning, where for the average person the capacity to experience religious feeling is not very far from those.
4. How does this fit with belief in God, since seemingly if He created such a feeling then clearly it has some significance at the very least. (Even though it could lead to idolatry.)