Religion in an Age of Science by Ian Barbour
Chapter 3: Similarities and Differences
III. Religious Pluralism
1. The Interpretation of Religious Experience
How should we view cultural relativism in the interpretation of religious experience? Some people have argued that it is not really a serious problem. Richard Swinburne says that we ordinarily accept people’s reports of what they claim to have experienced, unless there are grounds for thinking that their testimony is unreliable or their claims
implausible. Similarly, says Swinburne, when persons say they have an awareness of God, both they and other people should accept this at face value unless there are strong grounds to doubt it. "From all this, of course, it follows that if it seems to me that I have a glimpse of Nirvana or a vision of God, that is good grounds for me to suppose that I do.
And, more generally, the occurrence of religious experiences is prima facie reason for all to believe in that of which the experience was purportedly an experience."41 He grants that some experiences are deceptive and that we use cultural concepts to describe all experience;
religious testimony, in particular, produces conflicting claims. But the basic religious experiences are rather similar, and the burden of proof should rest on the skeptic. Swinburne concludes that "religious
perceptual claims deserve to be taken as seriously as perceptual claims of any other kind."
William Alston maintains that we accept sense experience as evidence of an independently existing object if (1) the experience occurs under favorable circumstances, and (2) the interpretation is consistent with other beliefs. The acceptance can be overridden if it is not consistent with other beliefs (for example, we question our perception that the moon is larger near the horizon). Alston says that similar conditions apply to the interpretation of religious experience. We should
acknowledge the favorable circumstances provided by the spiritual disciplines undertaken by the masters of the religious life. And we can test their conclusions against a larger framework of beliefs. But Alston grants that there are greater cultural variations in religious experience than the cultural variations in sense experience that anthropologists have
reported. 42
Steven Katz, at the opposite extreme, says that a report of religious experience is determinatively shaped by the concepts a person brings to it. He examines mystical writings in various traditions and is impressed by their diversity. For example, Jewish mysticism does not involve loss of identity in the experience of unity but preserves a sense of God’s other-ness. Belief in a personal God and in the importance of ritual and ethical action is simply assumed. "The mystic brings to his experience a world of concepts, images, symbols and values which shape as well as color the experience he eventually and actually has."43 Prior
expectations impose both form and content on experience; we cannot say there is a universal experience which is then interpreted by diverse cultural concepts. The symbols of religious communities are at work before, during, and after the experience. Buddhists hold that suffering and impermanence are the basic human problem, and therefore they seek liberation from suffering. Christians believe that sin is our basic problem, and they seek forgiveness and unity with God.
Peter Donovan takes an intermediate position. He argues that in religion, as in science, there is no neutral description without interpretation. "All that theoretical background is not found in the experience itself, but is brought to it by way of interpretation, making it the experience it is."44 Experience can indeed support an overall
theoretical scheme, but "one’s estimate of the value of any particular experience will depend on how one evaluates the total belief system in terms of which the experience is thought to be significant."45 Donovan holds that particular experiences, even those that are life transforming, must be systematically related to a coherent conceptual framework, which is judged as a whole.
In a similar vein Ninian Smart points to common elements in the reports of mystics but acknowledges that they diverge in doctrinal
interpretation.
The fact that mysticism is substantially the same in different cultures and religions does not, however, entail that there is a
"perennial philosophy" common to mystics. Their doctrines are determined partly by facts other than mystical experience itself. . . . The distinction between experience and interpretation is not clear-cut. The reason for this is that the concepts used in
describing and explaining an experience vary in their degree of
ramification. That is to say, where a concept occurs as part of a doctrinal scheme it gains its meaning in part from a range of doctrinal statements taken to be true.46
Smart recommends that we use low-level descriptive terms, with minimal doctrinal ramification, to try to formulate a more
phenomenological account on which both the mystic and other persons can concur. This would be consistent with my own view that the
distinction between experience and interpretation, like that between data and theory in science, is never absolute; in both cases the distinction is relative and is drawn at differing points at various times for particular purposes.
If there is no uninterpreted experience, there can be no immediate religious knowledge, no "self-authenticating" awareness of God, no incorrigible intuition for which finality may be claimed. For when interpretation is present there is always the possibility of
misinterpretation, especially through wishful thinking, which reads into experience more than is warranted. Nor can there be any certain
inference from experience to a Being who is its independent cause. Even the sense of confrontation and encounter is no guarantee of the existence of a source beyond us.47
The key question is whether religious experience exercises any control on interpretation. A set of basic beliefs has the tendency to produce experiences that can be cited in support of those beliefs, which are then self-confirming. A suggestible person may experience what he or she has been taught to expect. Yet people also have unexpected and surprising experiences that challenge their previous assumptions and lead them to reformulate their beliefs.
We can deny that God is an immediate and uninterpreted datum without going to the opposite extreme of saying that God is only inferred,
without being experienced. To make God a hypothesis to be tested or a conclusion of an argument (as in the argument from design) is to lose the experiential basis of religion. In my view, God is known through interpreted experience.48 Our knowledge of God is like knowledge of another self in being neither an immediate datum nor an inference.
Another self is not immediately experienced; it must express itself through various media of language and action, which we interpret. Yet we do not merely infer that another self is present; as a precondition for taking words and gestures as expressions of purpose and intention we
must already understand ourselves to be dealing with another self.49 Members of religious communities similarly understand themselves to be dealing with God; such an understanding is so basic that it may seem almost as much a part of interpreted experience as encounter with
another self.
I conclude that beliefs are both brought to religious experience and derived from it. Religion, more than science, is influenced "from the top down," from paradigms, through interpretive beliefs, to experience. But the influence "from the bottom up," starting from experience, is not totally absent in religion. Although there is no neutral descriptive language, there are degrees of interpretation. Thus members of various religious traditions can communicate even though they are dependent on culturally formed languages.