Religious Experience | AQA A-Level Religious Studies (7062)
Religious Experience
- 65 questions
- 5 subtopics
- Component 1 Section A: philosophy of religion
- Component 1
Visions, mystical experience and conversion, the principles of credulity and testimony, and the scientific challenges to taking such experiences at face value..
It covers visions and Otto's Numinous Experience, the Marks of Mystical Experience, credulity, Testimony and Swinburne, scientific Challenges to Religious Experience and the Value of Religious Experience for Faith.
Sample questions from Religious Experience
Answer each one closed book first, then open the answer.
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Visions and Otto's Numinous Experience
Why is the intellectual vision considered the highest form in the hierarchy of visions?
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Because it is the most certain and spiritually significant, involving direct intuitive awareness without reliance on sensory imagery. -
Visions and Otto's Numinous Experience
Why might someone experiencing the 'tremendum' feel a sense of their own insignificance?
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Because they are confronted with an overwhelming power that inspires awe and dread, making them acutely aware of their smallness in comparison. -
The Marks of Mystical Experience
Define 'noetic quality' as a characteristic of mystical experience.
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Mystical experiences carry a sense of insight or knowledge, states of illumination that feel deeply significant and authoritative to the experiencer. -
The Marks of Mystical Experience
What does Stace mean by describing mystical experience as 'non-sensuous and non-intellectual'?
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That it bypasses both sense perception and rational thought, achieving union with the divine through neither sensory nor intellectual means. -
Credulity, Testimony and Swinburne
How does an unreliable subject defeat the principle of credulity?
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If the person having the experience is known to be unreliable (e.g., prone to hallucinations or delusions), this provides grounds for doubting that what they perceived was actually present. -
Credulity, Testimony and Swinburne
How does known dishonesty defeat the principle of testimony?
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If the witness is known to be dishonest, their testimony cannot be trusted as a reliable report of their experience. -
Scientific Challenges to Religious Experience
How might a religious believer respond to the claim that brain activity explains religious experiences?
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Identifying a brain correlate does not disprove an external cause; God could work through natural brain processes to produce the experience. -
Scientific Challenges to Religious Experience
What form of pragmatic verification do religious believers offer for religious experiences?
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The transformative effects of religious experiences on people's lives provide pragmatic verification even if scientific verification is unavailable.
The 5 subtopics
One subtopic is one session. Work down the list.
| Subtopic | What it covers | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Visions and Otto's Numinous Experience | Recall questions on corporeal, imaginative and intellectual visions and how they rank, and on Otto's numinous as mysterium tremendum et fascinans, apprehended non-rationally. | 13 |
| The Marks of Mystical Experience | Recall questions on William James's four marks of ineffability, noetic quality, transiency and passivity, and on Stace's extrovertive and introvertive mysticism and the place of doctrinal interpretation. | 19 |
| Credulity, Testimony and Swinburne | Recall questions on the principles of credulity and testimony and on what defeats them. | 9 |
| Scientific Challenges to Religious Experience | Recall questions on neuroscience, artificially induced experience, cultural conditioning and the limits of scientific verification. | 12 |
| The Value of Religious Experience for Faith | Recall questions on how an experience affects a believer and a non-believer and why it may be valued above scripture or tradition. | 12 |
How the guide is worked
Answering a question from memory stores it far better than reading the answer again. The guide runs that as a fixed procedure on one subtopic at a time, about twenty minutes a session.
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Step 1 · Closed book
Cover the answers. Work through one subtopic and write down what you can. Leave blanks where you have nothing.
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Step 2 · Open book
Go back to the top. Read each printed answer and write it out in full, including the ones you had right.
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Step 3 · Closed book again
Same questions, same order, from memory. The gap between pass one and pass three is the session result.
Read the full method, the return schedule and the research behind it.
Nearby topics
AQA A-Level Religious Studies Active Recall Guide
Every topic, not just this one. 3,683 questions with their answers.