Abstract

Abstract At a time in which religion is breaking away from the normative power of its traditions and new forms of spiritual experience are emerging, religious philosophy must find criteria for what a religious experience is and how to judge its truth. In their empirical critique of religion L. Wittgenstein and R. Carnap accepted two forms of religious experience, which they described with an optical and acoustic metaphor. They denied their cognitive truth value, but not their value for life. However, an extended concept of truth, which encompasses every correspondence between experience and reality, can also find truth in religious experiences of “transparency” and “resonance”. They differ from aesthetic experience not only by the depth of transparency and resonance, but also by their cognitive interpretation. What is experienced is cognitively referred to a final reality: either to a “summum ens” in this world, or to the whole of this world or something unknown beyond of this world. This final point of reference is a unity of “being” and “value”. Religion makes experiences of the everyday transparent for both aspects of an ultimate reality und motivates to a life full of resonance with this reality.

Highlights

  • At a time in which religion is breaking away from the normative power of its traditions and new forms of spiritual experience are emerging, religious philosophy must find criteria for what a religious experience is and how to judge its truth

  • The optical and acoustic metaphors open up various aspects of religious experience

  • TRANSPARENCE points to its objective pole of reference. This experience makes something transparent in perception that goes beyond all perceptible parts. It differs from aesthetic experience in depth transparency by pointing to a transcendent “pole” that eludes our cognition

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Summary

Religious experience from a sceptical empiricist point of view

Modern empirical philosophy is often said to deny that religious experience is justified. Their representatives, often only think that religious experience is of a different kind than scientific experience. We can cite two representatives of empiricist philosophy as witnesses: the young Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970)[4]. Both wanted to limit our scientific knowledge to empirically discovered findings. Neither of them spoke of religion, Wittgenstein spoke but of the “mystical” and Carnap of the “metaphysical”. Both of them had an existential relationship to religion: L. Carnap had religious but tolerant parents, from whose faith he had broken away

The “mystical” of the early Ludwig Wittgenstein
The metaphysical with Rudolf Carnap
Optical metaphor in the Bible
Acoustic metaphor in the Bible
Four analyses of religious experience
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