ABSTRACT
Prosocial actions may be ‘put on’ or may ‘come from the heart’. In the same way, religious observance may involve either an unfeeling performance of ritual actions or feelings of extra-sensory reality and even experience of the presence of a deity. For some, the essence of religion lies less in the belief, the ritual or the values, and more in experiences involving a special awareness that they interpret as transcendental, as a mystical experience of unity (e.g. Otto, 1917; see Tambiah, 1990). Indeed many deeply religious people see such experience as fundamental. I should emphasise that I consider it unscientific to question the reality of religious experience or belief: the question to be examined is the basis of such a claim. There is, of course, a continuum between mechanical observance and
intense religious experience, so that it is difficult to define religious experience precisely except to say that it is generally seen as having some reference to ‘transcendence’, but not necessarily to an anthropomorphic deity. Religious experience may seem remote from basic human propensities evolved under the influence of natural selection. However, it is heuristically useful to distinguish between the eliciting circumstances, the experience itself and its interpretation, and on that basis this chapter suggests that the distinction between religious experience and some types of secular experience is not so clear as might appear. Many will feel that religious experience is beyond the province of the sci-
entist. That surely is an empirical matter. So long as there is a possibility that a scientific approach can shed light on a phenomenon, it is the scientist’s duty to see where his tools can take him. More justifiably, many will feel that it is absurd for one who has never had an experience that he labelled religious to discuss religious experience. It is hardly possible to have, or at least to convey, any complex experience without putting it into words that are not the experience itself, and the words chosen will be influenced by the individual’s interpretation. In what follows I have had to fall back on the language used by those who claim to have had religious experience, without being able to assess its nature or validity. I make no apology for plagiarising a language that I do not fully understand, because there is no alternative.
