The Quality of Faith: Relgious Belief versus Religious Experience

There is a marked difference in the quality of faith dependent upon whether it is based on religious belief or if it is grounded in religious experience. The difference in this quality of faith is "the one great partition" that William James describes as dividing institutional from personal religion. ("The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 28.)

"In the true mystic," writes Evelyn Underhill, "we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If we accept his experience as genuine it involves an intercourse with the spiritual world, an awareness of it, which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he belongs."

"The mystic," she notes, "speaks with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of a group. He lives by an immediate knowledge far more than by belief; by a knowledge achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated intercourse with the Transcendent when, as he says, he was "in union with God." The certitude then gained - a certitude which he cannot impart, and which is not usually diffused - governs all his reactions to the Universe. It even persists and upholds him in those terrible hours of darkness when all his sense of spiritual reality is taken away."

[Underhill, "The Essentials of Mysticism," pp. 25-26.]

Faith based on religious belief is thus, of necessity, only second-hand, while faith based on personal experience of a higher, religious consciousness is primary. The former is susceptible to wavering in tough times, while in the latter, or so it seems, there is "no variableness, nor shadow of turning."

"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others," James asserts, "in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away."

"This enchantment," James observes, "coming as a gift when it does come - a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say - is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 47-48.]

James goes on to describe the many different varieties of inner religious experience, each demonstrating that there is a higher state of religious consciousness above our ordinary, egoic self-consciousness; and he differentiates such experiences from intellectual or learned faith. Those who experience such inner relgious conversion are possessed thereafter with faith which is of a much different and enduring quality than a faith based solely on subjective, self-conscious belief.

"All the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy," philosopher and spiritual seeker, Aldous Huxley observes, "make, in one form or another, the affirmation that man is a kind of trinity composed of body, psyche and spirit. Selfness or personality is a product of the first two elements. The third element . . . is akin to, or even identical with, the divine Spirit that is the Ground of all being."

"Man's final end," he observes, "the purpose of his existence is to love, know and be united with the immanent and transcendent Godhead. And this identification of self with spiritual not-self can be achieved only by "dying to" selfness and living to spirit."

[Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," p. 38.]

While such religious experience - such "dying to self" and awakening to spirit - is available to all of us, it is only the rare individual who experiences the "immanent and transcendent Godhead" in reality. The rest of us, holding to a religious faith based only on our subjective and intellectual belief, may merely aspire to the experience of that higher consciousness which leads to the deepest, and most abiding faith possible.

"Sell all your cleverness," Rumi urges us, "and purchase bewilderment."

"Religion" vs. the "New Atheism"

Author, Sam Harris
("Letter to a Christian Nation")

Addressing the Enilghtenment 2.0 conference held in 2007, best selling author and religious critic, Sam Harris (author of "Letter to a Christian Nation"), observed:

"There is nothing about science that entails a criticism of religion, and there is nothing about science that entails a commitment to atheism. This, I think is to be misled by words. Words like religion and atheism. Science clearly does not entail that one identify one's self as an atheist, or even think of one's self as an atheist. But science does entail that one be skeptical of unsupported and unsupportable claims about miracles and about the divine origin of certain books. And when you dig into the details, this is all atheism is. Atheism is the failure to be convinced by other people's claims about miracles, and it is the conviction that they too should not be convinced."

"If there is something worth discussing in the experience of a Buddha or a Jesus . . . as I think there is, I think there is really a 'there' there . . . I think it is possible to have a rare and beautiful and transformative experience . .  and we can call that spirituality or mysticism . . . If there is something worthy of discussion there," says Harris, "it should be susceptible to rational inquiry, and we can hold mystics and contemplatives to the highest standards of empirical rigour and logical coherence. It's simply a myth to say that we can't."

But defining science as the best of our knowledge about the physical universe, Harris does not define what "religion" is to him, before veering off into a discussion of what roles religion and empirical science may have to play in morality and ethics . . . and then going completely off the rails.

Narrowly conflating religion with (i) miracles, (ii) divine origination of scripture, and (iii) ethics, Harris provocatively states that, "The truth is understanding a scriptural tradition is no more relevant to questions of ethics than it is to questions of astrology." And here he misses the point, as do so many leading voices of what Harris himself derides as "the New Atheism."

What Harris misses by leaving his definition of religion unexamined is that there is within religion a vast difference between inner religious experience and the outward dogmas and creeds that encompass Harris' unspoken narrow definition of what religion is.

Yet while, Harris acknowledges that there may be something worthy of discussion in the experiences of "a Buddha and a Jesus," he fails to do so. Buddhism, in particular, is strictly speaking already an 'atheistic religion,' in which its "founder," Gautama Buddha specifically urged his followers not to take his teachings on faith, but rather urged that they should try doing what he did and finding out the truths he talked of experientially, a far more scientific viewpoint (repeatability of 'experiments' and results being, along with the ability to falsify theoretical predictions, being the hallmarks of the scientific method), than perhaps Harris is aware of.

William James (1842-1910)

William James, an acknowledged founder of the modern study of psychology and the father of the 'pragmatic school' of American psychology, delivered perhaps his most famous addresses in the Gifford lectures, a series of talks he later published as "The Varieties of Religious Experience." In so doing, he clearly distinguished between inner religious experience of higher states of 'spiritual' consciousness and the outer religious forms of rites, rituals, creeds and dogmas. Yet this distinguishment is assiduously avoided by Harris, as it is by Christopher Hitchins, the biologist, Richard Dawkins, and other advocates of Harris' brand of "atheism."

There is a strong argument to be made that pro-science religious critics, like Harris, avoid talking about inner religious experience because it has everything to do with "consciousness," a subject area that science, particularly the mind sciences, are uncomfortable with and, thus, somewhat reluctant to approach.

However, with the increasing recognition of the work of leading scientists like the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, the neuroanatomists V.S. Ramachadran, David Chalmers and Dan Siegel, as well as that of synthesist physical/metaphysical theorists like Alan Wallace or the late David Bohm on consciousness, it can be hoped that the seemingly forever ongoing debate between science and religion may at some near point be conducted within mutually agreed upon terms.

After all, even the once most staid of religious institutions, the Catholic Church, has - if I can paraphrase a master metaphysicist - learned to "render unto Galileo what is Galileo's, and render unto God what is God's." It is high time, then, for religious critics to fully and honestly debate the questions of inner religious experience, instead of narrowly and dishonestly restricting their debate to matters solely of external religious beliefs, dogmas and ethics.