Reality of the Unseen: Religious Belief

The Reality of the Unseen

• Religion, broadly defined, is the belief in an unseen order and harmoniously adjusting oneself to it
• This belief and adjustment constitute the religious attitude in the soul

Psychological Peculiarities of Religious Belief

• All attitudes (moral, practical, emotional, religious) are due to the objects of our consciousness and our belief in their existence
• These objects can be sensed or simply be present in thought
• Reactions to objects of thought can be as strong or stronger than reactions to sensible presences e.g. the memory of an insult being more upsetting than the insult itself

Concrete vs. Abstract Religious Objects

• Concrete objects of religion (deities) are known only in idea
• Many Christian believers have not had a sensible vision of the Saviour
• The Christian religion relies on pure ideas, not direct past experience, to determine the believer's attitude
• Religion contains abstract objects of equal power with concrete ones, such as God's attributes (holiness, justice, mercy, absoluteness, infinity, omniscience, tri-unity) and the mysteries of the redemptive process
• Mystical traditions insist on the absence of definite sensible images for successful prayer or contemplation of higher truths
• Contemplations influence the believer's subsequent attitude

Kant's Doctrine on Objects of Belief

• Immanuel Kant believed objects of belief like God, creation, the soul, freedom, and the afterlife, are not objects of knowledge
• Kant suggests words associated with the soul, God and immortality lack significance due to a lack of sense-content
• He suggests there is a definite meaning for practice
• Kant says we can act as if a God existed, that they were free, that nature was full of special designs and lay plans as if they were to be immortal
• Faith in these unintelligible objects is equivalent to knowledge for action (praktischer Hinsicht)
• Kant describes a mind believing in the real presence of things it cannot conceive

Influence of Belief on Reality

• The sentiment of reality can strongly attach to an object of belief, polarizing one's life
• The object of belief may have no means of being said to be present to our mind
• Even lacking touch, sight, or representative faculty something can be strongly endowed with inner capacity
• It suggests that the various arousals of magnetism by magnets coming can be present in the neighbourhood so that it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies

Abstraction and Human Understanding

• Ideas of pure Reason have the power to make us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe
• Higher abstractions bring the same kind of impalpable appeal
• The universe swims in a wider, higher universe of abstract ideas, lending significance
• Abstract qualities like goodness, beauty, strength, significance, and justice pervade all things
• Abstract ideas form the background for all facts and possibilities, giving 'nature' to everything
• Everything is known by sharing in the nature of abstractions
• Abstractions are bodiless and featureless, but other things are grasped through them

Implications for Human Condition

• The mind's determinability by abstractions is a cardinal human trait
• Abstractions polarize and magnetize people, causing a range of reactions
• Plato defended the reality of abstract objects, known as the Platonic theory of ideas
• Abstract Beauty is a definite individual being, distinct from earthly beauties
• Plato suggested ascending through earthly beauties to the notion of absolute Beauty to grasp its essence
• Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship
• Ethical societies worship the abstract divine or moral law as an ultimate object
• Science can become a religion, with scientists revering the 'Laws of Nature' as objective facts

The Origin of Religious Feeling

• Some see Greek gods as personifications of abstract spheres of law and order e.g., sky-sphere, etc.
• There may be an undifferentiated sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, deeper than the special senses
• Senses may waken attitudes and conduct by exciting this sense of reality
• Ideas that excite the sense of reality appear real like objects of sense
• Religious conceptions can be believed if they can touch this reality-feeling

The "Sense of Presence"

• Hallucinations can involve feeling a 'presence' that is localized and real, yet not perceived by normal senses
• An acquaintance reported experiencing a 'consciousness of a presence distinguishable from other experiences
• One such incident occurred after a tactile hallucination
• A presence was felt to enter the room and stay close to the bed
• It did not register on any ordinary sense, yet there was a sensation connected with it
• The feeling had a large tearing effect that was present over the chest
• They were more sure of its existence than they were of real people
• The individual was conscious of its departure as well as its coming
• The same 'horrible sensation' occurred on multiple nights
• There stood outside the room something intensely more real than people
• The person felt the necessity to compel it to leave

Religious Interpretations

• The experience with "the horrible sensation" does not connect itself with the religious sphere
• The same individual has also reported some experiences with the sense of presence that was joyous
• He reported feeling a central happiness instead of a terrible sensation
• This was the sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person
• Afterward, the memory of the presence persisted as the only perception of reality
• One may think they might interpret these latter experiences theistically as signifying God's presence

Other Narratives and the Human Imagination

• Similar narratives show the sense of presence developing into distinctly visualized hallucinations
• Another individual said they were aroused in the night and felt a consciousness of a presence in the room
• In these instances they felt a spiritual presence, not of a person
• Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what it brings to birth

Conviction of Religious Beliefs

• Unpicturable beings are realized with an intensity close to hallucination
• Our vital attitudes are decisively determined as is the vital attitude of lovers
• Lovers are notoriously haunted, of the continuous feeling of his idol being present
• The conviction of these feelings of reality are as convincing to the individual as possible
• Sensible experiences are more convincing as a rule, than results established by mere logic
• One may be entirely without them however, or may have them strongly

Rationalism vs. Mysticism

• Belief is stronger than any argument
• The opinion opposed to mysticism in philosophy is sometimes spoken of as rationalism
• Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds:
  • Definitely statable abstract principles
  • Definite fact of sensation
  • Definite hypotheses based on such facts
  • Definite inferences logically drawn
• Nevertheless, vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic system
• Rationalism can only account for the more superficial aspects of the individual
• Intuitions come from a deeper level of nature than the loquacious rationalism
• The subconscious life, impulses, faiths, needs, and divinations have prepared the premises
• There can be a feeling that the result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk

The Limits of Reason and Logic

• There is an inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it
• Vast literature of proofs of God's existence drawn from the order of nature are not as convincing today
• It is known today that the type of personal God as understood by our ancestors is outdated
• If a person feels the presence of a living God in this emotional way, then critical arguments will unlikely change their faith
• The subconscious and non-rational hold primacy in the religious realm

The Nature of Religious Attitudes

• Much for our sense of the reality of the religious objects
• Let me now say a brief world more about the attitudes they characteristically awaken
• The attitudes are solemn with joy resulting is from absolute self-surrender
• The sense of the kind of object determines the precise complexion of the joy, and the individual phenomenon is more complex than any single formula allows
• Religious history shows the part which joy has evermore tended to play
• The joy has been primary however sometimes secondary
• If the sadness or the gladness should be left out, if we look at religion with the breadth of view which it demands
• The man's religion involves both moods of contraction and moods of expansion of his being
• The quantitative mixture and order of moods vary so much
• The constitutionally sombre and constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize opposite aspects of what lies before their eyes

The Constitution of Religious Experience

• A sombre religious person makes even of his religious peace a very sober thing
• Danger still hovers in the air about it
• "In Job," says that coldly truthful writer, the author of Mark Rutherford, "God reminds us that man is not the measure of his creation
• What more have we to say now than God said from the whirlwind over two thousand five hundred years ago?""
• If we turn to the sanguine onlooker, on the other hand, we find that deliverance is felt as incomplete unless the burden be altogether overcome and the danger forgotten
• Such onlookers give us definitions that seem to the sombre minds of whom we have just been speaking to leave out all the solemnity that makes religious peace so different from merely animal joys
• One touch were left in it of sacrifice or submission)gic used ency to flexion, no bowing of the head
• Havelock Ellis believes that laughter of any sort may be considered a religious exercise, for it bears witness to the soul's emancipation
• I propose accordingly that we make of religious optimism the theme of the next two lectures