Personal Experience of God

By Chris Park

Personal experience can provide powerful evidence of God's existence and engagement with people, which is usually more compelling than the other arguments for God. This book explores some important dimensions of this personal experience, including why God might want to make himself known personally to individual people, and why he doesn't do that to all people at all times. Christians believe that God reveals himself to us in 3 ways - through creation, through the Bible, and through particular events in history. Revelation to individual people is a more contested theme, but it is commonly experienced and widely documented. The most common forms of religious experience include dreams, visions and near-death experiences, and mystical experiences. Recent scientific studies of religious experience have promoted the field of neurotheology, but the jury is out on whether such experiences are the result of natural or divine causes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Park
• Release date: Mar 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311976390

Chris Park

I am a retired academic with more than 30 years experience in university teaching, research and senior management in the UK. These days I enjoy spending time reading, writing, walking and travelling, but not all at the same time!

Book preview

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF GOD

Copyright 2016 Chris Park

Smashwords Edition

Thank you for downloading this ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied or distributed for commercial or non-commercial reasons. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy, and please consider downloading the other books in the series GOD MATTERS, both free from Smashwords.com. Thank you for your support.

This ebook contains material drawn from my book God: Real or Imagined? which was first published in print format by Zaccmedia in 2013. It is part of the GOD MATTERS series, the other ebooks of which are listed in ‘Other books by this author’.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Divine intervention

3. Revelation

4. Religious experience

5. Scientific study of religious experience

References

About the author

Other books by this author

1. Introduction

"There are particular kinds of experiences that seem to those who have them to be experiences of the sacred. … [thus] if the sacred - if God - can be experienced, then God is simply not somewhere else but also right here." Marcus Borg (1998)

Believers and non-believers view the whole question of personal experience of God very differently. Non-believers, who struggle with the idea of God let alone the existence of God, generally find it impossible to envisage God interacting directly with individual people, and in ways that those people are aware of. Believers are generally comfortable with the idea and existence of God, but not all are convinced that personal experience of God is possible. Deists believe in a passive, absent God who initially created the universe and then left it to look after itself; for them personal experience of God is out of the question. Theists, on the other hand, believe in an active, present God who continues to engage with the universe he created; from this perspective it is quite logical for individuals to expect to be able to have personal experiences of God.

Richard Swinburne (1979) argues that we should expect God to make himself known to at least some people. He writes one might expect certain private and occasional manifestations by God to some men and points out that the argument from religious experience claims that this has often occurred; many have experienced God (or some supernatural thing connected with God) and hence know and can tell us of his existence.

Personal experience can provide powerful evidence of God’s existence and engagement with people, which is usually more compelling (at least for those who have such experiences) than the other arguments for God (which are discussed in the ebook Arguments for God in this GOD MATTERS series).

William James (1902) believed that religious belief "is not to be proved by arguments. It is rather grounded in enthusiastic emotion, essentially private and individualistic; its truths well up into our lives in ways resisting verbal expression. … No philosophical theology could ever arise or prosper