CAROLINE

FRANKS DAVIS
CAROLINE FRANKS DAVIS
• Dr Caroline Franks Davis has her university studies in Canada and
Germany, completed a DPhil in Philosophy at Oxford.
• Caroline Franks Davis is a Research Analyst in the University of
Saskatchewan, Canada.
• Caroline Franks Davis is the author of books such as The
Evidential Force Of Religious Experience
MAIN
CONTRIBUTIONS
IN RELIGION
THE EVIDENTIAL FORCE OF
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
This book examines the value of religious experiences as
evidence for religious claims. Its goal is to discover the role
which religious experience can legitimately play in the
defence of religious doctrines.

Book details:

280 pages

PUBLISHER:Clarendon Press

PLACE OF PUBLICATION:Oxford

PUBLICATION YEAR:1999

CONTRIBUTORS:Caroline Franks Davis

SUBJECTS:Experience (Religion)
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
• Quasi-sensory experience

• Having a perceived vision or inherent visual or audible experience from God. Ezekiel 47. 1-14.Joseph Smith’s ‘first vision’.

• Numinous experience

• A sense of overwhelming awe leading to the feeling of being in the presence of the holiness of God. Neil Armstrong

• Regenerative experience

• An experience to an overwhelming compulsion to convert. Nicky Cruz. A Muslim

• Mystical Experience

• Having a sense of the ultimate reality and a spiritual unity with God

• Revelatory Experience

• Receiving enlightenment and knowledge from God. Siddharta Gautama(Buddha).

• Interpretive Experience

• An experience which are interpreted in a religious way

ARGUMENTS FROM
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
• Experiences of the ‘numen’
• Experiences of the loving (etc.) relationship with a personal ‘other’
• Extroversive mystical experiences of unity in multiplicity
• Introversive mystical experiences of unity devoid of all multiplicity.
A CUMULATIVE CASE
 Richard Swinburne provides one of the most recent
attempts to use religious experiences as evidence for
theism. In The Existence of God, Swinburne argues not
only that it is rational to maintain a current religious belief
but also that ‘theism is more probable than not’.
CHALLENGES TO RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE
• Description related challenges
• Exemplified chiefly by the claim to detect some kind of inconsistency either
within the description of an experience or between this and something else
• Subject related challenges
• Some factor or set of factors associated with an individual subject or class of
subjects makes it likely that the described experience was unveridical
• Object related challenges
• Produce evidence or arguments designed to show that the experience was
unveridical.
EXPERIENCE AND
INTERPRETATION
 An extremely common challenge to arguments from religious
experience—though not to the veridicality of religious experiences
as such—is the claim that because religious experiences involve
interpretation in terms of religious doctrines, any argument
attempting to justify those doctrines by an appeal to religious
experiences must be viciously circular.
THE CONFLICTING CLAIMS
CHALLENGE
Illusory or Serious Misperception
The different descriptions tend to be
correlated with the subjects' different
traditions
THE
REDUCTIONIST
CHALLENGE
TOWARDS A
CUMULATIVE
CASE FOR THEISM
COMMON CORE FROM
NUMINOUS AND MYSTICAL
EXPERIENCES
 That the physical world is not the whole or ultimate reality;
 The ego of everyday consciousness is not the deepest level of the self,
 That deeper self in some way depends on and participates in ultimate reality;
 Ultimate reality is holy, eternal and of supreme value and everything else is dependent on it;
 This may be experience as a loving, guiding presence with whom individuals can have
relationship;
 Some mystical experience are of union with something else, although introvertive experiences
in themselves cannot show this as only the union is experienced; and
 Some kind of union or harmonious relation with the ultimate reality is the human being’s
summum bonum, his final liberation or salvation, and the means by which he discovers his
‘true self’ or ‘true home’.
EFFECTS OF THE
CONTRIBUTIONS
IN GENERAL
 “Should be the starting point for any future investigation of the evidential
force of religious experience upon any particular religious claim. Not only
does it give a complete catalog of the various types of religious experiences,
but it also gives a complete catalog of various arguments from religious
experience and the objections that can be made thereto.” –Christian Scholar’s
Review

 “This is a splendid piece of work. It breaks new ground as well as dealing

comprehensively with the standard material on religious experience.”-William
J. Abraham, Perkins School of Theology

 “Davis does an admirable job in reopening an issue which many may regard
as closed.”- Theological Studies