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neurologyYou need to know

• Verification is difficult in religious experience because experiences are usually private, subjective and non-repeatable, so other people cannot test them in the same way as public events.
• Scientific challenges to religious experience argue that experiences of God may be explained by psychology, suggestion, mental illness, temporal lobe activity, meditation or drugs rather than by a genuine divine encounter.
• A religious response to scientific challenge is that science may explain the physical process of an experience without disproving its ultimate cause, so a brain event could still be the means through which God communicates.
• Swinburne's principle of credulity states that, unless there is good reason to doubt it, people should usually trust that things are as they seem to be.
• Swinburne's principle of testimony states that, unless there is good reason to doubt it, people should usually accept other people's reports of their experiences.
• Religious experiences can influence believers by strengthening faith, changing moral behaviour, inspiring conversion, deepening prayer and giving a sense of divine reality.
• Cognitive religious language claims to make factual statements that can be true or false, whereas non-cognitive religious language expresses attitudes, commitments or ways of seeing the world.
• The verification principle claims that a statement is meaningful only if it is analytically true or empirically verifiable, which challenges many religious claims because God cannot be directly observed.
• The falsification principle, associated with Antony Flew, argues that a meaningful claim must be open to being shown false, and he claimed that believers often qualify religious claims so much that nothing counts against them.
• Hick's idea of eschatological verification argues that some religious claims, especially about life after death, cannot be verified now but may be verified in the future if the believer survives death.
• R.M. Hare argued that a blik is a non-cognitive but significant way of viewing the world, so religious language may express a deep commitment rather than a testable fact.
• Wittgenstein's view of language games suggests that the meaning of religious language depends on how it is used within a particular form of life, so religious utterances should be judged by their own rules and context.
• Tillich argued that religious language is symbolic, meaning that symbols point beyond themselves to God and participate in the reality to which they refer, rather than functioning as literal descriptions.
• Aquinas argued that religious language is analogical because words applied to God and humans are neither used in exactly the same sense nor in completely different senses, and he developed analogy of attribution and analogy of proportion.
• The Via Negativa states that God is beyond the limits of human language, so we speak more accurately by saying what God is not, such as not finite or not changeable.
• A realist view of miracles holds that miracles are objective acts of God that really occur, whereas an anti-realist view holds that miracles are events interpreted as miraculous by believers because of their meaning or effect.
• One understanding of miracle is that it is a violation or suspension of natural law, while another understanding is that it is an extraordinary natural event through which believers perceive God's action.
• Hume argued that a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature and that no testimony is strong enough to establish a miracle unless its falsehood would be even more miraculous than the event reported.
• Maurice Wiles argued that God does not intervene selectively in nature to perform miracles because such intervention would make God appear arbitrary, so miracles are better understood in terms of their religious significance than as supernatural interruptions.
• Descartes argued for the existence of the soul by claiming that he could doubt the existence of his body but not the existence of himself as a thinking thing, so mind and body are distinct substances and the soul may survive bodily death.

• Evaluate claims of religious experience by applying tests such as consistency, plausibility, alternative scientific explanations and the credibility of the witness.
• Apply Swinburne's principles of credulity and testimony to a case study, judging whether there is sufficient reason to trust the experience or report.
• Distinguish between cognitive and non-cognitive religious language by identifying whether a statement claims fact, expresses commitment or functions within a faith context.
• Analyse a religious claim using the verification and falsification principles, explaining clearly whether the claim is empirically testable, analytically true or immune to counter-evidence.
• Explain Hick's eschatological verification, Hare's blik and Wittgenstein's language game theory with accurate reference to how each responds to challenges about meaning.
• Compare symbolic, analogical and negative approaches to religious language, showing how each tries to speak meaningfully about a transcendent God while avoiding crude literalism.
• Compare Hume's and Wiles' views on miracles by identifying their definitions, reasons and the implications of each view for belief in divine action.
• Construct a reasoned argument about the soul and life after death by using Descartes' substance dualism, explaining the body-soul relationship and assessing whether personal identity could continue after death.