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Religious Experience and Transcendence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Hampus Lyttkens
Hampus Lyttkens
Affiliation:
Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, University of Lund
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Extract

Someone may ask what the reasons are for putting religious experience and transcendence together. My answer is the following. My general philosophical position is empirical by nature. I am of the opinion that everything that is said about reality must in some way or other, in order to be true or probable, be related to or grounded in reality. If God is thought to be real in some sense of the word and if he is said to have the quality of being transcendent, there must be some sort of empirical reasons for it. Experience is generally - at least in its objective variant - a usual way of motivating propositions about reality. There is therefore reason to ask: Is there anything in religious experience that motivates giving God the predicate of transcendence? And on the other hand: What conditions would there have to be in our world of experience to justify a consideration of a theory of Transcendence?

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 1979 , pp. 211 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

page 215 note 1 The analogy with knowledge of other people's minds does not hold. This knowledge is still immanent. Cf. Lewis, , Our Experience of God, (London, 1962), pp. 284 ff.Google Scholar