IB Philosophy 5.3 Religious Experience and Behaviour Key Definitions

Consciousness: the state of subjective awareness in which an individual experiences thoughts, sensations, and perceptions with a first-person, qualitative character: the 'what it is like' quality of mental life.

The epistemic value of religious experience concerns whether such experiences provide genuine knowledge about the existence and nature of God, or whether they can be fully explained by psychological, neurological, or social factors without invoking a divine cause.

Ineffability is a characteristic of religious (especially mystical) experience identified by William James, referring to the quality of being beyond adequate verbal expression.

The omnipotence paradox refers to a family of logical puzzles (such as "Can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it?") that challenge the coherence of unlimited divine power as a concept.

Projection theory is the view, associated with Feuerbach, Freud, and Marx, that the concept of God is a human creation projected outward rather than a response to an independently existing divine reality. Feuerbach argued that theology is unconscious anthropology, with believers attributing their own idealised qualities to a fictitious being, while Freud interpreted religion as wish-fulfilment rooted in childhood dependence.

Religious experience: any experience in which a person believes they have encountered the divine, the sacred, or a transcendent reality; types include mystical experiences, near-death experiences, prayer, visions, and moments of profound awe or transformation.

Religious pluralism: the view that no single religion has a monopoly on truth and that the major world religions are different culturally conditioned responses to the same ultimate divine reality; most closely associated with John Hick.

Social conditioning is the process by which social structures, institutions, and power relations shape an individual's beliefs, desires, and sense of identity, often without the individual's conscious awareness or consent.

In John Hick's philosophy of religion, the Real refers to the ultimate divine reality that transcends all human categories and is experienced differently through the cultural and conceptual frameworks of particular religious traditions, analogous to Kant's distinction between noumenon (thing-in-itself) and phenomenon (thing-as-experienced).