What is a religious experience, and what are its main types?
The nature and types of religious experience: mystical, conversion, numinous, corporate and revelatory experiences, with key examples and the features (ineffability, noetic quality) that mark them.
What religious experience is in SQA Advanced Higher RMPS. Covers the main types (mystical, conversion, numinous, corporate, revelatory), James's marks of mystical experience (ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity), Otto's numinous, and key examples, with how to analyse them.
Reviewed by: AI editorial process; not yet individually human-reviewed
Have a quick question? Jump to the Q&A page
Jump to a section
What this key area is asking
Religious Experience, the alternative optional area to Medical Ethics, opens by asking what a religious experience is and how many kinds there are. You must understand the main types, mystical, conversion, numinous, corporate and revelatory experiences, with key examples, and the features that are said to mark them, especially William James's four marks of mystical experience and Rudolf Otto's account of the numinous. This dot point describes and classifies the experiences; the next ones ask whether they prove anything.
What a religious experience is
The definition matters because the interpretation is part of the experience: the same event might be described religiously by one person and naturally by another, which becomes central when we ask whether such experiences are evidence for God.
Mystical experience and James's marks
James's marks are the most examined framework in this area, because they try to identify recurring, cross-cultural features and to treat the experiences as data to be studied. They are most at home with mysticism, which raises the question of whether they capture all religious experience.
The numinous
Otto's numinous is the key contrast to the mystical: union and absorption (mystical) versus awe before an "other" (numinous). Keeping the two distinct is a common discriminator in essays and short answers.
Conversion, corporate and revelatory experiences
These types broaden the category beyond private mysticism. Conversion is significant for its life-changing effects; corporate experience raises the problem of crowd influence; revelatory experience underlies the authority claimed by religious traditions. A strong answer can classify a given case among these types and note its distinctive features.
Worked example
Try this
Q1. What are James's four marks of mystical experience? [2 marks]
- Cue. Ineffability, noetic quality, transiency and passivity.
Q2. How does a numinous experience differ from a mystical one? [2 marks]
- Cue. The numinous is a confrontation with the holy as "wholly other" (awe before a distinct power); the mystical is a sense of union or oneness with the divine.
Exam-style practice questions
Practice questions written in the style of SQA exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.
SQA AH (Religious Experience)20 marksHow helpful are James's four marks of mystical experience for understanding religious experience?Show worked answer →
A strong essay explains James's marks, applies them, and judges how well they capture religious experience.
Explain William James's four marks of mystical experience: ineffability (it cannot be adequately described in words), noetic quality (it seems to give genuine knowledge or insight, not just feeling), transiency (it is brief and cannot be sustained), and passivity (the subject feels acted upon, as if grasped by a power beyond them). Apply them to examples such as mystical union or a conversion experience, showing which marks are present. Evaluate: the marks are helpful because they identify recurring, cross-cultural features and distinguish mystical experience from ordinary emotion, and James's empirical approach takes the experiences seriously as data; but they are not exhaustive (numinous and corporate experiences may not fit), the noetic claim is contested (does the sense of knowledge make it knowledge), and ineffability makes the experiences hard to study. Conclude on how far the marks illuminate the range of religious experience rather than only mysticism.
SQA AH (Religious Experience)12 marksExplain the difference between numinous and mystical religious experience.Show worked answer →
The marks reward accurate definitions of each type and the contrast between them.
A numinous experience, described by Rudolf Otto, is an experience of the holy as "wholly other": an awesome, overwhelming power (the mysterium tremendum) that evokes both dread and fascination, in which the subject feels their own smallness before a transcendent reality that remains distinct from them. A mystical experience, by contrast, characteristically involves a sense of union or oneness with the divine or ultimate reality, in which the ordinary separation between subject and object seems to dissolve, often described by James's marks (ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity). The key contrast is between confrontation with an "other" (numinous) and union or absorption (mystical). A full answer explains both with reference to Otto and James and draws the distinction clearly, rather than just listing examples.
Related dot points
- The argument from religious experience: the inductive argument that experiences count as evidence for God, Swinburne's principles of credulity and testimony, and James's empirical case.
The argument from religious experience for God in SQA Advanced Higher RMPS. Covers the inductive argument that experiences are evidence for God, Swinburne's principles of credulity and testimony, James's empirical case from The Varieties of Religious Experience, and how to evaluate it.
- Challenges to religious experience: psychological and physiological explanations (Freud, neuroscience), the problem of conflicting claims across religions, and verification and the privacy of experience.
The challenges to religious experience in SQA Advanced Higher RMPS. Covers psychological explanations (Freud), physiological and neuroscientific explanations, the problem of conflicting claims across religions, and verification and privacy, with how to evaluate them against the argument.
- Religious experience and belief: the role of experience in grounding and sustaining faith, public versus private evidence, the value of the effects of experience, and whether experience can justify belief for others.
The relationship between religious experience and belief in SQA Advanced Higher RMPS. Covers how experience grounds and sustains faith, the difference between justifying one's own belief and others', the value of the effects of experience, and whether religious experience can justify belief, with evaluation.
- The ontological argument: Anselm's a priori argument from the concept of the greatest possible being, Descartes's version, and the criticisms from Gaunilo and Kant (existence is not a predicate).
The ontological argument for God in SQA Advanced Higher RMPS Philosophy of Religion. Covers Anselm's a priori argument from the idea of the greatest possible being, Descartes's version, and the criticisms from Gaunilo's island and Kant's claim that existence is not a predicate, with how to evaluate it.
- The existence of God: theism, atheism and agnosticism, the burden of proof, and the distinction between a priori and a posteriori arguments that frames the cosmological, teleological and ontological arguments.
How the existence of God is debated in SQA Advanced Higher RMPS Philosophy of Religion. Covers theism, atheism and agnosticism, the burden of proof, and the distinction between a priori and a posteriori arguments that frames the cosmological, teleological and ontological arguments.