(a) On what grounds does William James characterize mystical states as a genuine expression of religious experience ? Elaborate…

(a) James on mystical states as genuine religious experience (10 marks)

In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) James identifies four marks of mystical states: ineffability (they defy expression), a noetic quality (they seem to disclose truth unavailable to the intellect), transiency, and passivity (the subject feels held by a higher power). His grounds for regarding them as genuine expressions of religious experience are these. First, they are, and have every right to be, absolutely authoritative for the person who has them, being immediate and not dependent on inference. Second, they are not authoritative for others, who may weigh them critically. Third, they break the monopoly of rationalistic, non-mystical consciousness, showing it is only one type of consciousness among others, so they must be taken into account. Further, James judges religion pragmatically "by its fruits": mystical states yield saintliness, charity, and moral strength. Their convergence across traditions supports a shared core, though James concedes they establish no proof for outsiders.

(b) Aquinas's argument from contingency (10 marks)

The Third Way (Summa Theologiae I, q.2, a.3) argues from possibility and necessity. We observe things that are contingent, that come into being and pass away, so that they can exist or not exist. If everything were contingent, then at some time nothing would have existed; but then nothing could begin to exist, and nothing would exist now, which is false. So something must exist necessarily. A necessary being either has its necessity from another or from itself; an infinite regress of necessary beings dependent on others is impossible, so there must be a being necessary in itself, which is the source of the necessity of others, and this is God.

Criticisms: Hume, Kant and Russell held that the move from "each thing has a time when it does not exist" to "there was a time when nothing existed" is a quantifier-shift fallacy; the world might be eternal or a brute fact (Russell, in his debate with Copleston); the notion of necessary existence is questioned; and modern cosmology changes the premises. Defenders (Leibniz, Copleston) recast it through the principle of sufficient reason.

(c) Tillich: faith as ultimate concern, doubt and reason (10 marks)

In Dynamics of Faith (1957) Tillich defines faith as the state of being ultimately concerned: a total, centred act of the whole person directed to what is of unconditional significance, which he calls God, or the "ground of being". Faith is therefore not belief on inadequate evidence, and not opposed to reason, which is the structure of the mind and works within faith. Doubt is not the opposite of faith but an element within it: the risk of commitment includes doubt, and real faith involves the courage to accept doubt and insecurity, as in the "courage to be". Sceptical or methodological doubt is compatible with faith, whereas the doubt of indifference is not. Evaluation: he reconciles faith with reason and honest doubt, and locates faith in existential seriousness. Critics say "ultimate concern" is vague and too wide, since it could include nationalism or success (which he calls idolatry), and it makes faith impersonal and thin in doctrinal content.

(d) Braithwaite on the nature of religious language (10 marks)

R. B. Braithwaite, in An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief (1955), accepts the verification principle: religious statements are not empirically verifiable as factual claims about a supernatural being, so they are not cognitive assertions. Instead they are like moral statements, declarations of adherence to a policy of action, a way of life such as the agapeistic (loving) one; to assert "God is love" is to commit oneself to live lovingly. Religious stories (parables, the Christian narrative) need not be believed as true; they are entertained as stories that psychologically support and intensify that commitment.

Criticism: this reduces religion to ethics plus stories, and makes it fail to be what believers mean, since they assert the truth of, say, the Resurrection; it separates the moral policy from the story, leaving the story with no distinct role; and later thinkers (Ramsey, Wittgenstein's followers) offer alternative accounts of meaning through language-games and models. Still, it takes religious use seriously and shows that non-cognitive accounts avoid the falsification problem.

(e) Reason and the experiential account of religion (10 marks)

I agree, with qualification. If religion were a subject for reason alone, it would consist of arguments about God's existence and morality, an abstract natural theology or deism, and there would be no place for accounts of encounter, worship, awe and communion. Yet such accounts pervade religion: Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence, Otto's numinous, James's mystical states, and the testimony of saints in every tradition. Kierkegaard argues that faith involves passion and a leap that reason cannot supply, and Swinburne's principle of credulity treats experience as prima facie evidence. Therefore the fact that religion has an experiential dimension shows that it exceeds reason.

The qualification is that experience does not replace reason. Experiences are not self-authenticating, differ across traditions and can be explained neurologically, so reason must scrutinise, interpret and compare them. Religion is best seen as a domain in which reason and experience work together, with neither sufficient alone.