![]() Perceptual error and illusion warn us that the senses can be deceptive. But experience is not purely objective, for it is qualified by the memories, feelings and concepts of the experiencing subject. We respond as beings participating in a wider world. It is at least in part a ‘given’ which we are powerless to alter, a demand upon us to which we must conform. Our experience is not purely subjective, since we cannot make of it what we will. The contributions of subject and object, in this view, are complex and never totally separable. The being who experiences is an active agent in the world, not a passive recipient of data. In a growing child, the distinction of self and world arises gradually because of his selective interest and responsive activity. It is a product of something encountered and a being capable of apprehending and interpreting that encounter. I would advocate an alternative theory ‘which identifies primary experience with pre-reflective awareness of the flow of living activity in the interaction of organism and environment. It should be evident that this is a theory of experience, rather than a description of human consciousness. Experience, for the positivist, is the private, subjective awareness of sense qualities produced by physical stimuli from the external world. Positivist authors since Hume have held that experience starts from the passive reception of momentary, disconnected, uninterpreted sense-data. The Influence of Interpretation on Experience The final section is concerned with criteria of assessment and their limitations.ġ. Thereafter some distinctive problems of religious belief are taken up: the character of religious faith, the problem of transcendence and the status of metaphysics. Section 3 examines the role of commitment to religious paradigms, understood as traditions transmitted by historical exemplars. Then the debate over the falsifiability of religious beliefs is appraised in the light of our conclusions about falsifiability in science. In the first section of this chapter the influence of interpretation on experience in religion is explored, paralleling the discussion of the influence of theory on observation in the previous chapter. But can religious beliefs be tested against human experience, as scientific theories can be tested against observations? Are there any criteria for the assessment of religious beliefs? Beliefs, like theories, can be propositionally stated and systematically articulated. As scientific models lead to theories by which observations are ordered, so religious models lead to beliefs by which experiences are ordered. In chapter 4 above it was proposed that the data of religion are experiences and events which are interpreted by imaginative models. Myths, Models and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religionīy Ian Barbour Chapter 7: Paradigms in Religion
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