OCR religious studies essay help

Post one of your essays here and I'll give you feedback (I've done the exam marking for OCR before).

Are religious experiences evidence of God?
Disagreeing with the statement, I think religious experiences aren’t evidence of God as there is no empirical data that goes along with them. They are simply personal experiences that are ineffable, meaning that by definition they can’t be explained or proved. William James and other scholars provide useful insight into the topic, but fail to prove God’s existence with this.

Firstly, William James created a list of criteria to decide whether a religious experience someone has truly is from God or not. His criteria includes “ineffability”, suggesting that religious experiences will be difficult to explain, which is logical as they supposedly come form a higher intelligence, meaning us, as humans, will find it difficult to explain or even comprehend. We can see this in the Bible, where St Paul had a conversion experience. Saul was persecuting Christians on the Road to Damascus when God blinded him and asked “Saul – why do you persecute me?”. From this ground-breaking experience, Saul became Paul and a saint; he was so influenced by the experience that he was converted to a Christian after persecuting the faith before. Paul didn’t fully understand what happened but knew it was powerful enough to change his beliefs. This kind of change seems to suggest the experience must have been real. As well as this, Swinburne argues his principle of credulity and principle of testimony, suggesting we should trust people when they say they have a religious experience as they are unlikely to be lying. Swinburne’s suggestion is strong, as otherwise we would never be able to trust people’s viewpoints and conversations would be meaningless. Therefore, we should trust Paul’s story and trust that it really happened, and some may accept that God does exist because of this.

Taking St Paul’s conversion experience into account however, we could argue that just because he changed his life, it doesn’t mean the experience was actually real. Someone can change their life whether they had a religious experience or not; they may just believe something happened to them, when maybe the truth is it didn’t happen. An example of this is Teresa of Avila’s multiple accounts of religious experiences. She claimed she had many visions which had a large impact on her life. She was criticised for her sexual frustrations, however she argued the overwhelming feeling was goodness, not disgust, which was her argument for the credibility of her experiences. Bertrand Russel believes the universe is just “brute fact”, there is no God and claimed experiences like this can be brought on through drink, drugs, illness, hunger etc – “if you eat too little, you see visions”. Teresa of Avila was known for her prior illness to her experiences, suggesting her claims can’t be trusted and may be misled. Even Swinburne who argued that we should trust people’s claims, said that his principles can be ignored if we have reason to not believe someone. In this case, I don’t think Teresa’s accounts can be trusted as she has a history of illness and therefore she has no proof of any God.

It could be argued that we should look to corporate religious experiences for proof of a God as surely if multiple people plead the same case, there must be some truth to the accounts. The Toronto Blessing is a famous corporate religious experience as it was new and created a huge debate among believers. A church crowd in Toronto were moved to cry, roll around, act like animals and they claimed it to be the influence of the Holy Spirit. People go this specific Church as they believe they may too have a religious epiphany there because of these accounts. However, if we follow William James’ criteria, we can see that there is no obvious “noetic quality” here. What can rolling around and acting hysterical tell us about God? There doesn’t appear to be any kind of higher intelligence playing a part here. David Hume argued that humans are drawn to the unusual and desire validation from God; Christians may be biased and therefore they might create these experiences themselves. Peer pressure can play a large part in group settings, people can act differently and therefore corporate religious experiences like these seem very hard to take seriously. Some even thought this was the work of a devil, rather than God. Ultimately, I don’t think this specific event has any proof of a God as it is simply people acting out of the ordinary in a religious location and claiming it to be from a higher power.

However, Otto argued that religious experiences are mysterious, tremendous and fascinating (“mysterium tremendum et fascinans”). He argued that they are wholly other and numinous, creating awe amongst humans. Even though Otto was discussing personal experiences, it could be argued that his description matches the Toronto Blessing. Maybe God doesn’t work in the way we would assume and we shoudlnt try explain it? The Toronto Blessing is definitely ineffable, aligning with James’ ideas. The Toronto Blessing is a mystery, is tremendous and fascinating and wholly other – so it could be argued that it is true proof of a God as it is just so out of the ordinary - there is no other explanation.
In conclusion however, I believe that religious experiences are an incoherent way to gain proof of a God. There ceases to be any concrete evidence and despite corporate religious experiences having more witnesses and James and Otto’s criteria providing help, I still don’t believe they reach any proof of the existence of a God.

Intro is fine. Though technically, 'proof' is stronger than evidence. So even if James fails to prove God's existence, he might still have shown they are evidence for God. I'm being a bit pedantic there but it's worth understanding and explaining that sort of distinction, especially when the terminology is in the essay question.
Intros just really need to say what you're going to argue, so that's fine.
Pretty good AO1 and a bit of AO2 with the strength.
Though it's a bit confusing when you say 'therefore we should trust Paul's story' - since that isn't your line of argument. Better to say 'therefore, Swinburne's argument suggests we should trust Paul's story'.
This is all fine AO1, though it's not very detailed. You've basically put different things together, James & Swinburne (with the illustration of Paul), and explained each of them a bit. But you're not demonstrating really deep understanding that way. Better to explain just one of them in a bit more detail and then evaluate that one.
See my notes about the way James builds an argument from his 4 criteria - I call it the 'pluralism' argument'.
You are mentioning James' argument which results from his being a 'pragmatist', which is the epistemological view that something being good for us is evidence of it's truth. That's why he'd regard Paul's experience being life-changing as evidence for it's authenticity. That's the kind of detail you need to start including if you want higher AO1 marks.
There's too many different things going on here. Better to separate James and Swinburne rather than trying to evaluate both of them at once.
Your chain of reasoning is:
St Paul's experience being life-changing doesn't mean it's evidence for God.
People can have a life-changing experience which wasn't real
E.g. St Theresa of Avila - who had psychological / medical issues,
Russell argues those can cause supposedly religious experiences
Swinburne admits we shouldn't trust people's experience if we have a valid reason to doubt them
We do have reason to doubt Avila, so her experience isn't valid evidence for God.
The problems are:
By the end of the evaluation, you've forgotten about James. You need to say 'therefore, the life-changing effects of an experience are not evidence for their having a supernatural origin'.
Also, you haven't really criticised Swinburne's view here. Yes, Swinburne might agree that Avila should be dismissed because we have a reason not to believe her. But, Swinburne's whole point is that there are people who have religious experiences for whom we have no such evidence of naturalistic explanations like illness. His argument is, we have no basis on which to avoid accepting their experiences as evidence for God. You've not discredited that argument, which you'd need to do to justify your line of argument.
So, don't try to explain and evaluate two different arguments at once. It can be done better if you'd not made those mistakes and written more, but there's no advantage to it.
It's better to choose one criticism and develop that in detail, rather than trying to spray multiple criticisms against something. It can seem strong to throw multiple criticisms and have many reasons to disagree with something. But you get AO2 marks for the 'detail', 'coherence' and 'development' of your evaluation. So, it's better to choose one criticism and evaluate that.
James isn't really adding much. Sure, James wouldn't accept this experience as a valid mystical experience. But so what? Is James right..? You've not really addressed whether he's correct in his categorisation of religious experiences. So you're just saying James disagrees, which isn't evaluation.
I would go with the peer pressure example. I like adding Hume to that, that makes sense. Technically Hume was saying that about miracles but you could say it works against religious experiences too. See my notes for ways to explain the whole psychological dynamics involved in peer pressure / social compliance in more impressive detail.
Using Otto is fine, but you haven't evaluated him properly, you just say there's no concrete evidence.
The whole discussion about whether Otto would consider the toronto blessing a genuine religious experience is a bit superficial, because again who cares if Otto thinks it is! If you want to get into the question of whose criteria are valid, you need to debate and evaluate that, not merely identify what would be valid according to whose criteria. That's not evaluating who is right.
It's easier to just debate the validity of their arguments for religious exprience rather than debating their criteria honestly. Otto was influenced by Schliermacher to argue that religious experiences were self-authenticating, appreciated by the non-rational part of the mind etc - you need to then argue that makes no sense because it could be deluded by hallucination or something like that, or perhaps use Persinger's God helmet.
But really i would just get rid of Otto, and have three paragraphs - James, Swinburne and Corporate experiences - all individually explains and evaluated.
Anyway, this essay would get around a high B grade, perhaps something like 28/40.
It's fine, everything you mention is correct and relevant. But you would most benefit from being stricter with your structure.
A paragraph should be like this:
point (an argument for or against the question - can often be detailed AO1. If the question focuses on a particular area/scholar - which this one doesn't - then you must start your essay with the point of the first paragraph covering much of the AO1 for that thing)
counter (one argument directly countering the argument made in the 'point' section
evaluation (Your judgement about whether the counter succeeded or not. Use language like 'X argument was un/successful because....' when starting your evaluation, or 'X fails because....' or 'However, X is invalid because...'
Make it just one argument per stage of the paragraph. One argument for the point, one direct counter to it, one evaluation of that counter.
This is harder, because it means that those single arguments have to be made in more impressive and precise detail. But that's the most reliable way to get higher marks!
If you want to see examples of these points made in fuller detail, see my notes (especially my revision notes) here: https://alevelphilosophyandreligion.com/ocr-religious-studies/

Hi, thank you so much for this really helpful feedback!! I really appreciate it. I will try my best to incorporate this into my next essays.
Honestly thank you so much! This is really useful!
So would you recommend having three main paragraphs in an essay that go into depth of three points (as long as that fits the question)?

Yep. And that is part of the challenge, identifying the content which best answers the question. It's a skill, which takes practice to develop. That should be part of revision. Revising a topic should include taking my list of possible questions and thinking through which paragraphs you'd use for which,
You also need to practice the skill of writing linking sentences.
When you start a paragraph, you should explain what the 'point' section is arguing regarding the question. I.e., is it for or against the question.
When you end a paragraph, you should state what answer to the question your evaluation has justified.

It's like "X argues Y", where X is the argument/scholar made by the 'point', and Y is the answer to the question that argument/scholar would give or justify.
Just state that, and then you can go ahead and explain the paragraph content having made sure to link it.