Keith Ward--Religion - Religion and Experience: A Philosophical Exploration

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source: GreshamCollege        2015年2月3日
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lectures are available from the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
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50:57 Experience and the Spiritual Dimension 
Professor Ward examines the empiricist philosophy and what it means for the religious person: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
It is a widely held philosophical belief that all knowledge begins with experience. But experience needs to be interpreted. This lecture argues that there are widespread human experiences of ‘transcendence’, and looks at the arts and at morality as providing examples of this. Such experiences need not involve God explicitly, but they postulate the existence of objective values that put in question a materialist view of reality.
54:26 The Idealist View of Reality 
There are competing philosophical views of reality. Main contenders are: common sense, reductive materialism, radical empiricism, and idealism. The lecture will review these, and defend an idealist view – that matter is a projection of mind, and that mental, conscious being is the fundamental form of reality.
50:41 Religion and Experience: Personal Knowledge 
Scientific knowledge aims at a dispassionate value-free assessment of publicly accessible, repeatable, and quantifiable data. But there is another sort of knowledge, knowledge of ourselves and other persons, which is very different, requiring engagement, personal evaluation, and involvement. This knowledge is seen in history, in self-awareness, and in relations with other persons. It is the basis of a religious form of knowing.
55:21 Forms of Religious Thought
The lecture will argue that there is a logical pattern to the different forms of religion in the world, and will set out the main differences and convergences between them in a systematic way. It will be argued that the idea of ‘God’ integrates various types of interpreted experiences in a coherent and comprehensive way.