Stephen Bradley was an evangelical who wrote a memoir of his spiritual life in 1830.
His name survives today because William James quoted him in his "Varieties of Religious Experience." I'll reproduce part of one of those quotes, regarding Bradley's conversion experience, not because I recommend Bradley's sort of faith, but simply as a token of a type.
"At first, I began to feel my heart beat very quick all on a sudden, which made me at first think that perhaps something is going to ail me, though I was not alarmed, for I felt no pain. My heart increased in its beating, which soon convinced me that it was the Holy Spirit from the effect it had on me. I began to feel exceedingly happy and humble, and such a sense of unworthiness as I never felt before. I could not very well help speaking out, which I did, and said Lord, I do not deserve this happiness, or words to that effect, while there was a stream (resembling air in feeling) came into my mouth and heart in a more sensible manner than that of drinking anything, which continued, as near as I could judge, five minutes or more, which appeared to be the cause of such a palpitation of my heart."
There's a lot that fascinates me about this quote, for example the scrupulous fashion in which Bradley, having quoted what he remembers himself as saying in prayer at the time, adds, "or words to that effect," to account for the imperfection of human memory.
James notes that the effect of this conversion experience upon Bradley in later life is something "of which we gain no information." Bradley dates the experience to Novemver 1829, when he was 24 years old, and the memoir was published in 1830.
If by their fruits we shall judge them, as pragmatists always hold, then it would be of interest to learn of Bradley's later life.
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Knowledge is warranted belief -- it is the body of belief that we build up because, while living in this world, we've developed good reasons for believing it. What we know, then, is what works -- and it is, necessarily, what has worked for us, each of us individually, as a first approximation. For my other blog, on the struggles for control in the corporate suites, see www.proxypartisans.blogspot.com.
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5 comments:
Bradley's description of his symptoms is so precise (although how can a stream resembling air feel as if it is entering the heart?) that I suspect that a medical doctor today could tell us what he experienced. James was a medical doctor, of course, and, even though medical knowledge was far less advanced in his day, I wonder whether it occurred to him to view Bradley's experience as a medical condition.
James spoke of such interpretations in general terms -- without specific reference to Bradley -- in his first lecture in the VRE series, "Religion and Neurology."
The point of that chapter was that no pleading of "the organic causation of a religious state of mind" can properly be said to refute its claim to possess spiritual value, "unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change." And James had few hopes for the sort of psycho-physical theory that would require.
After all, he said, a skeptic's disbelief, or a positivist's adherence to a reductionist physicalism, must itself be as neurologically determined as any ecstatic saint's belief. If we only knew the facts intimately enough, we might see some operation of the liver as "determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul." References to physiology, then, don't help us make judgments about value, cognitive or otherwise.
Christopher, Regarding the "unless" clause of James' that you quote in your second paragraph, it apparently has been worked out. I'm no expert on this, but a moment of googling yielded this article: http://www.bidstrup.com/mystic.htm, which states, among other things, "Dr. Michael Persinger, working at Laurentian University, in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, has pioneered a method for inducing the religious, spiritual experience of the shaman. Without drugs, herbs, hypnosis or invasive surgery, he can quite literally flip a switch and induce the experience of 'god.' Using an ordinary striped yellow motorcycle helmet purchased at a sporting goods store, which he has modified with electromagnetic coils, he can place the helmet on your head, connect the wires to a device he has constructed that generates the proper signals, and when the magnetic fields produced by the coils penetrate the skull and into the temporal lobes of the brain, the result is the stimulation of those lobes and a religious experience results." If stimulating the liver in a particular way ever yielded atheism, then, of course, one could dismiss atheism. But it is unlikely that this will occur because atheism, like theism, is a belief, not an experience. Beliefs can be altered by arguments, and Occam's razor suggests that we therefore need not look for physiological causes for them.
"If stimulating the liver in a particular way ever yielded atheism, then, of course, one could dismiss atheism."
No, that would be irrelevant to the merits of any atheistic conviction or argument.
"But it is unlikely that this will occur because atheism, like theism, is a belief, not an experience."
There aren't very firm boundaries there, I'm afraid.
"Beliefs can be altered by arguments, and Occam's razor suggests that we therefore need not look for physiological causes for them."
The razor would suggest that we acknowledge the correspondence of mental states to neuronal states quite generally, rather than that we postulate a sub-category of mental states that don't correspond to any neurology. The latter policy would amount to the invocation of a belief-generating ghost in the machine.
"If stimulating the liver in a particular way ever yielded atheism, then, of course, one could dismiss atheism."
"No, that would be irrelevant to the merits of any atheistic conviction or argument."
I agree. I meant that one could dismiss atheism to the same extent that Dr. Persinger's technique would justify dismissing a religious experience as caused by something external to person experiencing it.
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"Beliefs can be altered by arguments, and Occam's razor suggests that we therefore need not look for physiological causes for them."
"The razor would suggest that we acknowledge the correspondence of mental states to neuronal states quite generally, rather than that we postulate a sub-category of mental states that don't correspond to any neurology. The latter policy would amount to the invocation of a belief-generating ghost in the machine."
I did not mean that there would be a sub-category of mental states that don't correspond to any neurology. I meant that there would be a sub-category of metal states that could not be caused by the outside stimulation of neurons, independently of the subject's thoughts.
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