The numinous in religious experience

The numinous in religious experience October 9, 2015

A couple of years ago, I blogged about the Numinous, that sense of uncanny awe that Rudolph Otto and C. S. Lewis considered to be at the heart of religious experience.  Ben Stanhope at his Remythologized blog links to that post and explores the concept in greater depth, seeing it as central to Biblical worship and as evidence for supernatural reality.

From Ben Stanhope,  Remythologized: How Biblical Worship is like Hearing a Good Ghost Story – Part 2:

Numinous Fear

If the spiritual visitors in this story [of the apologist J. P. Moreland and his encounter with angels] managed to get any sort of emotional rise out of you, it was likely as sort of goosebumps awe. In part 1, we saw that human beings possess a strange, dreadful awe of the Numinous.

For example, If you saw a ghost, you would feel fear and dread. Like C. S. Lewis observed, that fear would not be grounded in natural, physical danger, since no one is primarily scared of what a ghost is going to do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost! We also saw that this creeping flesh or Numinous fear feeling can be found in heightened expression in all religions since religion involves the worship of great spirits.

Why the Mere Existence of Numinous Fear is an Argument For the Supernatural

C. S. Lewis, himself a huge fan of Rudolf Otto, explained why this emotion is so special:

This Numinous [fear] is [not] already contained in the idea of the dangerous…[and no] perception of danger or any dislike of the wounds and death which it may entail could give the slightest conception of ghostly dread or numinous awe to an intelligence which did not already understand them. When man passes from physical fear to dread and awe, he makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which could never be given, as danger is, by the physical facts and logical deductions from them.[4]

Because the feeling of creeping-flesh fear does not arise from an aversion to physical danger, it’s inexplicable within a purely mechanistic scheme how man should have ever come to possess it—that is, how we should have ever come to be capable of a fear, the object of which, cannot be an elaboration of physical reality or physical preservation.

Most materialistic accounts of numinous dread thoughtlessly attempt to smuggle awe into the idea of physical danger; they presuppose what they are claiming to explain. Scientist presuppose that fear of gods, angels and the dead is grounded in physical preservation, but if you consult your experience you know that physical attention to your body would not be your primary concern if you had encountered such a being. In that way, it is in a totally other dimension from an encounter with a lion, your boss or a rise in prices.

Unless we are to conclude Numinous dread is a freak emotional capacity in man which has managed to develop despite having no correspondence with the facts of reality, it seems inescapable that the religious mind of man has veins drawing life from something lurking beyond the natural, and it is the very fact that you are even capable of this emotion which whispers of at least one thing engraved in us which metaphysical materialism never can satisfy by definition.

I’m taking a lighthearted jab here at philosophers like Alain de Botton. It seems their attempts to create a “religious atheism,” as clever as they may be, will always fail to satisfy at least one universal and powerful dimension of human expression.

The “Man-Creates-God-in-his-Image” Objection:

If what I have observed so far lands in the ballpark of truth then we can infer from it that there is a very common belief held about the nature and origin of religion which seems false. Xenophanes is famous for his saying that if oxen could paint, they would depict their gods as oxen.

Response:

Surely, it is true that man is often compelled to depict his gods with human characteristics simply because human beings are the highest expression of personality that we may look to as a reference in nature. But, in the sense that the statement implies humans created the gods, and later God, merely from a desire to project what was familiar to us, Xenophanes’s claim seems false. The gods do not emerge from the familiar but the Strange.

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