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Space as God's Presence
| Article
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11324 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
8,088 Words |
| Author
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Patrick A. Heelan
Patrick A. Heelan teaches philosophy of science at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook and is the author of
Quantum Mechanics and objectivity: The Physical Philosophy of
Werner Heisenberg and Space-Perception and the Philosophy of
Science. |
It is not surprising that different individuals, traditions, and cultures experience the religious dimension of life in different ways. Since religious experience is a divine communication the study of religious experience is concerned with channels of communication between God and his peoples; different channels, presumably, serve different cultures and historical communities. I take it that religious experience is an experience of a certain kind--of a religious kind. I take the phenomenology of this experience to be that it deals with a sense of loving dependency on some Being other than oneself for life's ultimate meaning, some Being in whose presence one stands in unqualified awe and with a sense of sin.
Religious experience may or may not be accompanied by an "oceanic feeling." Mystical experience of a higher order may be characterized by such a feeling, but the religious experience I am concerned with is not a higher order experience, but the religious experience of ordinary religious folk. I want to set forth the view that--insofar as religious terms have public meaning--the object of religious worship, God, is experienced only through channels which are both appropriate and public: these channels are religious symbols. These channels are themselves metaphors of the experienced object, and more than metaphors, they testify to the presence of a reality to described.
There are, according to Paul Ricoeur, primary and secondary religious symbols. Primary symbols are natural objects used to describe the character and presence of a divine object or relationship; other religious symbols, such, for example, as the myths, stories, rites, and practices of particular religious communities, are secondary. The Myth of the Fall of
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