Can You Trust Your Instincts?

Hosted by Center for the Study of Religion and Psychology at Boston University's Danielsen Institute

Wesley J. Wildman, a School of Theology associate professor of theology and ethics, discusses the cognitive reliability of spiritual experiences in Can You Trust Your Instincts?, the fourth lecture in a six-part series titled Religious Experiences: From the Mundane to the Anomalous. He builds upon his previous discussions of religious and spiritual experiences to propose a new philosophical framework for questioning the truthfulness of the meaningful moments that shape our religious beliefs.

Wildman begins by examining the reliability problem that has long troubled theologians, psychologists, and philosophers of religion. If the beliefs we hold are true, he says, we can assume the thoughts that produced our beliefs are reliable. When dealing with spiritual and religious experiences, however, determining the truthfulness of our beliefs is impossible. Therefore, Wildman argues, the question of whether or not these experiences are reliable can never be answered, and needs to be approached from a new angle.

After outlining several common but inadequate criteria for reliability, Wildman proposes a new way of looking at the problem. Rather than asking if experiences are reliable, he poses the question, To what degree can we treat our own experiences are reliable? He gives three conditions for looking at intense spiritual experiences: the analysis of an experience must take into account natural cosmology, the role the person’s environment plays in the experience, and the symbolic nature of religious cognition. Wildman concludes that the reliability problem can only be partially solved, noting, “the subject matter defeats us to a significant degree.”

Part of a research project at the Danielsen Institute’s Center for the Study of Religion and Psychology, the lecture series is funded by a Templeton Foundation grant from the Metanexus Institute, which administers the Templeton Research Lectures.

February 25, 2007, 7:30 p.m.
Photonics Center

Video length is 01:30:32.

About the Speaker:
Wesley J. Wildman is an associate professor of theology and ethics at the Boston University School of Theology, where he directs the doctoral programs in Christian theology, in comparative theology, and in science, philosophy, and religion. Wildman has a bachelor’s in mathematics from Flinders University and a graduate degree in divinity from the University of Sydney, both in Australia. He earned a doctorate in philosophical and systematic theology and philosophy of religion from the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, California. He has published more than 60 articles and the book Fidelity with Plausibility: Modest Christologies in the Twentieth Century. Wildman is the coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, as well as a collection of debates on contemporary issues in religion and science. He has studied the nature and problems of religious experience for over a decade through his involvement with the Divine Action Project at Boston University, sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, and the Crosscultural Comparative Religious Ideas Project at BU. An ordained minister in the Uniting Church in Australia, Wildman has served churches in Sydney, Australia, and Piedmont, California.

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