RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 789, 3 September 1954, Page 14

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

WHAT IS RELIGION? bv Alban G. Widgery; Allen and Unwin, English price 18/-. LIFE, FAITH, AND PRAYER, by A. Graham lkin; Allen and Unwin, English price 8/6. ‘THE _ religion-versus-science controversy has been practically abandoned by both theologians and scientists. The relevant arguments have reached either solution or stalemate. At worst there is an agreement to differ, based on the fact that the theologian, arguing from an acceptance of religious categories, inhabits a different world of thought from that of the scientist who argues along purely empirical and inductive lines. It is refreshing, therefore, to find two writers on the scientific side of the fence challenging both scientists and theologians to examine the evidences of religion by working from the empirical phenomena of religious experience, and not from either an accepted creed, book or person, nor from psycho-naturalistic abstractions about religion. Dr. Widgery, Professor of Philosophy in Duke University, in What Is Religion? attacks the intellectualistic "confusion" about religion. "The way to knowledge in religion is the practise of religion," he affirms, and calls on evidence from all the great world religions to prove his argument. He presents a cumulative case for the reality of religion, drawn from experimental data, which scientific or philosophical speculation would find it herd to refute, even though orthodox Christians might want to part company with him in some of his excursions into the realms of comparative religion. Miss Ikin, Lecturer in Psychology at Gilmore, in Life, Faith and Prayer, attempts a less ambitious project, and merely tries to "adumbrate a synthesis which will make it possible for both scientific and religious thinkers to respect and allow for the reality of both (the scientific and the religious) responses of the human mind to life and experience." She examines certain fundemental and universal human experiences, sex, growth, the onset of middle age, and the discovery of self-denial as the secret of adjustment to environment, and claims that the answer of religion is the only satisfying and adequate answer to the practical problems posed

by life itself. There is a particularly illuminating study of the psychology of

prayer.

G.

D.