Abstract

In his Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience, William P. Alston presents an impressive argument for the justification of religious beliefs acquired through religious experience. The central thesis of Alston's argument is that one's being experientially aware of God--or one's perceiving God, as Alston prefers to say--as so-and-so at a certain moment--as guiding one about a particular issue, for instance--is a sufficient ground for the justification of one's belief that God is or acts so-and-so. ;In this study, I aim to do what the other critics do not: namely, to present a comprehensive critique of Alston's argument. My argument will be a cumulative one which consists of a detailed criticism of Alston's argument throughout--including its various steps, underlying principles, and presuppositions--and an exhibition of its defects. ;The project has the following structure. The first two chapters are devoted to the presentation of Alston's argument. In the first chapter, I give an account of Alston's argument from analogy. This includes his notion of perception in general, his conception of the experiential awareness of God, and the basis of the analogy between the two modes of experience. In the second chapter, I present Alston's argument from practical rationality and social establishment for the justification of our perceptual beliefs. This chapter contains his notion of epistemic justification, his doxastic practice theory, and the argument itself. ;I turn to the critics in the third chapter. I critically examine both the arguments given by critics and Alston's responses to them. The section on Alston's responses includes both the actual ones given by Alston and the possible ones that could be suggested from an Alstonian point of view. ;The last two chapters are dedicated to my own critique of Alston. In the fourth chapter, I present a critique of the first step of Alston's argument, namely, a critique of his argument from analogy. The criticism of his notion of perception and that of the mystical experience of God are also included in this critique. The last chapter is simply a critique of the second step of Alston' s argument, the argument from practical rationality and social establishment. Here I give a criticism of the preparatory part of the argument together with a criticism of the argument itself; that is, I include criticism of Alston's notion of justification and that of his doxastic practice theory in addition to the criticism of the practical rationality and social establishment in this chapter.