Abstract

Whitehead incorporates the data provided by religious experience to produce a system by means of which the full range of religious experiences may be understood. Whitehead does not build his doctrine of God on religious experience; however, he uses religious experience as the means of identifying his doctrine with that reality which is venerated by the great religions. ;God is prehended in every occasion of experience making up the world, but most of our experiences of him are unconscious. All experience may be divided into three types: mundane experience, in which no religious content is discerned; religiously ambiguous experience, which provides only intimations of a higher reality; and full-blown religious experience of a vivid kind. ;In terms of the system, the third type of experience requires a muting or silencing of worldly prehensions. Ascetic and meditative practices of various religious traditions may be seen as attempts to achieve this goal. ;According to Smart, two polarities may be discerned in vivid religious experiences. Numinous encounters are experiences of the "otherness" of the divine, while mystical experiences constitute a sense of "sameness" or identity. Whitehead's system can adequately account for both polarities of experience. ;Nature mysticism presents special problems in that it does not transcend the natural world, and it contains elements of both mystical experience and numinous encounter. It may be seen as a kind of "sacramental perception" in which the objective world becomes an outward symbol of an inner reality. ;Naturalistic arguments against a cognitive dimension of religious experience are convincing only to the extent that one accepts the underlying metaphysical assumptions of naturalism. "Neo-Whiteheadian" attempts to naturalize Whitehead's system produce an alternate system which is inadequate for accounting for religious experience