Abstract

Religious experience has long been conceived by philosophers of religion as subjective phenomena which are largely irrelevant to the justification, truth-conduciveness, or positive epistemic status of religious beliefs. But with William Alston's recent argument in Perceiving God defending the justification of beliefs about God on the basis of mystical perception, this view is no longer as defensible as it once was. Alston's claim that mystical perception is legitimately perceptual epistemically justified is defended on the basis of two parity arguments, one showing that there is no disparity between it and sense perception sufficient to discredit its perceptual nature and the other showing how the reliability of mystical perceptual practice has no disparity from the reliability of sense perceptual practice sufficient to discredit its truth-conduciveness and thus the justification of its resulting beliefs. ;The remainder of the dissertation examines how mystical perception affects two major interfacie disputes over religious belief found in the philosophy of religion--the evidential problem of evil and the voluntary nature of religious belief. The current dispute over religious belief is brought into focus by an examination of William Rowe's evidential argument from intense suffering against theistic belief. Stephen Wykstra's epistemic and Richard Swinburne's evidential goods solutions to Rowe's evidential argument from evil are shown to incompletely defeat or balance off intense suffering. Supplemental mystical perception is shown to undermine both Wykstra's arguments Rowe's atheistic conclusion, but also to contribute to the balancing off of evil against Rowe's evidential argument. Marilyn McCord Adams distinction between global and local defeat of horrendous evil is introduced to show that horrendous or afflicting evil can only sometimes be globally balanced off and more often be locally defeated by supplemental mystical perception. ;Finally, the role of voluntary belief in the process of removing doubt about God's love in the face of afflicting evil is addressed. It is concluded that a Jamesian approach to willed belief in the context of the mystical perception of the absence of the love of God in the midst of affliction can make possible the complete local defeat of the evil of affliction