For many Christians, personal experiences of God provide an important ground or justification for accepting the truth of the gospel. But we are sometimes mistaken about our experiences, and followers of other religions also provide impressive testimonies to support their religious beliefs. This book explores from a philosophical and theological perspective the viability of divine encounters as support for belief in God, arguing that some religious experiences can be accepted as genuine experiences of God and can provide evidence (...) for Christian beliefs. (shrink)

The essence of religion was once widely thought to be a unique form of experience that could not be explained in neurological, psychological, or sociological terms. In recent decades scholars have questioned the privileging of the idea of religious experience in the study of religion, an approach that effectively isolated the study of religion from the social and natural sciences. Religious Experience Reconsidered lays out a framework for research into religious phenomena that reclaims (...) class='Hi'>experience as a central concept while bridging the divide between religious studies and the sciences. Ann Taves shifts the focus from "religious experience," conceived as a fixed and stable thing, to an examination of the processes by which people attribute meaning to their experiences. She proposes a new approach that unites the study of religion with fields as diverse as neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to better understand how these processes are incorporated into the broader cultural formations we think of as religious or spiritual. Taves addresses a series of key questions: how can we set up studies without obscuring contestations over meaning and value? What is the relationship between experience and consciousness? How can research into consciousness help us access and interpret the experiences of others? Why do people individually or collectively explain their experiences in religious terms? How can we set up studies that allow us to compare experiences across times and cultures? Religious Experience Reconsidered demonstrates how methods from the sciences can be combined with those from the humanities to advance a naturalistic understanding of the experiences that people deem religious. (shrink)

This Element looks at religious experience and the role it has played in philosophy of religion. It critically explores the history of the intertwined discourses on mysticism and religious experience, before turning to a few specific discussions within contemporary philosophy of religion. One debate concerns the question of perennialism vs. constructivism and whether there is a 'common core' to all religious or mystical experience independent of interpretation or socio-historical background. Another central discussion concerns the (...) epistemology of purportedly theophanic experience and whether a perceptual model of religious experience can provide evidence or justification for theistic belief. The Element concludes with a discussion of how philosophy of religion can productively widen its treatment of religious experience in the service of creating a more inclusive and welcoming discipline. (shrink)

Appeal to experience for rational justification of religious belief is probably as old as the question whether religious belief has any rational support. The issues relevant to such appeal range widely, and I will have to be content to deal with only a few of them.

This clearly presented study examines the nature of religious experiences, and asks whether they can be used as evidence for religious beliefs. The author discusses important philosophical issues raised by religious experience, such as the role of models and metaphors in their description, and the way experiences in general are used as evidence for claims about the world. Using contemporary and classic sources from the world's religions, the author gives an account of different types of (...) class='Hi'>religious experience. She also draws extensively on psychological, sociological, and philosophical literature to meet sceptical challenges, and concludes that, like most experiences, they are most effective as evidence within an argument which combines evidence from a wide range of sources. (shrink)

I discuss Richard Swinburne’s account of religious experience in his probabilistic case for theism. I argue, pace Swinburne, that even if cosmological considerations render theism not too improbable, religious experience does not render it more probable than not.

How do we explain the coincidence of religion and madness in which prophets, founders of religions and great saints often show symptoms of an excitability that is extreme and even pathological? This book attempts to address this phenomenological problem. Richard Saville-Smith argues that 'acute religious experiences' provides a novel category to the study of the non-rational. This book provides an epidemiological approach to a crisis, which is non-veridical and non-reductionist, recognizing a predisposition due to gene variation as a perennial (...) constant, whilst affirming that culture contextualizes experiences. Informed by contemporary psychiatric theory, which is passed through the lens of mad studies, this book proposes the 'sweet-spot' of 'acute religious experiences' which express the phenomenality of madness – but where mad is good. This interdisciplinary study provides a species-wide account of interest to all disciplines that encounter such anomalies in their subjects, from fine art to psychiatry. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between religious belief and religious experience, bringing out a role for episodic memory that has been overlooked in the epistemology of religion. I do so by considering two questions. The first, the “Psychological Question,” asks what psychological role religious experiences play in causally bringing about religious beliefs. The second, the “Reliability Question,” asks: for a given answer to the Psychological Question about how religious beliefs are formed, are those beliefs (...) formed using generally truth-conducive cognitive mechanisms or patterns of reasoning? I argue that the standard way of answering the Psychological Question overlooks the fact that religious beliefs are often formed via reflection on episodic memories of past religious experiences. Furthermore, recognizing this opens up room to make more meaningful progress on answering the Reliability Question. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that a certain kind of belief is necessary for religious experience. Yet it is not clear that this must be so. In this article, I defend the possibility that a subject could have a genuine emotional religious experience without thereby necessarily believing that the purported object of her experience corresponds to reality and/or is the cause of her experience. Imaginative engagement, I argue, may evoke emotional religious experiences that may (...) be said to be both genuine and appropriate, despite not necessarily including beliefs of the aforementioned kind.I go on to maintain that such religious engagement is compatible not only with non-belief but also with disbelief. (shrink)

Do we need justification in order to know God exists? Must we infer God exists, if we are to know that he is there? How might religious experience ground belief in God?

Transformative experiences are epistemically and personally transformative: prior to having the experience, agents cannot predict the value of the experience and cannot anticipate how it will change their core values and preferences. Paul (2014, 2015) argues that these experiences pose a puzzle for standard decision-making procedures because values cannot be assigned to outcomes involving transformative experience. Responding philosophers are quick to point out that decision procedures are built to handle uncertainty, including the uncertainty generated by transformative (...) class='Hi'>experience. My paper enters here and contributes two points. First, religious experiences are transformative experiences that are especially resistant to these responses. Second, a procedure that appeals to voluntarist reasons—reasons arising from an act of the will—can allow an agent to rationally decide to undergo or avoid an outcome involving transformative experience. Combining these two points results in some interesting implications with respect to practical aspects of religion. (shrink)

Taking a new look at the language of ‘religious experience’, the authors in this contribution take into review this aspect in the current theological discussion, and in the church pew, asking the question: Does George Lindbeck’s criticism of the experiential-expressive model of religion still have something to say to us? Firstly, Lindbeck is reviewed and recouped. Then, religious experience and its commodification are discussed, at the hand also of the heritage from Schleiermacher onwards on experience. (...) Taking a position within the post-modern, relativist, critical realist and pragmatist possibilities, a community-embedded sense of truth is concluded to without sacrificing the possibility of universalising claims. Is it possible, though, within the cultural reflex towards psychologised faith to retain a historically oriented depth? (shrink)

This micro-summary and extended overview for the Special Divine Action Project discusses the connection between divine action and religious experience.

The Varieties of Religious Experience is not a theological treatise but an inquiry into a ubiquitous feature of the human condition and thus of human nature itself. Its author makes this clear at the outset, claiming competence as a psychologist and promising no more, therefore, than an examination of those “religious propensities of man” which James takes to be “at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution.” The “at least” is (...) clearly ironical for James will argue throughout the work that this aspect of one’s mental constitution is generative of thoughts, sentiments and actions at once new, different, original, and of the greatest consequence. As an enduring feature of our mental constitution, the religious contents are under no special burden of vindication or verification for they are vindicated and verified precisely by their ubiquity and efficacy. This “radical empiricist,” true to the authentic ism, accepts no philosophical a priori that would pass judgment on just which experiences are to count and which are to be rendered otiose. Just in case there are religious thoughts and sentiments widely experienced, abidingly efficacious, central to actually lived lives, it is not for the psychologist to await some “metaphysical” license before including them among subjects of interest. In this independence of inquiry, this openness to realities set before us as indubitable facts of mental life, James records what Louis Dupré discovers in an entire generation of American philosophers. (shrink)

Conciliationism is the view that says when an agent who believes P becomes aware of an epistemic peer who believes not-P, that she encounters a defeater for her belief that P. Strong versions of conciliationism pose a sceptical threat to many, if not most, religious beliefs since religion is rife with peer disagreement. Elsewhere I argue that one way for a religious believer to avoid sceptical challenges posed by strong conciliationism is by appealing to the evidential import of (...) religious experience. Not only can religious experience be used to establish a relevant evidential asymmetry between disagreeing parties, but reliable reports of such experiences also start to put pressure on the religious sceptic to conciliate toward her religious opponent. Recently, however, Asha Lancaster-Thomas poses a highly innovative challenge to the evidential import of religious experience. Namely, she argues that an evil God is just as likely to explain negative religious experiences as a good God is able to explain positive religious experiences. In light of this, religious believers need to explain why a good God exists instead of an evil God. I respond to Lancaster-Thomas by suggesting that, at least within the context of religious experience, that the evil God hypothesis is only a challenge to certain versions of theism; and that the existence of an evil God and good God are compossible. (shrink)

Religious Experience and the Knowledge of God is concerned with questions about the degree to which and the ways in which religious experiences, especially theistic experiences, can provide epistemic support for Christian beliefs. I adopt a critical trust approach to religious experiences and argue that, with appropriate qualifications, it can be reasonable for someone to believe that he or she has had a veridical experience of God and that this can provide some evidential support for (...) certain Christian claims. (shrink)

Recently, many philosophers of religion have sought to defend the rationality of religious belief by shifting the burden of proof onto the critic of religious belief. Some have appealed to extraordinary religious experience in making their case. Religious Experience, Justification, and History restores neglected explanatory and historical considerations to the debate. Through a study of William James, it contests the accounts of religious experience offered in recent works. Through reflection on the history (...) of philosophy, it also unravels the philosophical use of the term justification. Matthew Bagger argues that the commitment to supernatural explanations implicit in the religious experiences employed to justify religious belief contradicts the modern ideal of human flourishing. (shrink)

I discuss Alston's theory of religious experience and maintain that his argument to the effect that it is rational to suppose that the 'mystical doxastic practice' is epistemically reliable does not stand up to scrutiny. While Alston's transitions from practical to epistemic rationality don't work here, his arguments may be taken to show that, under certain conditions, it is not epistemically irresponsible to trust one's religious experiences.

Much of the discussion had focussed on the question of whether religious experiences are veridical, but then Richard M. Gale asked a more fundamental question: Are they even cognitive? An experience is cognitive if it takes an intentional accusative, such as “red cube” in “I see a red cube,” as opposed to the cognate accusative exemplified by the use of the word “waltz” in “I am dancing a waltz” which is synonymous with “I am dancing waltzily.” Cognitive experiences (...) are objective in the sense that they purport the existence of an object whose.. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to a defense of the now quite familiar argument from the perceptual model of religious experience (hereafter PMR) to the rationality of beliefs formed on the basis of religious experience. The contribution will not, however, come in the form of a positive argument for PMR. Neither will this contribution take the form of a response to key objections to the plausibility of that model. Instead, I wish to argue that there is (...) a widespread assumption about the role of concepts in perceptual experience generally which, when assimilated by PMR, complicates the attempt to respond to the most serious objection to the argument from PMR to the rationality of religious belief—viz. the objection from conflicting religious claims. Again, this paper will not respond to the objection from conflicting religious claims. Rather, it will explain how a common assumption makes that problem worse (or even intractable) and it will offer a positive suggestion about how to avoid that common assumption. Of course, to have shown how not to make a problem worse is not yet to have solved the problem. But, if the argument of this paper succeeds, it is a crucial first step.In what follows, I will (i) very briefly summarize the role of PMR in an argument for the rationality of religious belief, (ii) state the problem of conflicting religious claims, (iii) explain how a widespread assumption about the role of concepts in perceptual experience exacerbates the problem and (iv) offer the beginningsof an alternative account of the role of concepts in perceptual experience and comment on the evidential force of religious experience construed along the lines of this alternative account. Of course, an adequate treatment of the points in (iv) would require far more attention than can be devoted to them here. The primary burden of this paper is to establish the critical point in (iii), i.e., to generate some dissatisfaction with the “widespread assumption,” and to use this dissatisfaction as a motivation for exploring an alternative account of conceptual contribution. (shrink)

At a time in which religion is breaking away from the normative power of its traditions and new forms of spiritual experience are emerging, religious philosophy must find criteria for what a religious experience is and how to judge its truth. In their empirical critique of religion L. Wittgenstein and R. Carnap accepted two forms of religious experience, which they described with an optical and acoustic metaphor. They denied their cognitive truth value, but not (...) their value for life. However, an extended concept of truth, which encompasses every correspondence between experience and reality, can also find truth in religious experiences of “transparency” and “resonance”. They differ from aesthetic experience not only by the depth of transparency and resonance, but also by their cognitive interpretation. What is experienced is cognitively referred to a final reality: either to a “summum ens” in this world, or to the whole of this world or something unknown beyond of this world. This final point of reference is a unity of “being” and “value”. Religion makes experiences of the everyday transparent for both aspects of an ultimate reality und motivates to a life full of resonance with this reality. (shrink)

The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 at the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh to promote the discussion of 'Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God', and some of the world's most influential thinkers have delivered them. The 1901–2 lectures given in Edinburgh by American philosopher William James are considered by many to be the greatest in the series. The lectures were published in book form in 1902 (...) and have been reprinted many times. James, who was educated in the United States and Europe, and spent much of his career teaching philosophy at Harvard, was very influential in the development of modern psychology, and in these twenty lectures he explores the personal experience of religion. Some of the topics include religion and neurology, 'the sick soul', saintliness, and mysticism. (shrink)

Epistemologists of religion disagree about what evidential value religious experiences have. Some argue that religious experiences have no evidential value while others argue that religious experiences constitute proof of God’s existence. This book argues that religious experiences can contribute to justificatory cases for belief in God in several distinct ways and that several justificatory cases are philosophically viable. This book contends that this joint justificatory viability is best explained by the diversity and development of religious (...) lives: as religious believers grow in a faith tradition, their access to an evidential base can develop and the contributory work religious experiences provide in defense of religious belief can change. This suggests that various epistemologies of religious experience implicitly emphasize different life stages or different prototypical religious believers and that a fully adequate epistemology of religious experience will be expansive, pluralistic, and responsive to the diversity of religious believers and their development in a religious tradition. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to a defense of the now quite familiar argument from the perceptual model of religious experience (hereafter PMR) to the rationality of beliefs formed on the basis of religious experience. The contribution will not, however, come in the form of a positive argument for PMR. Neither will this contribution take the form of a response to key objections to the plausibility of that model. Instead, I wish to argue that there is (...) a widespread assumption about the role of concepts in perceptual experience generally which, when assimilated by PMR, complicates the attempt to respond to the most serious objection to the argument from PMR to the rationality of religious belief—viz. the objection from conflicting religious claims. Again, this paper will not respond to the objection from conflicting religious claims. Rather, it will explain how a common assumption makes that problem worse (or even intractable) and it will offer a positive suggestion about how to avoid that common assumption. Of course, to have shown how not to make a problem worse is not yet to have solved the problem. But, if the argument of this paper succeeds, it is a crucial first step. In what follows, I will (i) very briefly summarize the role of PMR in an argument for the rationality of religious belief, (ii) state the problem of conflicting religious claims, (iii) explain how a widespread assumption about the role of concepts in perceptual experience exacerbates the problem and (iv) offer the beginnings of an alternative account of the role of concepts in perceptual experience and comment on the evidential force of religious experience construed along the lines of this alternative account. Of course, an adequate treatment of the points in (iv) would require far more attention than can be devoted to them here. The primary burden of this paper is to establish the critical point in (iii), i.e., to generate some dissatisfaction with the “widespread assumption,” and to use this dissatisfaction as a motivation for exploring an alternative account of conceptual contribution. (shrink)

William Alston proposed an understanding of religious experience modeled after the triadic structure of sense perception. However, a perceptual model falters because of the unobservability of God as the object of religious experience. To reshape Alston’s model of religious experience as an observational practice we utilize Dudley Shapere’s distinction between the philosophical use of ‘observe’ in terms of sensory perception and scientists’ epistemic use of ‘observe’ as being evidential by providing information or justification leading (...) to knowledge. This distinction helps us to understand how religious experience of an unobservable God can be an epistemic practice that satisfies our epistemic obligations and justifies religious belief. (shrink)

Does religious thinking stand in opposition to postmodernity? Does the existence of God present the ultimate challenge to metaphysics? Strands of continental thought, especially those running from Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, focus on individual consciousness as the horizon for all meaning and provide modern philosophy of religion with much of its present ferment. In Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, 11 influential continental philosophers share the conviction that religious thinking cannot afford to disengage from the (...) challenges of modern European philosophy. Together they provide a rich and intriguing set of answers to questions surrounding the meaning of religious experience. Topics include subjectivity, selfhood, and rationality; language, community, and ethics; the influence of Jewish and eastern religions on religious experience; God as phenomenology; and religion in the postmodern age. These lucid and arresting essays bring together many of the leading voices in the contemporary continental debate on God and religion. (shrink)

In this book, Phillip Wiebe examines religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences, assessing how these experiences appear to implicate a spiritual order. Despite the current prevalence of naturalism and atheism, he argues that experiences purporting to have a religious or spiritual significance deserve close empirical investigation. Wiebe surveys the broad scope of religious experience and considers different types of evidence that might give rise to a belief in phenomena such as spirits, paranormal events, God, and an afterlife. (...) He demonstrates that there are different explanations and interpretations of religious experiences, both because they are typically personal accounts, and they suggest a reality that is often unobservable. Wiebe also addresses how to evaluate evidence for theories that postulate unobservables in general, and a Theory of Spirits in particular. Calling for more rigorous investigation of these phenomena, Wiebe frames the study of religious experience among other accepted social sciences that seek to understand religion. (shrink)

I start from a relatively simple idea: the human being is constantly making a multiple experience of truth (once again, in reference to Gadamer's statement), both scientifical and technical, as well as religious or aesthetic. Still, what is the relationship between those experiences of truth? Can they express somehow, precisely by their multiplicity, a neutral ethos of today's man, or do they manage to take part in a larger and more elevated experience of truth? In the following (...) paper I will try to bring into focus precisely such issues. I return to the meaning given by Gadamer to the experience of truth. Then I make the distinction between the common sense and the proper sense of alternative. The later concerns the correlation - sometimes paradoxical - of different experiences of truth. For instance, the correlation between the technical and the religious experience. So one can understand that religious experience is above all an experience of human finitude. (shrink)

William Alston's Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience is a most significant contribution to the philosophy of religion. The product of 50 years' reflection on its topic , this work provides a very thorough explication and defence of what Alston calls the ‘mystical perceptual practice’ – the practice of forming beliefs about the Ultimate on the basis of putative ‘direct experiential awareness’ thereof . Alston argues, in particular, for the rationality of engaging in the Christian form of (...) MP . On his view, those who participate in CMP are justified in forming beliefs as they do because their practice is ‘socially established’, has a ‘functioning overrider system’ and a ‘significant degree of self-support’; and because of the ‘lack of sufficient reasons to take the practice as unreliable’. (shrink)

This paper examines Alvin Plantinga's defence of theistic belief in the light of Paul Draper's formulation of the problem of evil. Draper argues (a) that the facts concerning the distribution of pain and pleasure in the world are better explained by a hypothesis which does not include the existence of God than by a hypothesis which does; and (b) that this provides an epistemic challenge to theists. Plantinga counters that a theist could accept (a) yet still rationally maintain a belief (...) in God. His defence of theism depends on the epistemic value of religious experience. I argue, however, that Plantinga's defence of theism is not successful. (shrink)

The enlarging domain of psychiatric intervention is frequently associated with the undue medicalization of unusual experiences. In such a climate, it becomes of utmost importance to carefully choose appropriate candidates for the psychiatric gaze. This suggests a need to draw a distinction between religious experiences (with psychotic form) and pathological psychotic experiences. As Jackson and Fulford (1997) maintain, “spiritual experiences, whether welcome or unwelcome, and whether or not they are psychotic in form, have nothing (directly) to do with medicine. (...) It would be quite wrong, then, to “treat” spiritual psychotic experiences with neuroleptic drugs, just as it is quite wrong to “treat” political .. (shrink)

Caroline Franks Davis provides a clear, sensitive, and carefully argued assessment of the value of religious experiences as evidence for religious beliefs. Much more than an 'argument from religious experience', the inquiry systematically addresses underlying philosophical issues such as the role of interpretation in experience, the function of models and metaphors in religious language, and the way perceptual experiences in general are used as evidence for claims about the world. The author examines several arguments (...) from religious experience and, using contemporary and classic sources from the world religions, gives an account of the different types of experience. To meet sceptical challenges to religious experience, she draws extenisvely on psychological and sociological as well as philosophical and religious literature, probing deeply into the questions whether religious experiences are merely a matter of interpretation, whether there is irreducible conflict among religious experiences, and whether psychological and other reductionist explanations of religious experience are satisfactory. She concludes that religious experiences, like most experiences, are most effective as evidence within a cumulative style of argument which combines evidence from a wide range of sources. (shrink)

Many religious believers do not appear to take the existence of epistemic peer disagreement as a serious challenge to the rationality of their religious beliefs. They seem to think they have different evidence for their religious beliefs and hence aren’t really epistemic peers with their opponents. One underexplored potential evidential asymmetry in religious disagreements is based on investigations of religious experience attempting to offer relevant evidence for religious claims in objective and public terms. (...) I conclude that private religious experience can provide a relevant evidential asymmetry between opponents in cases of religious disagreement. I further conclude that if a religious believer reports a private experience to a religious sceptic, the latter is pressured to conciliate in the direction of the believer, at least if they were epistemic peers prior to the experience. (shrink)

In recent analytic philosophy of religion, one hotly debated topic is the veridicality of religious experience. In this paper, I briefly trace how the argument from religious experience comes into prominence in the twentieth century. This is due to the able defense of this argument by Richard Swinburne, William Alston, and Jerome Gellman among others. I explain the argument's intuitive force and why the stock objections to religious experience are not entirely convincing. I expound (...) Swinburne's approach and his application of the Principle of Credulity to religious experience. Then I critically examine four major objections to Swinburne. I conclude that the argument from religious experiences is not likely to be conclusive but it should not be dismissed either. (shrink)

Can religious experience justify belief in God? We best approach this question by splitting it in two: Do religious experiences give their subjects any justification for believing that there is a God of the kind they experience? And Does testimony about such experiences provides any justification for believing that there is a God for those who are not the subject of the experience? The most popular affirmative answers trace back to the work of Richard Swinburne, (...) who appeals to the Principle of Credulity and the Principle of Testimony. Since then, development of his line of reasoning has gone in a number of distinct directions. Here I propose yet another development. I argue first that the Principle of Credulity is false on the grounds that it has several implausible commitments. I then offer a Phenomenal Conservative perspective on the epistemology of religious experience suggesting a categorically affirmative answer to but a nuanced answer to which allows the possibility of reasonable disagreement about religious experience. (shrink)

In this volume of essays, Howard Wettstein explores the foundations of religious commitment. His orientation is broadly naturalistic, but not in the mode of reductionism or eliminativism. This collection explores questions of broad religious interest, but does so through a focus on the author's religious tradition, Judaism. Among the issues explored are the nature and role of awe, ritual, doctrine, religious experience; the distinction between belief and faith; problems of evil and suffering with special attention (...) to the Book of Job and to the Akedah, the biblical story of the binding of Isaac; the virtue of forgiveness. One of the book's highlights is its literary approach to theology that at the same time makes room for philosophical exploration of religion. Another is Wettstein's rejection of the usual picture that sees religious life as sitting atop a distinctive metaphysical foundation, one that stands in need of epistemological justification. (shrink)

The case for the Critical Stance is not undermined by appeals to religious experience. One reason for this is the sheer diversity of religious experiences: members of diverse religious traditions report on experiences that they believe to be supportive of their beliefs. Another reason is that religious experience is normally capable of providing epistemic support for, at most, a subset of the set of beliefs associated with a tradition.

This chapter contains sections titled: Having an Experience Religion Describability Phenomenology Criteria for Kinds: Content Criteria for Kinds: Structure Object Claims Aspect Claims Relevance Conditions Content, Structure, and Evidence A Modest Typology Explanations The Doctrines of the Traditions The Appropriateness of Asking about Evidence A Principle of Experiential Evidence Recommended readings.

Hujjat al-Islam Imam al-Ghazali is a thinker, mystic, jurist, and theologian who has still influenced today since his time. In his al-Munqidh min ad-Dalal, he writes about how he survived the crisis that his inquiries about life had driven him to depression. Due to the distress caused by the crisis in him, he left the place where he lived and moved away from people. During this abandonment, he confesses his experiences, inquiries, introspection, and ways of getting to know himself in (...) al-Munqidh. In this article, I will try to understand how he reached guidance from this crisis, what his method was, and how he gained personal religious experience. I will examine the differences and similarities of the way of Sufism from the clergy, where the concept of rational theosophy corresponds in al-Ghazali’s thought. He shows us the limits of reason on the way to reach precise information. He talks about realities that cannot be explained within these limits, what he has learned in the uzlat, and why the love for the world is dangerous. The reason why al-Ghazali returned to social life is explained with the idea of 'fiqh of priorities' in Islam. Al-Ghazali attributes the "nour" that descends to his heart to the will of God in explaining his salvation from the turning point in his life. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical debates about the competing merits of neurological and phenomenological approaches to understanding both psychiatric illness and religious experience—and, indeed, the relationship, if any, between psychiatric illness and religious experience. In this chapter, I propose that both psychiatric illness and religious experiences - at least in some of their diverse forms - are best understood phenomenologically in terms of radical changes in a person's 'existential feelings', in the sense articulated by Matthew Ratcliffe. If so, (...) explanatory priority should be assigned to phenomenology and not to neurology. (shrink)

After completing his monumental work, The Principles of Psychology, William James turned his attention to serious consideration of such important religious and philosophical questions as the nature and existence of God, immortality of the soul, and free will and determinism. His interest in these questions found expression in various works, including The Varieties of Religious Experience, his classic study of spirituality. Based on the prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion he gave at the University of Edinburgh in (...) 1901 and 1902, the book--studded with richly concrete examples--documents and discusses various religious states of consciousness and covers such topics as the meaning of the term "divine," the reality of the unseen, the religion of healthy-mindedness, the sick soul, the divided self and the process of its unification, conversion, saintliness, and mysticism. One of the author's most popular works, The Varieties of Religious Experience remains one of the great books on the subject, especially noteworthy for the evidence it gives for religious experience as a unique phenomenon. This Dover edition will be the least expensive one in print. Unabridged republication of the second edition of The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, originally published by Longmans, Green and Co., New York, 1902. Index. (shrink)

In this book, Paul K. Moser offers a new approach to religious experience and the kind of evidence it provides. Here, he explains the nature of theistic and non-theistic experience in relation to the meaning of human life and its underlying evidence, with special attention given to the perspectives of Tolstoy, Buddha, Confucius, Krishna, Moses, the apostle Paul, and Muhammad. Among the many topics explored in this timely volume are: religious experience characterized in a unifying (...) conception; religious experience naturalized relative to science; religious experience psychologized in merely psychological phenomena; and religious experience cognized relative to potential defeaters from evil, divine hiddenness, and religious diversity. Understanding Religious Experience will benefit those interested in the nature of religion and can be used in relevant courses in religious studies, philosophy, theology, Biblical studies, and the history of religion. (shrink)

Kant’s general mode of argument in Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, especially his defence of human nature’s propensity to evil, is a matter of considerable controversy: while some interpret his argument as strictly a priori, others interpret it as anthropological. In dialogue with Allen Wood’s recent work, I defend my earlier claim that Religion employs a quasi-transcendental mode of argument, focused on the possibility of a specific type of experience, not experience in general. In Religion, Kant (...) portrays religious experience as possible only for beings with a good predisposition and a propensity to evil. Kant’s theory of the archetype and his theory of symbolism illustrate the same mode of argument. Taking Religion as a sequel to the third Critique more than the second, my perspectival interpretation makes room for a robust view of unsociable sociability without the absurd deception of regarding it as the source of human evil. (shrink)

THERE ARE MANY TYPES OF EXPERIENCE, each with a distinctive grain. In each of them we can discern something peripheral and focal, the mine and the not-mine, the private and the public, the episodic and the constant. Each answers to different sides of our separated and interrelated selves. Aesthetic experience is qualitatively toned, and encountered through the agency of emotions, partly mediated through the senses. Undergone in privacy it has a distinctive texture; sometimes it has a different one (...) when undergone by a number of men together. In secular experience we confront rather conspicuous steady regions through the agency of organically defined bodily reactions, appetites and needs. It is normally shared with others in fact or in prospect, and when privately undergone it continues to bear the marks of what it exhibited to men together. Ethical experience encompasses values sensed through the help of our attitudes and beliefs. The experience here is usually individual, but small groups of men sometimes have the experience together more or less in the way they had it privately. Religious experience, which has features, when private, that are distinct from those it has when public, brings us into relation with a felt power that assesses what we are and have attained. (shrink)