Religious Experience and Religious Epistemology

In this paper I argue that there are two kinds of epistemic reasons. One kind is irreducibly first personal – what I call deliberative reasons. The other kind is third personal – what I call theoretical reasons. I argue that attending to this distinction illuminates a host of problems in epistemology in general and in religious epistemology in particular. These problems include (a) the way religious experience operates as a reason for religious belief, (b) how we ought to understand religious testimony, (c) how religious authority can be justified, (d) the problem of religious disagreement, and (e) the reasonableness of religious conversion.

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Religious Experience, Pragmatic Encroachment, and Justified Belief in God

Open Theology ◽

10.1515/opth-2020-0021 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 296-305

Author(s):

Alex R Gillham

Keyword(s):

Religious Experience ◽

Justify Belief ◽

Religious Epistemology ◽

Pragmatic Encroachment ◽

Secondary Literature ◽

Justified Belief ◽

Belief In God ◽

Awkward Position ◽

To Come ◽

Threshold Problem

AbstractThe secondary literature on religious epistemology has focused extensively on whether religious experience can provide evidence for God’s existence. In this article, I suppose that religious experience can do this, but I consider whether it can provide adequate evidence for justified belief in God. I argue that it can. This requires a couple of moves. First, I consider the threshold problem for evidentialism and explain pragmatic encroachment (PE) as a solution to it. Second, I argue that religious experience can justify belief in God if one adopts PE, but this poses a dilemma for the defender of the veridicality of religious experience. If PE is true, then whether S has a justified belief in God on the basis of religious experience depends on how high the stakes are for having an experience with God. This requires one to determine whether the stakes are high or low for experiencing God, which puts the experient of God in an awkward position. If the stakes are not high, then justified belief in God on the basis of religious experience will be easier to come by, but this requires conceding that experiencing God is not that important. If the stakes are high, then the experient can maintain the importance of experience with God but must concede that justified belief in God on the basis of experience with God is less likely to happen, perhaps impossible.

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Contextualism, Decontextualism, and Perennialism

The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy ◽

10.5840/wcp20-paideia199836628 ◽

1998 ◽

pp. 142-146

Author(s):

Timothy A. Mahoney

Keyword(s):

Religious Experience ◽

Common Ground ◽

Mystical Experience ◽

Ultimate Reality ◽

Religious Epistemology ◽

Religious Traditions ◽

Perennial Philosophy ◽

The Common ◽

Mystical Experiences ◽

Central Claim

This paper addresses religious epistemology in that it concerns the assessment of the credibility of certain claims arising out of religious experience. Developments this century have made the world’s rich religious heritage accessible to more people than ever. But the conflicting religious claims tend to undermine each religion’s central claim to be a vehicle for opening persons to ultimate reality. One attempt to overcome this problem is provided by "perennial philosophy," which claims that there is a kind of mystical experience common to all religious traditions, an experience which is an immediate contact with an absolute principle. Perennialism has been attacked by "contextualists" such as Steven Katz who argue that particular mystical experiences are so tied to a particular tradition that there are no common mystical experiences across traditions. In turn, Robert Forman and the "decontextualists" have argued that a certain kind of mystical experience and process are found in diverse traditions, thereby supporting one of the key elements of perennialism. I review the contextualist-decontextualist debate and suggest a research project that would pursue the question of whether the common ground of the world’s mystical traditions could be expanded beyond what has been established by the decontextualists. The extension of this common ground would add credibility to the claims arising out of mystical experience.

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Pentecostalism

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199662241.013.20 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

James K. A. Smith

Keyword(s):

Lived Experience ◽

Religious Experience ◽

Limit Case ◽

Religious Epistemology ◽

Phenomenological Tradition ◽

Robert Brandom

This chapter elucidates the epistemological assumptions tacit in the uniqueness of Pentecostal and charismatic experience. It argues that Pentecostal spirituality functions as a limit case for most paradigms in epistemology, requiring a revised account of ‘understanding’ that recognizes the unique and irreducible mode of ‘narrative knowledge’. It is suggested that this mode of religious experience is an occasion to recall biblical intuitions about knowledge often ignored by paradigms in contemporary religious epistemology. It is suggested that the method here, which begins from lived experience, making explicit what is tacit and implicit in practice, is akin to the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger and the the pragmatism of Wittgenstein and Robert Brandom.

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