Abstract
Many persons, not only monastics and great religious leaders but humble laypersons as well, have taken themselves to be directly aware of God, as directly as all of us are aware of the physical and social environment through sense perception. And some of these people have communicated to others what they have learned about God though their awareness of Him, thus contributing to the development of religious traditions. This raises the question of this paper: What place does the experience of God (and, as we shall go on to ask, other forms of religious experience as well) have in the total assemblage of grounds of religious belief? Is the experience of God, ultimately, the sole basis of religious belief, or, somewhat more modestly, does it play as a fundamental role in the grounds of religious belief as sense perception plays in the grounds of belief about the physical and social world? Or is it to be assigned a still more modest place in the larger picture? And if so what is that place?
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Notes
This is taken from an anonymous personal communication contained in William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: The Modem Library, 1902), pp. 67–68.
Angela of Foligno. Quoted in Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York: World Pub. Co., 1955), p. 282.
A ground G prima facie justifies one in believing that p provided that by virtue of asing that belief on G one will be (unqualifiedly) justified in believing that p if there are no sufficient considerations to the contrary, either sufficient reasons for believing that not-p or sufficient reasons for denying that G carries its usual justificatory force in this instance.
For an argument that the experience of God has basically the same structure as sense perception of the physical environment and hence deserves to be termed (mystical) “perception”, see my “The Perception of God”, Philosophical Topics 16/2 (1988): 23–52. For a defence of the claim that mystical perception is a source of prima facie justification for beliefs based on it see my “Religious Experience and Religious Belief’, Nous, 16 (1982): 3-12; ”Christian Experience and Christian Belief’, in Faith and Rationality, eds.A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 103-134; “Perceiving God”, Journal of Philosophy, 83/11 (November 1986): 655-665. (The term’ mystical perception’ is not used in any of these articles.) These positions are presented and argued for much better in my Perceiving God. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
See R. M. Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977), pp. 83–86. Chisholm is not even a soft core coherentist.
For more on reciprocal epistemic support see below.
See his The Existence of God (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979).
In fn. 4 I listed some articles and a book of mine in which I support the claim of justificatory force for the perception of God.
It is obvious that in many cases perceptual beliefs about the external world are partly based on other things we know or justifiably believe; the only question is as to whether this is always the case.
I argue this in detail in Perceiving God, ch. 3.
But more widely distributed than is often supposed among our intelligensia.
See writings listed in fn. 2.
See “The Perception of God” for a discussion of this. There is a more thorough going discussion in Perceiving God.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Alston, W.P. (1992). The Place of Experience in the Grounds of Religious Belief. In: Clark, K.J. (eds) Our Knowledge of God. Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2576-5_5
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