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A Comparative Doxastic-Practice Epistemology of Religious Experience pp 25–37Cite as

Religious Experience as Perceptual

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Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Religious Studies ((BRIEFSRESTU,volume 2))

Abstract

An examination of reports of religious experiences from all traditions shows that they all have a perceptual character. While some have challenged the claim that they are perceptual on the grounds that naturalistic explanations provide a better explanation, or on the grounds that divine qualities are impossible to perceive, such challenges rest on a misunderstanding of how perception works, even in ordinary cases.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See for example Edwards 2001, Plantinga 2000, and the inspiration for this study, Alston 1991.

  2. 2.

    The archaic spellings are in the original.

  3. 3.

    One popular discussion of the naturalistic origin or religion is Boyer 2001. He says his view “portrays religion as a mere consequence or side effect of having the brains we have” (Boyer 2001, 330).

  4. 4.

    To be fair, Swinburne is not foreseeing the use I am making of POC. He is simply arguing that people are entitled to trust their own religious experiences. POC is not to appear as the premise of a natural theologian’s argument.

  5. 5.

    In defeaters three and four, Swinburne seems to be taking an internalist line; only things that the subject has epistemic possession of can be defeaters. I am not convinced this is true, but it would take us too far afield to discuss that here.

  6. 6.

    He seems to have adopted this argument uncritically from Wainwright (1973).

  7. 7.

    Gellman (2001, Chap. 2) defends such a principle.

  8. 8.

    Such a view is to be found in Gregory (1970).

  9. 9.

    Dretske explains this all in terms of seeing, but he says that it can be generalized to the other sense-modalities.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA

    Mark Owen Webb

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  1. Mark Owen Webb
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Correspondence to Mark Owen Webb .

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Webb, M.O. (2015). Religious Experience as Perceptual. In: A Comparative Doxastic-Practice Epistemology of Religious Experience. SpringerBriefs in Religious Studies, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09456-4_3

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