Abstract

My concern is with a version of the argument from religious experience similar to that offered by Swinburne in The Existence of God. I argue that experiences apparently of God meeting certain conditions provide their subjects with good evidence for particular claims about God. I discuss these conditions in detail . I argue that there are no good reasons for thinking that particular experiences of God cannot satisfy these conditions. In doing so I reply to a number of current objections to appealing to experiences of God for support of beliefs about God. ;One objection has it that experiences of God are not corrigible--that is is not possible to identify and dismiss particular experiences of God as non-veridical. I argue that if experiences of a given kind are to provide good evidence for claims about their object, they must be corrigible; that is not an unfair demand. But experiences of God are corrigible, and that the tests we can use to check experiences of God do not require prior acceptance of theism or of the veridicality of any particular experiences of God. ;Another objection has it that experiences of God conflict in certain important ways, and that this fact makes appeal to experiences of God for support of theistic beliefs unreasonable. I distinguish between various kinds of conflict, and argue that we have as yet no reason to think that there are the kinds of conflicts needed to make such appeal to experiences of God unreasonable. Further, there are resources within the theistic traditions for explaining at least some of the conflicts in question. ;I concentrate on similarities and analogies between sensory experience and experience of God. I argue that the reasons why sensory experiences can provide good evidence for particular claims about material objects are closely related to the reasons why particular experiences of God can provide good evidence for claims about God. This is so despite the very different character of the objects of those experiences