Religious Experience

This paper seeks to explore the significance of a specific kind of religious experience for the rationality of religious belief. The context for this is a gap between what is often allowed as rational and what is embraced as certain in the life of faith. The claim to certainty at issue is related to the work and experience of the Holy Spirit; this experience has a structure which is explored phenomenologically. Thereafter various ways of cashing in the epistemic value of (...) the purported claim to certainty are examined. (shrink)

This is a sweeping treatment of navigating the difficulties of engaging a religiously pluralistic culture and offers sage and compassionate advice from one of the leading Christian thinkers today. His special treatment of Buddhism is engaging and should be carefully considered by all. Whether believer, nonbeliever, or none, this book engages all readership with careful research and deserves a wide audience.

Philosophical foundations of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s christology are found in his rejection of the likeness theology found in many medieval theologians and in German rationalist philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries such as Leibniz and Kant. Instead, Schleiermacher offers a theology of divine otherness, as an interpretation of religious consciousness as awareness of oneself as absolutely (i.e., totally and unconditionally) dependent. On this basis all that we can characterize of that on which we are absolutely dependent (God) is its causality. (...) Hence, Schleiermacher argues, Christian theology must not speak of a nature of God, but only of a causality of God, as present in Christ in a special way. It is argued that he identifies this divine causality as love (that is, as a causality tending toward human redemption), and as identical with Christ’s human love, on the basis of a teleology known in Christian experience of redemption. (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)

The hermeneutical model of illusion, just as that of projection, has always been part of the psychoanalytic views of religion. The author presents a brief critical summary on this subject, and underlines that in relational psychoanalysis, the concept of illusion refers not to religion as such, but to the subjective experiences of desire and relatedness, that is, the source of the desire for God in man. Because of personal conflicts and their outcome, besides illusions one encounters also in such experiences, (...) disillusion, disappointment, and even delusion. The author, while challenging the views of many scholars taking part in this debate: a) maintains that psychoanalytic interpretation is not concerned with the question of religious truth but with the formation and transformation of the process of believing; b) calls for special attention to the fact when speaking of religious representation, the focus is on the process rather than on the objects represented; c) raises his criticism at the often used expression, "unconscious representation of God", because according to him, religion gives a name to the object of desire only when placed at the conscious and cultural level. Coherent with his basic distinction between conscious religious behaviour and the deep psychological pre-conditions, the author underlines the differences between the unconscious processes of desire and the religious concepts, particularly, between the representation of God and the concept of God; between the parental imagos and the transcendent God; and between the capacity to "believe in anything at all" and religious faith. The author concludes that in the illusion model, it is suggested that as part of religious maturity, one could construct the representation of God as something that is deeply connected with primary objects, while at the same time, assuming the capacity to take the necessary distance from personal desires and projections. (shrink)

Dewey’s A Common Faith has been variously interpreted, both in terms of its relation to Dewey’s corpus and internally in terms of its leading ideas. I argue for its crucial relevance in understanding Dewey and undertake an analysis of the key idea of “religious experience” as an “attitude of existence.” This distinguishes religious experience from other types of qualitative experience and shows the unique place this concept has for Dewey.

After an initial consideration of the three main positions discernible within the current literature on the question of the relationship between mystical experience and its interpretation, attention is focused on a new model of this relationship. by utilizing wittgenstein's notion of "seeing-as" in conjunction with a more complex theory of the nexus between experience and interpretation, it is argued that there are varieties of mystical experience. on the other hand, it is maintained that there is a limiting case of mystical (...) experience, the essence of which is its undifferentiated or contentless nature. it is suggested that the contemplative method, while producing a variety of content-filled mystical experiences, nonetheless is most conducive to the attainment of this "pure" contentless mystical state. (shrink)

[Alethic Realism] 1. The sense of ‘true’ and ‘false’ in which such items as beliefs, statements, and propositions can be evaluated as true or false. 2. It is important to determine the truth-value of such items in this sense.

Introduction i. Character of the Book The central thesis of this book is that experiential awareness of God, or as I shall be saying, the perception of God, ...

Can beliefs to the effect that god is manifesting himself in a certain way to the believer ("m-beliefs") be justified by its seeming to the believer that he experiences god doing that? the issue is discussed in the context of several concepts of justification. on a "normative" concept of justification the answer will depend on what one's intellectual obligations are vis-a-vis practices of belief formation. on a rigorous view of such obligations one is justified in forming a m-belief on the (...) basis of experience only if one has adequate reasons for taking that practice to be reliable. on a more permissive view of such obligations, one is justified only if one lacks adequate reasons for taking the practice to be unreliable. it is suggested that neither this practice nor, e.g., the practice of forming perceptual beliefs on the basis of sense perception passes the stronger test, but that they both pass the weaker test. (shrink)

One of the most influential analytic philosophers of the late twentieth century, William P. Alston is a leading light in epistemology, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of language. In this volume, twelve leading philosophers critically discuss the central topics of his work in these areas, including perception, epistemic circularity, justification, the problem of religious diversity, and truth.

Indubitably, Iranian thinker 'Abdolkarīm Sorūš in the course of the Islamic Republic's history has undergone an impressive change from establishment ideologist to its most prominent dissident. From 1980 on, he was a member of the Council of the Cultural Revolution, an organisation that dismissed oppositional, i.e. secular minded professors from their university posts, and he often appeared on TV as the Islamic Republic's apologist denouncing the left wing's ideology. But in the late 1980s, Sorūš published his epistemological theory of the (...) evolution of religious knowledge in Keyhān-e Farhangī magazine. Controversies between the magazine's state-appointed publisher and the two journalists who had accepted Sorūš's articles for publication inspired the latter to found Kīyān magazine, which was Sorūš's mouthpiece as much as it became the most important platform of the religious newthinkers, and the religious reform's backbone until its proscription in 2001. Sorūš's transition to a post-Islamist thinker began with his theory of what he chose to call theoretical contraction and expansion of the šarī'a and it continued with his theory of religious-democratic government. In all of his later essays, he spoke out against the monopolization of exegesis by one single social class and against tendencies of taking fatwās for religion itself. In 1997, he published his probably most radical theory, which however was not widely noted until 2007, when the English translation of the essay in question was about to be published and Sorūš spoke of it in an interview. In what did finally appear in English under the title “The Expansion of Prophetic Experience“ in 2009, he argued that “like a poet, the Prophet transmits the divine inspiration into the language he knows, the styles and images he masters, and the knowledge he possesses“. And this human view of the Qur'ān makes it possible to distinguish between what he calls the 'essential' and the 'accidental' aspects of religion. Some parts of religion are historically and culturally determined and no longer relevant today. At this epistemological revolution, some of Sorūš's critics accused him of having left his faith for good; others see in it a chance to bring about Islam's aggiornamento. (shrink)

Monica A. Coleman achieves remarkable rigor in bringing together in one volume her long-standing interests in process philosophy and theology, womanist theology and ethics, African diaspora studies, West African religions, and African American women’s literature. Making a way out of No Way (2008) is a tour de force in contemporary African American constructive theology and especially in womanist discourse on the religious experience(s) of African American women. Coleman insists on understanding black women’s religious experience through the lens of their complex (...) subjectivity, which is irreducible to singularity or totality. As typically found in academic womanist theology, Coleman does not begin her theology with .. (shrink)

The article engages with two contemporary understandings of Schleiermacher's notion of feeling which are in important aspects in conflict: a social understanding (Kevin W. Hector and Christine Helmer) and an existential-mystical understanding (Thandeka). Using the phenomenological category of ‘existential feelings’ drawn from the work of Matthew Ratcliffe, I argue that they can be brought into a coherent overall account that recognizes different aspects of feeling in Schleiermacher's work. I also suggest that such an interpretation of Schleiermacher's concept of religious feeling (...) offers a different and better understanding of the role of feelings in religious experience and belief than the contemporary ‘perception-model’ of religious experience. (shrink)

Religious thought often assumes that the principle of physical causal completeness (PCC) is false. But those who explicitly deny or doubt PCC, including William Alston, W. D. Hart, Tim Crane, Paul Moser and David Yandell, Charles Taliaferro, Keith Yandell, Dallas Willard, William Vallicella, Frank Dilley, and, recently, David Chalmers, have ignored not only the explicit but also the implicit grounds for acceptance of PCC. I review the explicit grounds, and extend the hitherto implicit grounds, which together constitute a greater challenge (...) to contemporary religious philosophy than has been realized. Religious philosophers need to find a better way around PCC than has been found, or, if PCC is unavoidable, religious philosophers need to work toward a worldview that both accepts PCC and defends strong forms of religious experience. (shrink)

This paper suggests that an ontologically reductionist view of nature which also accepts the completeness of causality at the level of physics can support (1) the blissful transfiguration of the moral, (2) mystical release from standard ego-identification, and (3) psycho-physical transformation cultivated through meditative practice. This mystical naturalism provides the basis for a thicker, more vigorous institutional religious life, including religious life centred around meditation practices, personalist meanings, and the theology of incarnation, than current proposals for strongly naturalist religions allow.

In ‘Ineffability’ Alston suggests that philosophical mystics take care to delimit the class of predicates which cannot be ascribed to God. It is suggested that some qualification of ‘ineffability’ is necessary lest the mystic be trapped into such simple contradictions as that of ascribing predicates like ‘ineffability’ to God, while denying that any predicates can be ascribed to God. By the end of Alston's dialogue Mysticus, the would-be defender of mysticism, is browbeaten into meekly asking, ‘Yes, I see that [qualifying (...) statements of God's ineffability] would be better. But how does it happen that so many philosphers make ineffability statements without qualification?’. (shrink)