## 1. Types of Religious Experience



Reports of religious experiences reveal a variety of different kinds.
Perhaps most are visual or auditory presentations (visions and
auditions), but not through the physical eyes or ears. Subjects report
"seeing" or "hearing," but quickly disavow any
claim to seeing or hearing with bodily sense organs. Such experiences
are easy to dismiss as hallucinations, but the subjects of the
experience frequently claim that though it is entirely internal, like
a hallucination or imagination, it is nevertheless a veridical
experience, through some spiritual analog of the eye or ear (James
1902 and Alston 1991 cite many examples). 


In other cases, the language of "seeing" is used in its
extended sense of realization, as when a yogi is said to
"see" his or her identity with Brahman; Buddhists speak of
"seeing things as they are" as one of the hallmarks of
true enlightenment, where this means grasping or realizing the
emptiness of things, but not in a purely intellectual way.



A third type is the religious experience that comes through
sensory experiences of ordinary objects, but seems to carry with it
extra information about some supramundane reality. Examples include
experiencing God in nature, in the starry sky, or a flower, or the
like. Another person standing nearby would see exactly the same sky or
flower, but would not necessarily have the further religious content
to his or her experience. There are also cases in which the religious
experience just is an ordinary perception, but the physical object is
itself the object of religious significance. Moses's experience
of the burning bush, or the Buddha's disciples watching him
levitate, are examples of this type. A second person standing nearby
would see exactly the same phenomenon. Witnesses to miracles are
having that kind of religious experience, whether they understand it
that way or not. 



A fourth type of religious experience is harder to
describe: it can't be characterized accurately in sensory
language, even analogically, yet the subject of the experience insists
that the experience is a real, direct awareness of some religiously
significant reality external to the subject. These kinds of
experiences are usually described as "ineffable."
Depending on one's purposes, other ways of dividing up religious
experiences will suggest themselves. For example, William James (1902)
divides experiences into "healthy-minded" and
"sick-minded," according to the personality of the
subject, which colors the content of the experience itself. Keith
Yandell (1993, 25-32) divided them into five categories,
according to the content of the experiences: monotheistic, nirvanic
(enlightenment experiences associated with Buddhism), kevalic
(enlightenment experiences associated with Jainism), moksha
(experiences of release from karma, associated with Hinduism), and
nature experiences. Differences of object certainly make differences
in content, and so make differences in what can be said about the
experiences. See Section 4 for further discussion of this
issue.


## 2. Language and Experience



Many have thought that there is some special problem with religious
language, that it can't be meaningful in the same way that
ordinary language is. The Logical Positivists claimed that language is
meaningful only insofar as it is moored in our experiences of the
physical world. Since we can't account for religious language by
linking it to experiences of the physical world, such language is
meaningless. Even though religious claims look in every way like
ordinary assertions about the world, their lack of empirical
consequences makes them meaningless. Ayer (1952) calls such language
"metaphysical," and therefore meaningless. He says, "That a
transcendent god exists 3s a metaphysical assertion, and therefore not
literally significant." The principle of verification went through
many formulations as it faced criticism. But if it is understood as a
claim about meaning in ordinary language, it seems to be
self-undermining, since there is no empirical way to verify it.
Eventually, that approach to language fell out of favor, but some
still use a modified, weaker version to criticize religious language.
For example, Antony Flew (Flew and MacIntyre, 1955) relies on a
principle to the effect that if a claim is not falsifiable, it is
somehow illegitimate. Martin (1990) and Nielsen (1985) invoke a
principle that combines verifiability and falsifiability; to be
meaningful, a claim must be one or the other. It is not clear that
even these modified and weakened versions of the verification principle
entirely escape self-undermining. Even if they do, they seem to take
other kinds of language with them--like moral language, talk
about the future or past, and talk about the contents of others'
minds -- that we might be loath to lose. Moreover, to deny the
meaningfulness of religious-experience claims on the grounds that it
is not moored in experience begs the question, in that it assumes that
religious experiences are not real experiences.



Another possibility is to allow that religious claims are meaningful,
but they are not true or false, because they should not be understood
as assertions. Braithwaite (1970), for example, understands religious
claims to be expressions of commitments to sets of values. On such a
view, what appears to be a claim about a religious experience is not
in fact a claim at all. It might be that some set of mental events,
with which the experience itself can be identified, would be the
ground and prompting of the claim, but it would not properly be what
the claim is about.



A second challenge to religious-experience claims comes from
Wittgensteinian accounts of language. Wittgenstein (1978) muses at
some length on the differences between how ordinary language is used,
and how religious language is used. Others (see Phillips 1970, for
example), following Wittgenstein, have tried to give an explanation of
the strangeness of religious language by invoking the idea of a
language-game. Each language-game has its own rules, including its own
procedures for verification. As a result, it is a mistake to treat it
like ordinary language, expecting evidence in the ordinary sense, in
the same way that it would be a mistake to ask for the evidence for a
joke. "I saw God" should not be treated in the same way as
"I saw Elvis." Some even go so far as to say the religious
language-game is isolated from other practices, such that it would be
a mistake to derive any claims about history, geography, or cosmology
from them, never mind demand the same kind of evidence for them. On
this view, religious experiences should not be treated as comparable
to sense experiences, but that does not entail that they are not
important, nor that they are not in some sense veridical, in that they
could still be avenues for important insights about reality. Such a
view can be attributed to D. Z. Phillips (1970).



While this may account for some of the unusual aspects of religious
language, it certainly does not capture what many religious people
think about the claims they make. As creationism illustrates, many
religious folk think it is perfectly permissible to draw empirical
conclusions from religious doctrine. Hindus and Buddhists for many
centuries thought there was a literal Mount Meru in the middle of the
(flat, disc-shaped) world. It would be very odd if "The Buddha
attained enlightenment under the bo tree" had to be given a very
different treatment from "The Buddha ate rice under the bo
tree" because the first is a religious claim and the second is
an ordinary empirical claim. There are certainly entailment relations
between religious and non-religious claims, too: "Jesus died for
my sins" straightforwardly entails "Jesus died."


## 3. Epistemological Issues



Since the subjects of religious experiences tend to take them to be
real experiences of some external reality, we may ask what reason
there is to think they are right. That is to say, do religious
experiences amount to good reasons for religious belief? One answer to
that question is what is often called the Argument from Religious
Experience: Religious experiences are in all relevant respects like
sensory experiences; sensory experiences are excellent grounds for
beliefs about the physical world; so religious experiences are
excellent grounds for religious beliefs. This argument, or one very
like it, can be found in Swinburne (1979), Alston (1991), Plantinga
(1981, 2000), Netland (2022) and others. Critics of this approach
generally find ways in which religious experiences are different from
sensory experiences, and argue that those differences are enough to
undermine the evidential value of the experiences. Swinburne (1979)
invokes what he calls the "Principle of Credulity,"
according to which one is justified in believing that what seems to
one to be present actually is present, unless some appropriate
defeater is operative. He then discusses a variety of circumstances
that would be defeaters in the ordinary sensory case, and argues that
those defeaters do not obtain, or not always, in the case of religious
experience. To reject his argument, one would have to show that
religious experience is unlike sensory experience in that in the
religious case, one or more of the defeaters always obtains. Anyone
who accepts the principle has excellent reason to accept the
deliverances of religious experience, unless he or she believes that
defeaters always, or almost always, obtain.



Plantinga offers a different kind of argument. According to
Cartesian-style foundationalism, in order to count as justified, a
belief must either be grounded in other justified beliefs, or derive
its justification from some special status, like infallibility,
incorrigibility, or indubitability. There is a parallel view about
knowledge. Plantinga (1981) argued that such a foundationalism is
inconsistent with holding one's own ordinary beliefs about the
world to be justified (or knowledge), because our ordinary beliefs
derived from sense-experience aren't derived from anything
infallible, indubitable, or incorrigible. In fact, we typically treat
them as foundational, in need of no further justification. If we hold
sensory beliefs to be properly basic, then we have to hold similarly
formed religious beliefs, formed on experiences of God manifesting
himself to a believer (Plantinga calls them 'M-beliefs'),
as properly basic. He proposed that human beings have a
faculty--what John Calvin called the '*sensus
divinitatis*'--that allows them to be aware of
God's actions or dispositions with respect to them. If beliefs
formed by sense-experience can be properly basic, then beliefs formed
by this faculty cannot, in any principled way, be denied that same
status. His developed theory of warrant (2000) implies that, if the
beliefs are true, then they are warranted. One cannot attack claims of
religious experience without first addressing the question as to
whether the religious claims are true. He admits that, since there are
people in other religious traditions who have based beliefs about
religious matters on similar purported manifestations, they may be
able to make the same argument about their own religious
experiences.



Alston develops a general theory of doxastic practices (constellations
of belief-forming mechanisms, together with characteristic background
assumptions and sets of defeaters), gives an account of what it is to
rationally engage in such a practice, and then argues that at least
the practice of forming beliefs on the basis of Christian religious
experiences fulfills those requirements. If we think of the broad
doxastic practices we currently employ, we see that some of them can
be justified by the use of other practices. The practice of science,
for example, reduces mostly to the practices of sense-perception,
deductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning (memory and testimony
also make contributions, of course). The justificatory status the
practice gives to its product beliefs derives from those more basic
practices. Most, however, cannot be so reduced. How are they
justified, then? It seems that they cannot be justified
non-circularly, that is, without the use of premises derived from the
practices themselves. Our only justification for continuing to trust
these practices is that they are firmly established, interwoven with
other practices and projects of ours, and have "stood the test
of time" by producing mostly consistent sets of beliefs. They
produce a sufficiently consistent set of beliefs if they don't
produce massive, unavoidable contradictions on central matters, either
internally, or with the outputs of other equally well-established
practices. If that's all there is to be said about our ordinary
practices, then we ought to extend the same status to other practices
that have the same features. He then argues that the Christian
practice of belief-formation on the basis of religious experience does
have those features. Like Plantinga, he admits that such an argument
might be equally available to other religious practices; it all
depends on whether the practice in question generates massive and
unavoidable contradictions, on central matters, either internally, or
with other equally well-established practices. To undermine this
argument, one would have to show either that Alston's criteria
for rationality of a practice are too permissive, or that religious
practices never escape massive contradictions.



Both Plantinga's and Alston's defense of the epistemic
value of religious experiences turn crucially on some degree of
similarity with sense-experience. But they are not simple arguments
from analogy; not just any similarities will do to make the positive
argument, and not just any dissimilarities will do to defeat the
argument. The similarities or dissimilarities need to be
epistemologically relevant. It is not enough, for example, to show
that religious experiences do not typically allow for independent
public verification, unless one wants to give up on other perfectly
respectable practices, like rational intuition, that also lack that
feature.



The two most important defeaters on the table for claims of the
epistemic authority of religious experience are the fact of religious
diversity, and the availability of naturalistic explanations for
religious experiences. Religious diversity is a prima facie defeater
for the veridicality of religious experiences in the same way that
wildly conflicting eyewitness reports undermine each other. If the
reports are at all similar, then it may be reasonable to conclude that
there is some truth to the testimony, at least in broad outline. A
version of this objection is the argument from divine hiddenness (cf.
Lovering 2013). If God exists, and shows himself to some people in
religious experiences, then the fact that he doesn't do so for
more people, more widely distributed, requires some explanation.
Axtell provides another version of that objection. He argues that to
insist that one's own religious convictions are true in the face of
the diversity of religions is to reason counter-inductively, and is
therefore irrational. The reasoning is counter-inductive because your
own convictions come from the same kinds of epistemic sources
(investment in testimonial authority) as those you deem to be wrong,
so if you are right, it is just a matter of luck. But if two
eyewitness reports disagree on the most basic facts about what
happened, then it seems that neither gives you good grounds for any
beliefs about what happened. It certainly seems that the contents of
religious-experience reports are radically different from one another.
Some subjects of religious experiences report experience of
nothingness as the ultimate reality, some a vast impersonal
consciousness in which we all participate, some an infinitely perfect,
personal creator. To maintain that one's own religious
experiences are veridical, one would have to a) find some common core
to all these experiences, such that in spite of differences of detail,
they could reasonably be construed as experiences of the same reality,
or b) insist that one's own experiences are veridical, and that
therefore those of other traditions are not veridical. The first is
difficult to manage, in the face of the manifest differences across
religions. Nevertheless, John Hick (1989) develops a view of that
kind, making use of a Kantian two-worlds epistemology. The idea is
that the object of these experiences, in itself, is one and the same
reality, but it is experienced phenomenally by different people
differently. Thus, is possible to see how one and the same object can
be experienced in ways that are completely incompatible with one
another. This approach is only as plausible as the Kantian framework
itself is. Jerome Gellman (2001) proposes a similar idea, without the
Kantian baggage. Solutions like these leave the problem untouched: If
the different practices produce experiences the contents of which are
inconsistent with one another, one of the practices must be
unreliable. Alston (1991) and Plantinga (2000) develop the second kind
of answer. The general strategy is to argue that, from within a
tradition, a person acquires epistemic resources not available to
those outside the tradition, just as travelling to the heart of a
jungle allows one to see things that those who have not made the
journey can't see. As a result, even if people in other
traditions can make the same argument, it is still reasonable to say
that some are right and the others are wrong. The things that justify
my beliefs still justify them, even if you have comparable resources
justifying a contrary view.



Naturalistic explanations for religious experiences are thought to
undermine their epistemic value because, if the naturalistic
explanation is sufficient to explain the experience, we have no
grounds for positing anything beyond that naturalistic cause. Freud
(1927) and Marx (1876/1977) are frequently held up as offering such
explanations. Freud claims that religious experiences can be
adequately explained by psychological mechanisms having their root in
early childhood experience and psychodynamic tensions. Marx similarly
attributes religious belief in general to materialistic economic
forces. Both claim that, since the hidden psychological or economic
explanations are sufficient to explain the origins of religious
belief, there is no need to suppose, in addition, that the beliefs are
true. Freud's theory of religion has few adherents, even among
the psychoanalytically inclined, and Marx's view likewise has
all but been abandoned, but that is not to say that something in the
neighborhood might not be true. More recently, neurological
explanations of religious experience have been put forward as reasons
to deny the veridicality of the experiences. Events in the brain that
occur during meditative states and other religious experiences are
very similar to events that happen during certain kinds of seizures,
or with certain kinds of mental disorders, and can also be induced
with drugs. Therefore, it is argued, there is nothing more to
religious experiences than what happens in seizures, mental disorders,
or drug experiences. Some who are studying the neurological basis of
religious experience do not infer that they are not veridical (see,
e.g., d'Aquili and Newberg 1999), but many do. Guthrie (1995),
for example, argues that religion has its origin in our tendency to
anthropomorphize phenomena in our vicinity, seeing agency where there
is none.



There are general problems with all kinds of naturalistic explanations
as defeaters. First of all, as Gellman (2001) points out, most such
explanations (like the psychoanalytic and socio-political ones) are
put forward as hypotheses, not as established facts. The proponent
assumes that the experiences are not veridical, then casts around for
an explanation. This is not true of the neurological explanations, but
they face another kind of weakness noted by Ellwood (1999):
*every* experience, whatever its source, is accompanied by a
corresponding neurological state. To argue that the experience is
illusory because there is a corresponding brain state is fallacious.
The same reasoning would lead us to conclude that sensory experiences
are illusory, since in each sensory experience, there is some
corresponding neurological state that is just like the state that
occurs in the corresponding hallucination. The proponent of the
naturalistic explanation as a defeater owes us some reason to believe
that his or her argument is not just another skeptical argument from
the veil of perception.



One further epistemological worry accompanies religious experience.
James claimed that, while mystical experiences proved authoritative
grounds for belief in the person experiencing them, they cannot give
grounds for a person to whom the experience is reported. In other
words, my experience is evidence for me, but not for you. Bovens
(2012) gives a modern expansion and explanation of this claim. The
claim can be understood in a variety of ways, depending on the kind of
normativity that attaches to the purported evidential relation. Some
(see Oakes 1976, for example) have claimed that religious experiences
epistemically can necessitate belief; that is, anyone who has the
experience and doesn't form the corresponding belief is making
an epistemic mistake, much like a person who, in normal conditions,
refuses to believe his or her eyes. More commonly, defenders of the
epistemic value of religious experience claim that the experiences
make it epistemically permissible to form the belief, but you may also
be justified in not forming the belief. The testimony of other people
about what they have experienced is much the same. In some cases, a
person would be unjustified in rejecting the testimony of others, and
in other cases, one would be justified in accepting it, but need not
accept it. This leaves us with three possibilities, on the assumption
that the subject of the experience is justified in forming a religious
belief on the basis of his or her experience, and that he or she tells
someone else about it: the testimony might provide compelling evidence
for the hearer, such that he or she would be unjustified in rejecting
the claim; the testimony might provide non-compelling justification
for the hearer to accept the claim; or the testimony might fail to
provide any kind of grounds for the hearer to accept the claim. When a
subject makes a claim on the basis of an ordinary experience, it might
fall into any one of these three categories, depending on the
claim's content and the epistemic situation of the hearer. The
most natural thing to say about religious experience claims is that
they work the same way (on the assumption that they give the subject
of the experience, who is making the claim, any justification for his
or her beliefs). James, and some others after him, claim that
testimony about religious experiences cannot fall under either of the
first two categories. If that's true, it must be because of
something special about the nature of the experiences. If we assume
that the experiences cannot be shown *a priori* to be defective
somehow, and that religious language is intelligible--and if we
do not make these assumptions, then the question of religious
testimony doesn't even arise--then it must be because the
evidential value of the experience is so small that it cannot survive
transmission to another person; that is, it must be that in the
ordinary act of reporting an experience to someone else, there is some
defeater at work that is always stronger than whatever evidential
force the experience itself has. While there are important differences
between ordinary sense-experience and religious experience (clarity of
the experience, amount of information it contains, presence of
competing explanations, and the like), it is not clear whether the
differences are great enough to disqualify religious testimony always
and everywhere.


## 4. The Diverse Objects of Religious Experience



Just as there are a variety of religions, each with its own claims
about the nature of reality, there are a variety of objects and states
of affairs that the subjects of these experiences claim to be aware
of. Much analytic philosophy of religion has been done in Europe and
the nations descended from Europe, so much of the discussion has been
in terms of God as conceived of in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic
traditions. In those traditions, the object of religious experiences
is typically God himself, understood as an eternal, omniscient,
omnipotent, free, and perfectly good spirit. God, for reasons of his
own, reveals himself to people, some of them unbidden (like Moses,
Muhammad, and Saint Paul), and some because they have undertaken a
rigorous practice to draw closer to him (like the mystics). To say
that an experience comes unbidden is not to say that nothing the
subject has done has prepared her, or primed her, for the experience
(see Luhrmann 2012); it is only to claim that the subject has not
undertaken any practice aimed at producing a religious experience. In
such experiences, God frequently delivers a message at the same time,
but he need not. He is always identifiable as the same being who
revealed himself to others in the same tradition. Other experiences
can be of angels, demons, saints, heaven, hell, or other religiously
significant objects.



In other traditions, it is not necessarily a personal being who is the
object of the experience, or even a positive being at all. In the
traditions that find their origin in the Indian
subcontinent--chiefly Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism--the
object of religious experiences is some basic fact or feature of
reality, rather than some entity separate from the universe. In the
orthodox Hindu traditions, one may certainly have an experience of a
god or some other supernatural entity (like Arjuna's encounter
with Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita), but a great many important kinds
of experiences are of Brahman, and its identity with the self. In
Yoga, which is based in the Samkhya understanding of the nature of
things, the mystical practice of yoga leads to a calming and stilling
of the mind, which allows the yogi to apprehend directly that he or
she is not identical to, or even causally connected with, the physical
body, and this realization is what liberates him or her from
suffering.



In Theravada Buddhism, the goal of meditation is to "see things
as they are," which is to see them as unsatisfactory,
impermanent, and not-self (Gowans 2003, 191). The meditator, as he or
she makes progress along the way, sheds various delusions and
attachments. The last one to go is the delusion that he or she is a
self. To see this is to see all of reality as made up of sequences of
momentary events, each causally dependent on the ones that went
before. There are no abiding substances, and no eternal souls. Seeing
reality that way extinguishes the fires of craving, and liberates the
meditator from the necessity of rebirth (Laumakis 2008,
158-161). Seeing things as they are involves removing from the
mind all the delusions that stand in the way of such seeing, which is
done by meditation practices that develop the meditator's
mastery of his or her own mind. The type of meditation that brings
this mastery and allows the meditator to see the true nature of things
is called *Vipassana* (insight) meditation. It typically
involves some object of meditation, which can be some feature of the
meditator him- or herself, some feature of the physical or mental
world, or some abstraction, which then becomes the focus of the
meditator's concentration and examination. In the end, it is
hoped, the meditator will see in the object the unsatisfactory and
impermanent nature of things and that there is no self to be found in
them. At the moment of that insight, *nirvana* is achieved.
While the experience of nirvana is essentially the realization of a
kind of insight, it is also accompanied by other experiential
elements, especially of the cessation of negative mental states.
Nirvana is described in the Buddhist canon as the extinction of the
fires of desire. The Theravada tradition teaches other kinds of
meditation that can help the meditator make progress, but the final
goal can't be achieved without *vipassana*
meditation.



In the Mahayana Buddhist traditions, this idea of the constantly
fluctuating nature of the universe is extended in various ways. For
some, even those momentary events that make up the flow of the world
are understood to be empty of inherent existence (the idea of inherent
existence is understood differently in different traditions) to the
point that what one sees in the enlightenment experience is the
ultimate emptiness (*sunyata*) of all things. In the Yogacara
school of Mahayana Buddhism, this is understood as emptiness of
external existence; that is, to see things as they are is to see them
as all mind-dependent. In the Zen school of Mahayana Buddhism, the
enlightenment experience (*kensho*) reveals that reality
contains no distinctions or dualities. Since concepts and language
always involve distinctions, which always involve duality, the insight
so gained cannot be achieved conceptually or expressed linguistically.
In all Mahayana schools, what brings enlightenment is direct
realization of sunyata as a basic fact about reality.



The situation is somewhat more complicated in the Chinese traditions.
The idea of religious experience seems to be almost completely absent
in the Confucian tradition; the social world looms large, and the idea
of an ultimate reality that needs to be experienced becomes much less
prominent. Before the arrival of Buddhism in China, Confucianism was
primarily a political and ethical system, with no particular concern
with the transcendent (though people who identified themselves as
Confucians frequently engaged in Chinese folk religious practices).
Nevertheless, meditation (and therefore something that could be called
"religious experience") did come to play a role in
Confucian practice in the tenth century, as Confucian thought began to
be influenced by Buddhist and Daoist thought. The resulting view is
known as Neo-Confucianism. Neo-Confucianism retains the Mencian
doctrine that human beings are by nature good, but in need of
purification. Since goodness resides in every person, then examination
of oneself should reveal the nature of goodness, through the
experience of the vital force within (*qi*). The form of
meditation that arises from this line of thought ("quiet
sitting" or "sitting and forgetting") are very like
Buddhist vipassana meditation, but there is no value placed on any
particular insight gained, though one can experience the principle of
unity (*li*) behind the world. Success is measured in gradual
moral improvement.



The Daoist ideal is to come to an understanding of the Dao, the
fundamental nature of reality that explains all things in the world,
and live according to it. Knowledge of the Dao is essential to the
good life, but this knowledge cannot be learned from discourses, or
transmitted by teaching. It is only known by experiential
acquaintance. The Dao gives the universe a kind of grain, or flow,
going against which causes human difficulty. The good human life is
then one that respects the flow of Dao, and goes along with it. This
is what is meant by "life in accordance with nature," and
is the insight behind the Daoist admonition of *wu wei,*
sometimes glossed as "actionless action." By paying attention to
reality as it presents itself, a person can learn what the Dao is,
and can experience unity with it. This picture of reality, along with
the picture of how one can come to know it, heavily influenced the
development of Ch'an Buddhism, which became Zen.



All of the same epistemological problems that arise for theism will
also arise for these other traditions, though in different forms.
That is, one can ask of experiences of Brahman, Sunyata, the Dao, and
anything else that is the object of religious experience whether there
is any reason to think the experience is veridical. One can also ask
whether testimony about those experiences carries the same weight as
ordinary experience. Naturalistic explanations can also be offered to
these experiences. It is equally true that the responses that have
been offered to these objections in a theistic context are also
available to defenders of non-theistic religious experience.