Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious ExperienceIn Perceiving God, William P. Alston offers a clear and provocative account of the epistemology of religious experience. He argues that the "perception of God"—his term for direct experiential awareness of God—makes a major contribution to the grounds of religious belief. Surveying the variety of reported direct experiences of God among laypersons and famous mystics, Alston demonstrates that a person can be justified in holding certain beliefs about God on the basis of mystical experience. Through the perception that God is sustaining one in being, for example, one can justifiably believe that God is indeed sustaining one in being. Alston offers a detailed discussion of our grounds for taking sense perception and other sources of belief—including introspection, memory, and mystical experience—to be reliable and to confer justification. He then uses this epistemic framework to explain how our perceptual beliefs about God can be justified. Alston carefully addresses objections to his chief claims, including problems posed by non-Christian religious traditions. He also examines the way in which mystical perception fits into the larger picture of grounds for religious belief. Suggesting that religious experience, rather than being a purely subjective phenomenon, has real cognitive value, Perceiving God will spark intense debate and will be indispensable reading for those interested in philosophy of religion, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, as well as for theologians. |
Contents
CHAPTER | 2 |
Perceptual and Otherwise i Preview | 68 |
General Epistemological Background | 70 |
The Justification of Perceptual Beliefs | 77 |
Doxastic Grounds of Perceptual Beliefs | 81 |
A Beliefs about Perceptual Experience | 82 |
B Perceptual Cues | 83 |
Adequacy Assumptions | 84 |
The Evaluative Side | 158 |
Mutual Involvement of Practices | 159 |
5 | 161 |
E Irreducible Plurality of Practices | 162 |
F PreReflective Genesis | 163 |
J Distinctive Presuppositions | 164 |
The Individuation of Doxastic Practices | 165 |
Practical Rationality | 168 |
Contextual Beliefs | 88 |
E The Perceptual Identification of Individuals | 91 |
F Conclusion | 93 |
The Perceptual Identification of God | 96 |
vii | 99 |
CHAPTER 3 | 102 |
Simple Empirical Arguments for Reliability | 106 |
Descartes Meditations | 109 |
Verificationism | 110 |
Criteria of Physical Object Concepts III | 111 |
Paradigm Case Arguments | 115 |
The Private Language Argument | 118 |
Transcendental Arguments | 121 |
The Explanation of Sensory Experience | 123 |
Explanations of Our Success in Predicting Our Experience | 135 |
I | 143 |
A Doxastic Practice Approach to Epistemology | 146 |
The Autonomy of Doxastic Practices | 149 |
The Nature of Doxastic Practices | 153 |
A A System of BeliefForming Mechanisms | 155 |
B Generational and Transformational Practices | 157 |
Overriders of Prima Facie Rationality | 170 |
Significant SelfSupport | 173 |
CHAPTER 5 | 184 |
Conclusion | 225 |
CHAPTER 7 | 255 |
Genuine Epistemic Consequences of Religious Diversity | 275 |
Summary of the Case for CMP | 278 |
First and ThirdPerson Perceptual Justification | 279 |
Knowledge of God | 284 |
CHAPTER 8 | 286 |
Other Grounds of Religious Belief | 289 |
Basic Categories of Grounds of Religious Belief | 290 |
How Different Grounds Interact in the Total Picture | 292 |
Can Any of the Sources Make a Distinctive Contribution? | 300 |
The Importance of Experiential Grounds | 302 |
A Case of Christian Belief | 305 |
309 | |
315 | |
316 | |
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Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience William P. Alston No preview available - 1991 |