Card 6.1.1 · Root VI — The Philosophy of X Family
Religious Experience
If someone tells you they have met God, what have you learned?
This node asks whether experiences people describe as encounters with the divine can be evidence for anything, and what kind of evidence they would be.
Where it sits
Under 6.1 Philosophy of religion. Depends on 2.2.1 Perception, 2.2.4 Testimony. Borders 1.8 Natural theology, 2.2.5 Revelation, 1.3.4 Qualia.
The rival answers
| Position | Religious experience is |
|---|---|
| Perceptual realism | A genuine perception of something real, with its own doxastic practice |
| Credulity principle | Prima facie evidence, like any seeming, until defeated |
| Cumulative case | Weak on its own; substantial in aggregate across cultures and centuries |
| Naturalistic explanation | Fully accounted for by neurology, expectation and social setting |
| Ineffability thesis | Real but not propositional; it reports nothing that could be evidence |
| Constructivist | Shaped so thoroughly by the tradition that it cannot confirm it |
| Transformative knowledge | Not evidence at all but a change in the knower — the Sufi position |
Key figures
| Figure | Dates | Tradition | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Al-Ghazali | 1058–1111 | Islamic | Dhawq — tasting; knowledge that arrives when argument runs out |
| Rumi | 1207–1273 | Islamic, Sufi | The experiential tradition in its most transmitted form |
| Teresa of Ávila | 1515–1582 | Christian | Systematic first-person description of mystical states |
| William James | 1842–1910 | Pragmatist | Four marks of mystical experience; judge by fruits, not roots |
| Rudolf Otto | 1869–1937 | German | The numinous — awe as a category of its own |
| Walter Stace | 1886–1967 | Analytic | Common-core thesis: one experience, many interpretations |
| Steven Katz | b. 1944 | Analytic | Constructivist reply: no unmediated experience exists |
| William Alston | 1921–2009 | Analytic | Perceiving God; religious practice as a doxastic practice |
Connections
→ 6.1, 2.2.1 · ↔ 2.2.4, 2.2.5, 1.8, 1.3.4 · ◇ perceptual realism, common-core thesis, constructivism, transformative knowledge · ○ Islamic golden age; Modern; Table 3
→ narrower questions · ↔ questions it borders · ◇ the positions, mapped in Part III of the book · ○ the eras and comparison tables (Parts IV and V)
The full card is in the book
In The Coordinates of Thought this card goes on to a worked example that sets the answers against one case, and to where the question touches daily life — page 247.
On Coordinates of Thought
Conversations about this question in Mysticism & spirituality:
- Mystical experience can count as evidence for what it reveals 7 replies
- Reading group: William James’s Varieties, from ‘Religion and Neurology’ to the mysticism lectures 6 replies
- Al-Ghazali says some knowledge has to be tasted. Is that an argument, or a way out of one? 5 replies
- If ātman already is brahman, what is left for liberation to do? 5 replies
- Taking the meditation without the metaphysics is fine: most people never wanted the path 5 replies
Join free to ask about it Everything in Mysticism & spirituality