Religious Experience and the Knowledge of God
Religious Experience and the Knowledge of God

Author: Harold A. Netland

Publisher: Baker Academic

Published: 2022-02-08

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 1493434896

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For many Christians, personal experiences of God provide an important ground or justification for accepting the truth of the gospel. But we are sometimes mistaken about our experiences, and followers of other religions also provide impressive testimonies to support their religious beliefs. This book explores from a philosophical and theological perspective the viability of divine encounters as support for belief in God, arguing that some religious experiences can be accepted as genuine experiences of God and can provide evidence for Christian beliefs.

Perceiving God
Perceiving God

Author: William P. Alston

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2014-01-21

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0801471257

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In 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.

Knowledge, Belief, and God
Knowledge, Belief, and God

Author: Matthew A. Benton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0198798709

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Recent decades have seen a fertile period of theorizing within mainstream epistemology which has had a dramatic impact on how epistemology is done. Investigations into contextualist and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge suggest radically new ways of meeting skeptical challenges and of understanding the relation between the epistemological and practical environment. New insights from social epistemology and formal epistemology about defeat, testimony, a priority, probability, and the nature of evidence all have a potentially revolutionary effect on how we understand our epistemological place in the world. Religion is the place where such rethinking can potentially have its deepest impact and importance. Yet there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new ideas into philosophy of religion and the epistemology of religious belief. Knowledge, Belief, and God incorporates these myriad new developments in mainstream epistemology, and extends these developments to questions and arguments in religious epistemology. The investigations proposed in this volume offer substantial new life, breadth, and sophistication to issues in the philosophy of religion and analytic theology. They pose original questions and shed new light on long-standing issues in religious epistemology; and these developments will in turn generate contributions to epistemology itself, since religious belief provides a vital testing ground for recent epistemological ideas.

The Epistemology of Religious Experience
The Epistemology of Religious Experience

Author: Keith E. Yandell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1994-11-25

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780521477413

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Arguing against the notion that religious experience is ineffable, while advocating the view that it can provide evidence of God's existence, this text contends that social science and nonreligious explanations of religious belief and experience do not cancel out the force of the experience.

The Significance of Religious Experience
The Significance of Religious Experience

Author: Howard Wettstein

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-11-12

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0190226757

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In this volume of essays, Howard Wettstein explores the foundations of religious commitment. His orientation is broadly naturalistic, but not in the mode of reductionism or eliminativism. This collection explores questions of broad religious interest, but does so through a focus on the author's religious tradition, Judaism. Among the issues explored are the nature and role of awe, ritual, doctrine, religious experience; the distinction between belief and faith; problems of evil and suffering with special attention to the Book of Job and to the Akedah, the biblical story of the binding of Isaac; the virtue of forgiveness. One of the book's highlights is its literary (as opposed to philosophical) approach to theology that at the same time makes room for philosophical exploration of religion. Another is Wettstein's rejection of the usual picture that sees religious life as sitting atop a distinctive metaphysical foundation, one that stands in need of epistemological justification.

The Varieties of Religious Experience
The Varieties of Religious Experience

Author: William James

Publisher: The Floating Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 824

ISBN-13: 1877527467

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Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."

Knowing with the Heart
Knowing with the Heart

Author: Roy Clouser

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2007-09-01

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1556354320

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The famous scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal memorably said that the heart has its reasons the mind will never know. But too often it's forgotten that Pascal, in referring to the heart's reasons, was not talking about hunches or cozy feelings. Instead he had in mind our intuitive knowledge of the first principles of number, time, space, and motion. And he believed God can be known in the same way, so that belief in God has the same justification as scientific and mathematical principles. Was he right? In Knowing with the Heart, Roy Clouser develops a broad, compelling case for Pascal's position. Against the current climate of religious relativism, Clouser concludes that Christians are entitled to say they know God is real. Written in clear and nontechnical language, Knowing with the Heart is intended for believers concerned with the credentials of their faith--and those who don't believe in God but are willing to investigate and reconsider.

Sacred Knowledge
Sacred Knowledge

Author: William A. Richards

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-12-08

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0231540914

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Sacred Knowledge is the first well-documented, sophisticated account of the effect of psychedelics on biological processes, human consciousness, and revelatory religious experiences. Based on nearly three decades of legal research with volunteers, William A. Richards argues that, if used responsibly and legally, psychedelics have the potential to assuage suffering and constructively affect the quality of human life. Richards's analysis contributes to social and political debates over the responsible integration of psychedelic substances into modern society. His book serves as an invaluable resource for readers who, whether spontaneously or with the facilitation of psychedelics, have encountered meaningful, inspiring, or even disturbing states of consciousness and seek clarity about their experiences. Testing the limits of language and conceptual frameworks, Richards makes the most of experiential phenomena that stretch our understanding of reality, advancing new frontiers in the study of belief, spiritual awakening, psychiatric treatment, and social well-being. His findings enrich humanities and scientific scholarship, expanding work in philosophy, anthropology, theology, and religious studies and bringing depth to research in mental health, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology.

The Cambridge Companion to Religious Experience
The Cambridge Companion to Religious Experience

Author: Paul K. Moser

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-07-16

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1108472176

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Offers a state-of-the-art contribution by providing critical analyses of and creative insights to the nature of religious experience.