Abstract
Does the alleged religious experience of a mystic constitute a reliable source of knowledge about the object of his or her experience? Or does it rationally justify a move from such experience to meaningful beliefs about God or the Absolute which is supposed to be the object of that experience? And are religious beliefs in need of being grounded in religious experience in order to be rationally justified? Although it seems pretty obvious that a great many adherents of all religions find reasons for their beliefs in their religious traditions rather than in their personal religious experiences, one could note that (1) usually these traditions present religious experiences of their founder figures as constituting evidence for their authenticity and truthfulness (consider the importance of Abraham's and Moses' encounters with God for Judaism, the experience of the Apostles on the Day of Pentecost for Christianity, or the experience of Mahomet receiving the Koran for Islam); (2) the supposed mystical experiences of some adherents of a given religious tradition are often treated by their co-believers as an important evidence which increases credibility of their own religious convictions (it seems that primarily for this reason some of the great Christian mystics have been granted the title of 'Doctor of the Church', Chasidic Jews venerate the memory of their saintly leaders making pilgrimages to their graves, and some sufi mystics of medieval Islam are still held in high esteem nearly a thousand years after their death).
Highlights
If one considers i n addition the fact that (3) i n our own days m a n y individuals report that they have had some sort of religious experience and they take these experiences to be among main reasons for their being religious, or at least among reasons for their deep religious involvement, it has to be concluded that arguments against the Janusz Salamon cognitive validity and authenticity of religious experience as a means of justification for religious beliefs, if not refuted, would constitute a serious challenge to the rationality of religious stance i n general
Some religious experiences appear as contentless and there is lacking within the experience itself any contextual concept which could constitute a link between the experience and the subject's tradition
Scientific answers constitute part of the world-view of a religious person and these answers can have as its background a picture of the Universe with God i n its centre, but science rarely provides answers to the questions that religion usually addresses. In yet another commonly employed naturalistic argument against the cognitive validity of religious experience, the claim is being made that religious experience can be scientifically explained because science has identified the type of electrical stimuli upon the brain which will result in experiences which are described as religious or mystical
Summary
Does the alleged religious experience of a mystic constitute a reliable source of knowledge about the object of his or her experience? O r does it rationally justify a move from such experience to meaningful beliefs about God or the Absolute which is supposed to be the object of that experience? A n d are religious beliefs in need of being grounded in religious experience i n order to be rationally justified? it seems pretty obvious that a great many adherents of all religions find reasons for their beliefs i n their religious traditions rather than i n their personal religious experiences, one could note that (1) usually these traditions present religious experiences of their founder figures as constituting evidence for their authenticity and truthfulness (consider the importance of Abraham's and Moses' encounters with God for Judaism, the experience of the Apostles on the Day of Pentecost for Christianity, or the experience of Mahomet receiving the Koran for Islam); (2) the supposed mystical experiences of some adherents of a given religious tradition are often treated by their co-believers as an important evidence which increases credibility of their own religious convictions (it seems that primarily for this reason some of the great Christian mystics have been granted the title of 'Doctor of the Church', Chasidic Jews venerate the memory of their saintly leaders making pilgrimages to their graves, and some sufi mystics of medieval Islam are still held in high esteem nearly a thousand years after their death). Roughly speaking 'miracle' has a 'public' nature while religious experience is essentially 'private' On this account Moses' 'experience' of God i n the Burning Bush, as well as the 'experience' of the Apostles i n the Upper Room on the Day of Pentecost, are to be seen as examples of miracles i n the above sense. We have to do with two rather than one paradigmatic case of religious experience, and though they are different, the argument will go that they are both sufficiently similar to sense experience to create presumption i n favour of its cognitive validity.
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