Reply to Michael Levine

Abstract

I am grateful to Mr Levine for his careful and accurate rendering of the thesis which I presented and defended in my first paper on the topic of ‘self-authenticating religious experience’. As should be reasonably clear from his remarks, I defended therein the negative and somewhat modest epistemological thesis that even if it is inconceivable (or logically impossible) for there to occur self-authenticating experience of God, it is far from obvious that such is the case. Hence, it seems to me that the claim of more than a few theistic mystics to have had such experience is entitled to something more than the rather cavalier rejection it has received at the hands of many ‘tough-minded’ epistemologists of religion. (I except Mr Levine: his rejection of that claim inclines towards the distinctly non-cavalier.)