The Place of Experience in the Grounds of Religious Belief

Abstract

Many persons, not only monastics and great religious leaders but humble laypersons as well, have taken themselves to be directly aware of God, as directly as all of us are aware of the physical and social environment through sense perception. And some of these people have communicated to others what they have learned about God though their awareness of Him, thus contributing to the development of religious traditions. This raises the question of this paper: What place does the experience of God (and, as we shall go on to ask, other forms of religious experience as well) have in the total assemblage of grounds of religious belief? Is the experience of God, ultimately, the sole basis of religious belief, or, somewhat more modestly, does it play as a fundamental role in the grounds of religious belief as sense perception plays in the grounds of belief about the physical and social world? Or is it to be assigned a still more modest place in the larger picture? And if so what is that place?