Andrew Jeffery

This dissertation focuses on a number of issues concerning the epistemic value of religious experience, with frequent references to recent work on this topic by William Alston, Richard Gale, and many others. The dissertation begins with a defense of talk about rights, obligation, and permission in epistemic discourse. Chapter One ends with the presentation of two epistemological theses: that the testimony of mystics could serve as an epistemic ground for the religious beliefs of non-mystics; that reason nevertheless requires different things of the two regarding the mystics' private experiences. Together, these two theses comprise a moderate form of epistemic relativism with respect to evidence. Chapter Two defends this relativism against objections from the epistemology of testimony, "cognitivity verificationism," and truth-conducivity. Chapter Three makes use of some theories of reference and intentional identity in an exploration of the relationship between religious experience and the other grounds for religious belief. Chapter Four considers what has to be true of some object for it to be experienced, and what has to be true of some experience for it to confer knowledge. Finally, Chapter Five describes the way in which Alston deals with the epistemological difficulties raised by the phenomenon of widespread religious diversity, explores several problems he does not address, and appropriates some suggestions of Keith Yandell's to help flesh out his talk of "inter-system winnowing devices."

Richard Gale, in On the Nature and Existence of God, offers several reasons why an “historical-cum-indexical” theory of reference cannot be appropriate in explaining how people refer to God. The present paper identifies five distinct lines of argument in Gale, attempts to clarify several important desiderata for a successful theory of reference, and argues that Gale fails to discharge the burden of proof he has assumed, leaving the most important features of Alston’s “direct reference” theory untouched. Nevertheless, it is conceded that some consequences of Alston’s theory are quite counter-intuitive. The paper therefore concludes with a consideration of two alternatives: either taking a hard, Alstonian line in conflict with people’s linguistic intuitions, or striking a compromise with descriptivism along lines similar to those found in Gareth Evans’s paper, “The Causal Theory of Names.”

Jerome Gellman argues in Experience of God that there is “some” reasonable application of the canons of rationality to the facts concerning apparent experiences of God “on which it is reasonable to believe that God exists and not reasonable to believe that God does not exist”. The book is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter sets the conceptual groundwork, discussing the meaning and reference of “God,” what is meant by “experience of God,” and the like. Gellman’s treatment of “God” as a proper name in terms of reference is especially interesting, and resurfaces at crucial turns later in the book. The main argument, appealing to a modified and extended version of Richard Swinburne’s Principle of Credulity, is given in the second chapter. The remaining chapters attempt, with varying success, to answer the major objections facing this sort of argument from religious experience, including the claim that the experiential evidence for theism is outweighed or vitiated by others’ failures to experience God; the problems posed by the diversity of religious experience in different religions; the claim that the best explanations of religious experience are nonreligious; the claim that the alleged object of theistic experience is conceptually incoherent; and the relevance of the problem of evil.