Emmanuel Chinonso Ugwuishi

I ask, in this thesis, when it is rational to believe in God on the basis of religious experience, and I pursue the question through the principle that has done the most work on it in contemporary philosophy of religion, Richard Swinburne's Principle of Credulity (POC). I argue that the POC can carry the epistemic weight Swinburne assigns it, but only when it is held inside a broader relational framework the principle does not itself supply, and I take the burden of the thesis to be to show what that framework is and why the POC needs it. I develop this argument in five chapters. Chapter I sets up the vocabulary of the analytical debate (evidentialism, internalism/externalism, and justification/warrant). Chapter II presents Swinburne's POC, contrasting it with Huemer’s phenomenal conservatism and Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology against three historical cases of religious experience. Chapter III takes up Swinburne's responses to pluralism, subjectivity, and relativism objections, defending an attenuated form of the principle. Chapter IV argues that Swinburne and Plantinga offer complementary rather than rival accounts of religious belief, integrating both into Katherine Dormandy's relational reframing of faith. Chapter V draws the positions together and outlines future research avenues. The positive claim I defend is this: the POC's defensibility depends on its being embedded in a broader relational structure of trust. I argue that the principle earns its work as the epistemic backbone of a lived faith rather than as a stand-alone perceptual rule.