A preliminary study explored whether psychedelic agents (LSD-25, mescaline) can facilitate creative problem-solving. Twenty-seven professionally employed males received a single psychedelic experience in small groups after extensive selection and preparation. The session was carefully structured to shape participants' expectations and create a supportive social environment. Tentative findings from creativity tests, subjective reports, self-ratings, and the usefulness of problem solutions suggested that, under this regimen, psychedelic agents seem to facilitate creative problem-solving, especially during the “illumination phase.” The results also suggested that various degrees of increased creative ability may persist for at least some weeks after the session.
The argument for the Critical Stance remains intact despite appeals to religious experience. The diversity of religious experiences across traditions, each taken by adherents to support their own beliefs, weakens any single tradition's claim. Moreover, religious experience typically supports only a portion of the beliefs within a tradition, not the whole set.
William Alston's analysis of perceptual religious experience does not weaken the Critical Stance; rather, religious diversity poses a more serious challenge to his doxastic practice epistemology than he acknowledges. When doxastic practices operate under ambiguous conditions and amid disagreement, their outputs should be regarded with suspicion, even by practitioners themselves.