Divine Disclosures: Religious Experiences as Evidence in Theology
Apollo (University of Cambridge) October 21, 2017 Hugh Burling
The thesis argues that skepticism about religious experiences arises because traditional methods for distinguishing genuine from illusory experiences require commitment to a particular religious tradition, making it impossible to decide which method to trust. These methods also fail to test whether experiences are veridical and are too coarse-grained for regulating theological beliefs. The thesis develops a new procedure where parties in religious disagreements understand God as a perfect being and use shared moral beliefs from outside their tradition to assign probabilities to putative divine actions, including religious experiences. The likelihood the divine action occurred given those moral beliefs indicates the likelihood the experience was veridical. The procedure addresses different sources of doubt and is applied to debates about divine hiddenness and religious diversity.