C. S. Peirce and Religious Experience

Abstract

This chapter discusses how Peirce viewed the role of experience in religion. Over the years, there have been two problems present in the analysis of religion and religious experience. The first is classical empiricism's charge that religious language is meaningless, in the sense of bearing no cognitive content. The second is the tension felt by religious believers between the need for an authentic experience of God—a sense of awareness of God's nearness or presence—and the need for rational argument to ground and to legitimate any such experience. Experience is required to make religion concrete and alive; argument is required to authenticate the experience. The chapter turns to Peirce to answer both these problems in terms of his general theory of experience and cognition.