The Ecology of Religious Knowledges

Religious traditions claim to provide knowledge of ultimate reality, but the diversity of their accounts poses a challenge. Drawing on the ecology of knowledges—which holds that intentions, body, and physical and social environments shape experience and knowledge—the author argues that religious experiences and knowledges are both veridical (embodied and extended) and pluralistic (essentially limited). Mystical religious experience is characterized as a non-ordinary state of consciousness that allegedly enables direct epistemic contact with supreme reality, understood as eternal, infinite, and possessing supreme value. Different religious perspectives are seen as epistemic approaches along a continuum from impersonal to personal specifications of the sacred. The cognitive relevance of any religious knowledge implies explanations and interventions that go beyond those of other religious and non-sacred knowledges.

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Abstract

Different religious traditions, beliefs, and experiences claim to have epistemic contact with the ultimate source of reality. However, this epistemic claim has encountered one of its most significant obstacles in the initial incompatibility of its multiple accounts. I argue that from the ecology of knowledges, the idea that intentions, body, and physical and social environments are constitutive elements of our experience and knowledge, we can understand both the veridical, as embodied and extended, and pluralistic, as essentially limited, nature of religious experiences and knowledges. I characterize the mystical religious experience as a state of consciousness that (allegedly) allows direct epistemic contact with the supreme reality, articulating its essentially non-ordinary nature on the basis of the radical otherness of the sacred realm, namely, its character of being eternal, infinite, and with supreme ontological, ethical, and aesthetic value. According to this proposal, the different religious perspectives are understood as different epistemic approaches dealing with these numinous features in a gradual continuum from their most impersonal to their most personal specifications. I conclude that the cognitive relevance of any religious knowledge implies explanations and interventions that, although compatible with, go beyond those of both other religious knowledges and the knowledges of the non-sacred domains.