Religious Experience and the Problem of Epistemic Justification in William Alston's Thought

Abstract

his article examines the epistemological status of religious experience and the problem of its justification in the thought of William P. Alston. It focuses particularly on Alston’s defense of religious experience as a potential source of prima facie justification for religious beliefs and his broader challenge to the assumption that religious beliefs require inferential justification from independently established premises. The study reconstructs Alston’s account of experiential justification, with particular attention to his concept of doxastic practices, the analogy between religious experience and perceptual experience, and the role of socially established epistemic practices in the formation of justified beliefs. It then critically examines the principal objections to his position, especially the problems of epistemic circularity, religious diversity, and the alleged asymmetry between ordinary perceptual practices and religious doxastic practices. The article argues that Alston’s contribution is significant not because it conclusively establishes the epistemic reliability of religious experience, but because it challenges restrictive conceptions of rational justification and expands the scope of contemporary epistemology to include religious experience as a serious epistemological phenomenon. The study concludes that Alston’s approach provides a powerful framework for understanding how religious experience can possess prima facie epistemic justification while leaving open the need for critical assessment of its defeaters, reliability, and intercultural implications.