Religious Experience without Belief? : Toward an Imaginative Account of Religious Engagement

Abstract

It is commonly supposed that a certain kind of belief is necessary for religious experience. This claim gets cashed out in various ways in the philosophical and theological literature. For example, on some accounts religious experience is subjectively self-verifying – that is, one cannot have a religious experience without in some sense believing in the existence of the intentional object of the experience.1 On other, more nuanced accounts, religious experience always minimally involves a belief about the causal origin of the experience. (That is, it is not possible to have an experience of God if one sincerely judges the experience to be purely naturalistically explicable).2 Yet it is not clear that this must be so. In what follows, I will defend the possibility that a subject could have a genuine emotional religious experience without thereby necessarily believing that the purported object of her experience corresponds to reality and/or is the