Cultural Mediation and the Evidential Limits of Religious Experience

Abstract

Abstract Does the cultural constitution of religious experience undermine its value as evidence of an independent reality? I examine this question through John Hick’s critical realism and Steven Katz’s contextualism. Cultural constitution, natural–cultural producibility, and evidential closure make different claims: that learned frameworks shape experience, that natural processes can generate it, and that its features fail to discriminate between competing explanations. Neither of the first two claims entails the third. Predictive processing and embodied approaches clarify how culturally formed experience can remain responsive to constraints beyond a subject’s expectations. They do not, however, establish contact with Hick’s transcategorial Real. I develop an account of counterfactual sensitivity that separates responsiveness in a particular experiential feature from evidence identifying its source. Examples of divine address and contemplative experience show why explaining one feature does not automatically explain an entire episode, and why sensitivity to an independent cue does not establish a religious interpretation. The account preserves the force of inductive naturalistic explanations while rejecting a deductive inference from cultural mediation to evidential closure. Its contribution is a more precise statement of what an experiential defence of Hick must explain and what cognitive accounts can legitimately count against it.