The argument from religious experience in Christianity
Christianity's long mystical tradition — Augustine, the Desert Fathers, Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila — supplies the Western canon's richest reports of religious experience, though modern Christian epistemology has grown cautious about inferring metaphysics from them.
Christian mysticism is the other great strand of Christian engagement with God — running alongside doctrine and liturgy but often in tension with them. Its vocabulary is mostly negative (apophatic): God is beyond image, word, concept. Its method is experiential. From Augustine's Confessions through Pseudo-Dionysius, the Desert Fathers, Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Ávila, Christian mystics report direct encounter with the divine under various names — contemplation, ecstasy, mystical union, dark night.
The epistemic argument from these experiences was most systematically developed in the twentieth century by William Alston in Perceiving God (1991). Alston argued that Christian mystical practice ('Christian mystical practice', CMP) is a doxastic practice analogous to ordinary sense perception — one that generates beliefs about God which, absent a specific defeater, should be taken as prima facie justified. Richard Swinburne's principle of credulity runs in the same direction: reported experiences are evidential unless we have reason to discount them.
Christian defenders of the argument now typically concede several points to critics. Neurologists have induced religious experiences with temporal-lobe stimulation; drugs and meditation produce phenomenologically similar states; cross-cultural reports yield incompatible metaphysical conclusions. The Christian reply is that none of these facts, individually or jointly, defeats the argument — they only show that religious experience is not self-authenticating. On the Alston/Swinburne line, Christian mystical experience remains evidence; it is just not knockdown evidence, and its force depends on the broader epistemic position. Critics, including Graham Oppy and Michael Martin, argue that the same epistemic generosity would validate incompatible traditions and should therefore not validate any.
- Teresa of Ávila— The Interior Castle; stages of contemplative prayer
- John of the Cross— Dark Night of the Soul
- William Alston— Perceiving God (1991); doxastic-practice argument
- Richard Swinburne— Principle of credulity
“He stretched out his right hand, grasped my head, and pressed me to his breast; I thought I should die of rapture.”
“In addition to our perceptual beliefs about the physical world, we form perceptual beliefs about God in Christian mystical practice.”