Thread by @Helenreflects

My philosophy of religion course #PORcourse will focus on Alston's argument from mystical perception in Perceiving God (1991). Main claim: "a person can become justified in holding certain kinds of beliefs about God by virtue of perceiving God as being or doing so-and-so.” 1/

First, let's note the terminology is confusing and manifold. E.g., Schleiermacher: "Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor action, but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe..."(1799). For Schleiermacher, religion = feeling of absolute dependence on God 2/

I rather like Schleiermacher, am I'm writing a book that tries to reclaim this broad, expansive conception of religion (as a bundle of feelings, experiences, etc.). But over time the concept of religious experience narrowed and became more specific, cf Otto, William James 3/

William James in Varieties of Religious Experience talks about religious experience (1902) specifically about mysticism as having an ineffable component, further narrowing the idea of religious experience to study. 4/

Interestingly, I asked my students before we started all this what they thought were religious experiences.
One said that astrology could give you REs (e.g., a feeling of destiny).
One said that if someone gave you the evil eye, that would count as an (unpleasant) RE. 5/

Alston is basically taking on W James' rather narrow definition of mystical experience (ineffable, etc). Importantly, Alston does *not* make an argument for the existence of God based on religious experience. That's not his project. 6/

Rather, what the book claims is that "people sometimes do perceive God and thereby acquire justified beliefs about God." - e.g., if you think God is kind and loving bc you experienced God in this way, you can acquire justified beliefs about God. 7/

Compare w sense perception:
You could argue: I perceive tables, chairs etc. therefore tables, chairs exist. Not a great argument, but why not.
Alston's claim: I perceive tables, etc. and thus come to hold justified beliefs about these objects (e.g., this table has 4 legs) 8/

Alston is focusing on a particular class of beliefs called "M-beliefs" ('M' stands for manifestation). God appears to me/manifests Godself as comforting, strengthening, etc., and saying that we get direct, non-sensory experiences of God that elicit these M-beliefs 9/

So you have these direct, non-sensory experiences of God as paradigmatic mystical experiences. Here's an example Alston uses (from James 1902). 10/

Alston spends quite some time talking about the phenomenology of these experiences. They're often non-perceptual, but sometimes also involve audition, imagery etc.
Still, he will focus on non-sensory mystical perception as the canonical example of mystical perception 11/

Why? "It seems clear that a non-sensory appearance of a purely spiritual deity has a greater chance of presenting Him as He is than any sensory presentation."
hmmm... I'm not so sure about that. Think of the Gita, where Arjuna def experiences Krishna in a sensory way 12/

Also, Alston circumvents the very plentiful rather erotic imagery of God, Jesus, saints etc in the writings of female mystics. Maybe it made him uncomfortable to think about Jesus fanfic? Read some here: blogos.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2019/04/18/log… 13/

"The soul then enters into the “hidden bedchamber of the pure Godhead”, where [Mechthild] is instructed by her bridegroom to take off her clothes. When asked for an explanation, Christ tells her, “You are so completely en-natured in me that nothing more must come between us”.14/

Overall, Alston takes on quite a bit from William James but he doesn't think ineffability holds up as a criterion as people James cites tend to have a lot to say about what their mystical experience was like 15/

(one exception to the no sex in Alston is this quote from Richard of St Victor) 16/

I'll leave you on this cliffhanger for now and continue tomorrow... can we be justified in holding beliefs about God based on such experiences (particularly M-beliefs)? 17/

Alston makes a close analogy between mystical perception (MP) and sensory perception (SP). Both provide a presentation of the object.
E.g., I see a house = the house appears to me (blue roof etc).
Similarly, my MP of God = God appears to me (as loving etc) in a certain way 18/

An atheist might say that Alston is begging the question. Doesn't SP already imply success (e.g., I see a house implies there's a house)? No, bc you also have "see" as a phenomenological terms (e.g., "I'm seeing things") that don't necessarily have a corresponding object 19/

So all Alston needs for his argument is that religious people will sometimes perceive God in a specific way, e.g., God is merciful, in Muslim philosophy also God is beautiful and splendid (will do a thread on this later today). 20/

As Alston points out there is indeed significant literature that theistic people have had religious experiences.
I'm fascinated by this report
"46% of Americans report feeling a deep sense of wonder about the universe on a weekly basis" 21/
pewforum.org/2015/11/03/cha…

And what to make of this? (from the same Pew forum survey). Alston only focuses on theistic experiences, so I am wondering what sorts of conclusions we can draw, or how we can expand this to non-theistic experience 22/

Here now is Alston's central argument: we generally accept that sensory perception is a source of justified belief. You can sometimes be wrong about SP (e.g., that bag flying in the wind was not a pigeon), but still, we accept that SP gives us justified beliefs 23/

We use SP to form beliefs in our daily life (e.g., "I saw Tina yesterday, she came down the hall"). Why can I say that I'm justified I saw Tina? Alston surprisingly says there is no way I can justify this ultimately in a way that isn't circular 24/

The main way in which I would justify the belief "Tina was there" is that I assume the source (SP) is reliable. My eyeglasses + eyes + facial recognition are such that I can recognize Tina. But that's circular! I use the reliability of SP to establish the reliability of SP 25/

Alston says epistemic circularity is ultimately unavoidable for any basic source of belief, including memory, reason, introspection.
This is not logical circularity because the conclusion that sense perception is reliable is not used as one of the premises. Still fishy tho 26/

Alston ultimately doesn't think this is a problem, and endorses a reliabilist idea to establish which of these basic belief-formation processes we can trust:

S’s belief that p is justified if and only if it has a sufficiently reliable causal source. 27

Reliabilism has problems
* How do I establish the process is reliable in a non-question begging way?
* generality problem for reliabilism (Conee and Feldman): what's the relevant process and how to establish it? E.g., my seeing Tina is it sight, or sight by daylight etc 28/

Still, Alston argues it's rational for us to form beliefs on the basis of SP (in spite of epistemic circularity worries) because we don't have an alternative. 29/

If we accept that SP can yield justified beliefs, Alston argues the same is true of religious experience.
We can form the belief that God is just bc God appears to us that way to us through RE, just like we can believe the bird is black bc the bird appears to us that way 30/

"If S's belief that X is p is based on an experience in which, so it seems to S, X is appearing to S as p, then that belief is prima facie justified." To fully flesh this out, he talks about ways we can form beliefs through practices, termed doxastic practices 31/

Doxastic practices are dispositions, habits, etc that each of yield a belief with a certain content from an input of a certain sort. Basic ones are e.g., sense perception. There are also overrider systems to correct for faulty outputs. 32/

Here's where I'm not entirely following Alston's argument. I would think that here's the opportunity to talk about all the ways we religiously engage that is conducive to religious experience, e.g., icon veneration, darshana (gazing on status in Hinduism), the sun dance 33/

Fascinating issues arise if we think such distinctive practices could be something akin to specialized perception, e.g., birdwatchers have doxastic practices to help them recognize birds. But Alston shies away from this because there are troublesome consequences perhaps 34/

E.g., if I do the Shinto practices, I'll see kami. If I do Catholic practices, I might feel the intercession of saints on my behalf, if I do the vision quest in some American Indian societies, I will see my spirit helper animal...
Fascinating but also disturbing 35/

The anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, known from her recent When God talks back recounts that when she studied Wicca magic and practice, she had religious experiences in line with Wicca beliefs. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasio… 36/

There's a whole literature out there of anthropologists who have (often to them) disturbing religious experiences in line with the religions they study. One anthropologist I spoke to studied spirit possession and felt at some point as if a spirit would possess her, an atheist 37/

Or here, a report by Grindall (1983, 60) from Ghana “Near midnight came a moment in which I saw before my eyes and felt within my body a phenomenon totally unnatural to my previous experience—I “witnessed” the raising of the dead.” 38/

Unless you're a religious pluralist, this sort of stuff does give you reasons for skepticism. But Alston thinks Christian doxastic practices still yield justified beliefs, because they enjoy a significant degree of self-support. 39/

But so do other religious practices (Alston does not deny it). Now Alston did not set out to prove that God exists, but that we are justified in holding certain beliefs about God that we obtain as a direct result of religious experience. 40/

However, without clarifying what we do with all these practices yielding mutually incompatible beliefs (Muslim sufism, the Lakota vision question, Eastern Orthodox icon veneration etc...), it's not clear to me that this argument works. 41/

Especially since Alston is a realist about religious belief. He doesn't go the way of DZ Philips, or Wittgenstein or others who say religion is just a way in which you see reality. He's still saying there's a fact of the matter. Can you know through religious experience? /end

@threadreaderapp please unroll so I can use this for class later :)