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The Overall Argument of Alston's Perceiving God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Richard Gale
Richard Gale
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260
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Extract

Alston's overall aim in Perceiving God is to show that we are rationally justified in believing that our apparent direct perceptions of God's presence (called ‘M-experiences’) are reliable and thus for the most part veridical, the objective, existentially-committed beliefs based on these experiences thereby being prima facie justified, subject to defeat by certain overriders supplied by some background religion. It is argued that our rational justification for believing this is of both an epistemic and pragmatic (or practical) sort, in which an epistemic reason for believing a proposition is truth conducive, rendering the proposition probable, while a pragmatic one concerns the benefits which accrue from belief. We will begin by considering the pragmatic justification, since the case he makes out for epistemic justification is built on its back.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , June 1994 , pp. 135 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Alston, W. P., Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

2 The preceding discussion assumed that MP is an objective DP because its experiential inputs, M-experiences, are perceptual in nature. In my article, ‘Why Alston's Mystical Doxastic Practice is Subjective’, forthcoming in a book symposium on Alston's Perceiving God in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, I argue against this assumption by showing that M-experiences take only internal or cognate accusatives and, furthermore, fail to have evidential status because not subject to any tests. These failures preclude their being perceptual in nature.