Mystical experience as evidence

Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend... 'But', He said, 'you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live'. Ex. 33:11 & 20 Religious apologetics is perennially attracted to the idea that religious beliefs are arrived at in ways that are fundamentally on all fours with the procedures by means of which more mundane beliefs are generated and justified. If that is so, not only could the same conceptual tools be applied to the epistemic evaluation of both religious and mundane beliefs, but atheists and agnostics could be confronted (given certain sorts of evidence) with an unpleasant dilemma: either to treat mundane beliefs with the same skepticism , or to admit that the epistemic credentials of religious beliefs are-or at least could be-in good order. Perhaps the most natural application of this thought is to religious beliefs which are more or less directly the result of perceptual experiences-perceptual experiences whose putative objects are divine or supernatural. A class of such experiences lies ready to hand: mystical experiences, as they are often called. The philosophical challenge is to show, in terms of our best current understanding of epistemic justification generally, that such experiences do confer upon religious beliefs based on them the same sort of prima facie justification that sensory experience supplies for ordinary perceptual beliefs. William Alston's book Perceiving God gives this theme the most sophisticated treatment it has yet received. 1 Taking our reasoning from sense experience as a paradigm of empirical knowledge, Alston's strategy is to see how judgments based upon mystical experiences stack up against this standard. He proceeds by analyzing the major features of our ordinary cog-nitive practices with respect to sensory input, and then examines the extent to which analogous features can be found in the practices of mystics; that is, in the epistemic use they make of their spiritual experiences. Alston's conclusion is that the analogies are quite close, on the whole, and that, with some reservations, it can therefore be said that beliefs derived from mystical experience are on roughly the same footing as ordinary empirical beliefs.