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The fact that subjects take themselves to acquire knowledge of God from mystical perception does not guarantee that they do. One can be misled even by sense experience. One can suppose that one saw, at dusk, that there was a car in the distance when it was actually a cow. And in extreme cases one can be subject to complete hallucinations, like Macbeth falsely taking there to be a dagger in front of him. With both sense experience and mystical experience, contradictions between reports prevent us from taking all of them to be veridical. As for mysticalexperience, we need look no further than the many cases in which someone supposes that God commanded the

murder of as many people of a certain sort as possible, in contrast to those instances in which one is aware of God as supremely loving. In both areas of experience there are two ways in which one can acquire false beliefs. One may not be experiencing the thing, or sort of thing, one supposes one is experiencing. The two cases of sensory illusion just mentioned illustrate this, as do the cases of people supposing themselves to be aware of God telling them to do things that God would not tell anyone to do. But second, even if one is genuinely aware of the sort of thing in question, the beliefs one forms about it may be mistaken. I may genuinely see a car in the distance, but mistakenly think it is moving. I may genuinely be aware of the presence of God, but mistakenly suppose that he refuses to forgive me. A comprehensive discussion would go into both these ways in which experiences can be

misleading. But since sceptics about religious experience usually take it that no one is ever genuinely aware of a really existing God, we will concentrate on the former, more radical criticism. The main issue will be whether mystical experiences are significantly often genuine experiences of God, are veridical experiences Reasons for a positive answer can be divided into theological and philosophical ones. The former comprise any

components of the belief system of a given religion that give us reason for thinking either that God is in principle accessible to human experience, or that particular persons have experienced God’s presence on one or another occasion. Theological considerations are out of bounds here. As for philosophical reasons, the most important one, perhaps the only important one, goes as follows.

Any supposition that one perceives something to be the case - that there is an elephant in front of one or that God is strengthening one - is prima facie justified. That is, one is justified in supposing this unless there are strong enough reasons to the contrary, strong enough overriders. Overriders can be divided into rebutters, strong enough

reasons for the falsity of the belief, and underminers, strong enough reasons for supposing that the experience, in

this instance, does not sufficiently support the belief. In the elephant case, strong reasons for thinking that there is

no elephant in the vicinity would be a rebutter. A reason for supposing oneself to be subject to hallucinations,

perhaps because of some drug, would be an underminer. According to this position, beliefs formed on the basis of

experience possess an initial credibility by virtue of their origin. They are innocent until proven guilty.

This position has been widely advocated for sense perception (see Chisholm 1977, ch. 4). Swinburne (1979, ch.

13) applies it to mystical experience, terming it ‘The Principle of Credulity’. Alston (1991) gives it a more social

twist; the claim is that any socially established ‘doxastic (belief-forming) practice’ is to be accepted as a source of

(generally) true beliefs unless there are sufficient reasons against its reliability. The position is usually supported

by the claim that unless we accord a prima facie credibility to all experiential reports, we can have no sufficient

reason to trust any experiential source of beliefs. This is the only alternative to a thoroughgoing scepticism.

As applied to mystical experience, this ‘prima facie credibility’ position implies that whenever anyone reports

having perceived God as being or doing so-and-so, the report is to be accepted as true unless we have sufficient

reasons for refusing to do so. Lest one fear that this lets in any crackpot report, remember that we wouldn’t regard

reports as ‘crackpot’ unless we had reasons, from other reports of mystical perception or from other theological

sources, for denying that what the ‘crackpot’ believes about God is correct.

3 ions to regarding experiences of God as veridical

A large number of contemporary philosophers deny that anyone ever genuinely perceives the presence or activity

of God. Most of the reasons for this are based on differences, real or alleged, between sense experience and

mystical experience. Since we are all, in practice, completely confident of the by-and-large reliability of sense

perception, positive analogies between the two will be taken to support a positive epistemic assessment of mystical

perception, whereas differences between them will be taken to support a negative assessment (see Alston 1991,

chaps 5-7, for further discussion; also Wainwright 1981, ch. 3).

The first and most obvious reason for a negative assessment concerns certain striking differences between sense

experience and mystical experience. Sense experience is a common possession of all human beings, whereas, so

far as we can tell, mystical experience is not. Even if we are careful to include dim, background experiences in the

reckoning, it is foreign to a considerable proportion of the population. Moreover, even for those who are privileged

with both, they play vastly different roles in one’s life. Sense experience is continuously, insistently and

unavoidably present during all our waking hours, while mystical experience, except for a few choice souls, is arare phenomenon. Sense experience, especially vision, is vivid and richly detailed, bursting with information, more

than we can possibly encode; while mystical experience, by comparison, is meagre and obscure. These differences

can lead one to deny that mystical experience is a conduit of information about ive reality.

The differences certainly render mystical experience much less useful as a source of information, but that is quite

different from saying that, where it exists, it is never or seldom a veridical experience of God, or that it provides no

information about God. Regarding the partial distribution in the population, the defence can point out that there is

no a priori reason to suppose that a doxastic practice engaged in by only a part of the population is less likely to be

a source of truth than one we all engage in. There are many reliable practices engaged in by only a small minority -

for example, research in the physical sciences and wine tasting. We have to learn from experience which features

of the world are open to all and which are open only to some people who satisfy special requirements. And it

would beg the question to think that experience tells us that no aspect of reality is disclosed in mystical experience.

Similar points can be made about the lesser frequency and lesser detail of mystical experience. That shows that it

provides less information than sense experience, but not that it provides none.

A second common charge is that the mystic is simply reading prior religious beliefs into a cognitively indifferent

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