The Epistemology of Religious Experience

This text addresses a fundamental question in the philosophy of religion. Can religious experience provide evidence for religious belief? If so, how? Keith Yandell argues against the notion that religious experience is ineffable, while advocating the view that strong numinous experience provides some evidence that God exists. He contends that social science and other non-religious explanations of religious belief and experience do not cancel out the evidential force of religious experience. The core of the argument conveyed in the book concerns the formulation and application of an appropriate principle of experiental evidence. A final chapter considers the relevance of nonexperiential, conceptual issues. A feature of the book is that it does not confine its attention to any one religious cultural tradition, but tracks the nature of religious experience across different traditions in both the East and the West.