Religious Experience, Argument for the Existence of God
Arguments from Religious Experience show remarkable diversity, (a) in the sorts of experience taken as data for the argument, (b) in the structure of the inference itself, and (c) in the alleged conclusion, whether to a vague Presence, an Infinite Being, or the God of traditional Christianity.
The following exemplify some versions of the argument:
"At very different times and places great numbers of men have claimed to experience God; it would be unreasonable to suppose that they must all have been deluded."
"The real argument to God is the individual believer's sense of God's presence, the awareness of God's will in tension and conflict with his own will, the peace that follows the acceptance of God's command."
"Experiences of meeting God are self-authenticating: They involve no precarious chain of inference, no sifting of rival hypotheses. They make unbelief logically absurd."
"In itself, religious experience is neither theistic nor pantheistic, Christian nor Buddhist. All these distinctions are interpretations of the experience. By itself, religious experience testifies to something far less definite but still infinitely valuable—the insufficiency of all materialisms and naturalisms."
If we compare any of these arguments with the Ontological, Cosmological, and Teleological arguments, important differences in their logic and history can readily be shown.
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