PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: A contemporary introduction

276 NONMONOTHEISTIC CONCEPTIONS

not seeking to give a psychological explanation of enlightenment experiences,
but asking whether these experiences provide self-authentication for certain
religious beliefs.
What follows from our discussion is that they do not. The argument is not
that Advaita Vedanta, Jainism, and Theravada Buddhism can all claim self-
authentication for logically incompatible beliefs so that at least two of the
traditions will be mistaken, though that is the case. The argument is that
none of the enlightenment experiences possesses a phenomenology which
self-authenticates the beliefs in question. It is not logically impossible that
one have an enlightenment experience – whether Advaita Vedanta, Jain, or
Buddhist – that possesses the relevant phenomenological features and it also
is the case that the corresponding Advaita, Jain, or Buddhist doctrine is false.
So enlightenment experiences do not self-authenticate doctrines based on
them. The argument showing this can be made fully explicit as follows:

1 One’s enlightenment experience is self-authenticating regarding a
proposition that expresses the core Advaita, Jain, or Buddhist
doctrinal claim if and only if:
(i) one seems (respectively) to be qualityless, indestructible, or
momentary,
(ii) it is logically impossible that one seems to oneself to be
qualityless, indestructible, or momentary, and one is not
qualityless, indestructible, or momentary, and
(iii)one rests one’s acceptance of core Advaita, Jain, or Buddhist
doctrine on one’s having seemed to oneself to be qualityless,
indestructible, or momentary.
2 It is not logically impossible that one seem to oneself to be
qualityless, indestructible, or momentary and one not be so. Hence:
3 One’s enlightenment experience is not self-authenticating relative
to Advaita, Jain, or Buddhist doctrine.

We have argued that enlightenment experiences are not self-
authenticating regarding these claims. That they are not self-
authenticating regarding the religious claims often based on them does
not entail that these experiences are not evidence for those claims.
Evidence need not be self-authenticating. So the next question is: Do
enlightenment experiences provide evidence for religious beliefs?

Previous principles of experiential evidence

We have explained and defended some principles of experiential evidence.
They are examples of claims that can provide support for premises like the