hold the criterion. And that may just possibly be true. But then notice this oddity: he
would be entitled to hold it only because it's false; if it were correct, he would not be
entitled to hold it.
Third, in his book Perceiving God, William P. Alston (1991) attacks the assumption that
God cannot be an object of perception. Mystical experience has standardly been assumed
to be a purely subjective phenomenon; the question traditionally raised has been whether,
from this subjective experience, we can make well-grounded inferences to the existence,
character, and action of God. Alston challenges the assumption. In the context of a
carefully articulated general theory of perception that he calls “the theory of appearing,”
he argues for understanding mystical experience as God appearing to the person in such a
way that the person perceives God.
end p.264
It's worth adding that though the Reformed epistemologists have themselves not objected
much to the understanding of reason and experience that underlies Enlightenment
evidentialism—reason and experience give us direct cognitive access to certain facts and
evoke in us beliefs whose propositional content corresponds to those facts—a good many
other philosophers have mounted vigorous objections to this understanding.^3
To attack Locke's classic Enlightenment reason for holding that religious beliefs, to be
doxastically meritorious, have to be rationally grounded, is of course not to show that
there is nowhere a good and sufficient reason for this view. Even less is it to show that
the view is false; people hold good views for bad reasons all the time. But in the years
that have elapsed since Reformed epistemology came on the scene, no one has stepped
forward to offer good reasons for evidentialism concerning religious beliefs. Surely we
are by now entitled to assume that the thesis is mistaken: it's not true that religious beliefs
in general have to be rationally grounded in the deliverances of reason and experience to
be doxastically meritorious. Some do, some don't.
Let me put the point more precisely. Assume that entitlement is the doxastic merit one
has in view. An entitled belief is one that one is permitted to hold; conversely, a belief
that one ought not to hold is one that one is not entitled to hold. It's important, then, to
recognize that entitlement to believe is very much a situated phenomenon. For almost any
proposition that one person is entitled to believe in his situation, there will be another
person in another situation who is not entitled to believe that proposition. To the question,
Is one entitled to believe P? the answer must almost always be, It all depends. Is one
entitled to believe that Santa Claus comes around every Christmas? It all depends. There
are surely some children somewhere who are entitled to believe that; I and those who
read this essay are surely not entitled to believe it.
The Reformed epistemologist would make it easy for himself if it were his claim that
somewhere there's someone with an immediate religious belief that's doxastically
meritorious. That's not his claim. His claim is the much stronger one; that in the belief
systems of people such as the author and readers of this essay, intellectuals in modern
Western society, one finds immediately held religious beliefs that are doxastically
meritorious—entitled, warranted, or whatever.
Reformed epistemology, as I have presented it thus far, is a polemic. Positive claims have
of course been made, some explicitly, some implicitly; no polemic can be entirely