11

Monotheism and religious

experience

Phenomenologically thick experiences

A

phenomenological description of an experience is a description that

tells us how the things appear to a person who has it. Consider these

sentences, each of which uses the word “seems” in a different sense:

1 Kim seems less capable than she is. (Here, “seems” contrasts
appearance to reality.)
2 It seems to Kim that she left the oven on. (Here, “seems” reports a
shaky belief on Kim’s part.)
3 There seems to Kim to be a chair in front of her. (Here, “seems”
expresses how Kim is “appeared to;” whether there is a chair there or
not, it remains true that if things are as they perceptually appear to
Kim, a chair is in front of her.)

So there are at least three senses of “seems” – a contrastive sense (in 1), an
opinionative or belief-expressive sense (in 2), and an experiential and
perceptual sense (in 3). Our concern is with the experiential, perceptual
sense.
Suppose Kim is in a room that she knows was set up by some majors in
psychology and physics. There seem to be twice as many chairs in the room
as there are – half of the “chairs” are in fact holograms of chairs. Not
having been in the room before, but knowing that half of what seem to be
chairs are not, Kim nonetheless properly says:

4 It seems to me that there is a chair in front of me, though I have no
idea whether I am seeing a chair or a hologram of a chair.

The “seems” here is experiential and perceptual; it is also
phenomenological – it describes how things perceptually seem, whether