MONOTHEISM AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 231they provide evidence that God exists; hence they provide evidence that
God exists. The argument presented here is an evidential argument
from religious experience, not an inferential argument from religious
experience.^8
Here is a basic version of the evidential argument from religious
experience:
1 Experiences occur which are a matter of their subjects at least
seeming to experience God.
2 If the subjects of experiences of this sort (non-culpably) have no
reason to think that these experiences are canceled or
counterbalanced or compromised or contradicted or confuted or
logically consumed or empirically consumed, then their occurrence
gives them evidence that God exists.
3 The subjects of experiences of this sort typically have no reason to
think that these experiences are canceled or counterbalanced or
compromised or contradicted or confuted or logically consumed or
empirically consumed. Hence:
4 These experiences give them evidence that God exists, (from 1–3)
The principle of experiential evidence applied
The first premise is an empirical truth. The argument of course also
requires that premise 2 is true. Here is an argument for that premise.
Premise 2 says that religious experience is not disqualified by any of the
considerations included in:
(P*) If a person S has an experience E which, if reliable, is a matter of being
aware of an experience-independently existing item X, and S (non-
culpably) has no reason to think that E is canceled or counter-balanced
or compromised or contradicted or confuted or logically consumed or
empirically consumed, then S’s having E is evidence that X exists.
Suppose, then, that Mary has what is an at least apparent experience of
God. The first two relevant terms in (P*) are defined, relative to an
experience providing evidence, as follows:
1 Mary’s experience is canceled as evidence if she has reason to think
that she would seem to experience God whether or not God exists.