4

What sorts of religious

experience

are there?

Structure and content

T

he interest of religious experiences for the philosophy of religion
lies in whatever potential they may have for providing information
about what there is. Those who think that there are experience-
independent material objects typically suppose that perceptual experience –
seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching^1 – are on the whole a
reliable source of information about these objects.^2 Moral experience
typically is taken by moral realists – roughly, those who think that there
actually are obligations, duties, right and wrong ways of behaving, ways of
being a good or an evil person, and the like – to have similar information
potential. The discussion that follows is governed by an underlying query:
what sort of information about what there is might religious experience
provide, and how could one tell? While this underlying question does not
receive direct attention until later chapters, the presentation here looks
forward to the discussion there.
Not only are there various sorts of religion; there are also various sorts
of religious experience. The notion of a sort of experience is not
immediately obvious. Let us begin with two criteria for experiences being
of a different sort. One has to do with structure, the other with content.
Consider such experiences as feeling nauseous, dizzy, or disoriented;
consider also generalized anxiety and generalized euphoria, where the force
of “generalized” is to cancel out the idea that there is something in
particular that one is anxious or euphoric about. These experiences do not
seem to their subjects to be matters of sensing something external,
something that exists independent of the subject and, so to say, causes her
to take notice of itself. In that respect, these experiences differ from seeing
a tree, hearing a bell, or smelling the perking coffee. The former