Religious Experience

This entry will first look at the concept and varieties of religious experience. Then it will evaluate the challenge of constructivism raised by Proudfoot's attribution theory of religious experience. It goes on to survey the prevalence of religious experience in the contemporary world, both in the West and in Asia (such as Chinese societies). The remainder of the entry is mainly devoted to the naturalistic explanation of religious experiences. The criteria for evaluating naturalistic explanations are spelled out, the neurological explanations of religious experience offered by Michael Persinger and Andrew Newberg are discussed, and the cognitive science of religion is also considered. The entry concludes with an evaluation of the epistemic implications of these naturalistic explanations of religious experiences for the veridicality of those experiences.