Abstract

An assumption common to many religions is that we can have special experiences that would provide us with unassailable epistemic support for core religious beliefs. I argue that there are at least two very important types of religious belief that cannot in principle be justified, by experience, to such a high degree. ;The first type of belief concerns the divine reality's independence of us. No possible experience can apodictically establish that the divine reality is, as classical theism asserts, independent of the subject, for it remains an epistemic possibility that the subject is simply mistaking an aspect of his or her own nature as an independent being. Neither can any possible experience show that the divine is, as Indian monism asserts, ontologically indistinct from the subject, for it is a perpetual epistemic possibility that the subject is merely intensely perceiving some aspect of the divine. I argue, however, that the divine's independence of us is not as religiously significant as it is often supposed to be. It makes no necessary practical difference to religious life. ;The second type of belief concerns the ultimacy of the divine. I argue that at least one of the divine's supposed ultimacies---its omnipotence---cannot apodictically be established on the basis of any experience. The most we can ever justifiably ascertain of a being is that it can do those very things that we perceive it to do. We cannot rule out the possibility that there are many other things it cannot do, or that it could have been prevented by a more powerful entity from doing even those things that we perceive it to do. One might suppose that traditional soteriological accounts are thus untenable if we can never be certain that the divine ground of our salvational state is unassailable. I argue that though indeed we can never know with certainty that we enjoy an absolutely secure salvational state, such a state may in fact be secure and we may, as a matter of psychological fact, never doubt that this is the case