Religious Experience and Testimony

Abstract

The paper considers the problem of the transfer of religious experience, consisting of two elements: the problem of the features of individual religious experience and the problem of testimony in relation to religious experience. Religious experience seems to be more difficult to transfer through testimony than other types of experience. The search for the causes of these features leads either to the assertion that these are features of the religious experience itself, or to the assertion that these are features of a certain type of testimony. Based on these features and, most often, adopting the first option, opponents of theism try to reduce religious experience to cognitive distortions and disorders, and supporters of theism try to create a special epistemological description of this experience in order to protect it. The author made an attempt to substantiate the thesis that difficulties in transferring religious experience arise in special specific cases and only due to the features of the transfer of experience, and not due to the features of religious experience as such. These statements are based on the approach proposed by the author to the analysis of objects of religious, scientific, and everyday experience. This approach combines natural and supernatural objects of experience into a single class of objects. The most significant feature of the approach is the assertion that such unique supernatural objects of experience as miracles differ from other objects of experience only epistemically, but not ontologically. Considering the epistemological consequences of this approach, the author comes to the stated theses.