One frequent claim for the existence of God is the “argument from religious experience.” The philosopher Michael Martin (1990: 154) provides a concise definition of religious experience as an event “in which one senses the immediate presence of some supernatural entity.” It is a claim to “direct, rather than inferential, knowledge of the existence of God” (Scriven 1966: 136). Many people in cultures across space and time have reported powerful, private, revelatory, visual, and auditory experiences involving contact with purported super-intelligent entities, or “Divine Others” who are believed to exist outside the spatiotemporal realm of the universe but can have observed effects upon the world. In this chapter, I shall examine the case for the existence of God and transcendental realms based on the argument from religious experience. “Religious experiences” refer to different types of perceptions and feelings, and some demarcations are necessary before we can proceed. The philosopher Graham Oppy (2018: 173– 77), for instance, considers several distinct phenomena to belong in this category.

He includes thoughts generated during religious practice undertaken under the auspices of organized religious institutions, such as meditation sessions, religious dances, festivals, initiations, sermons, and so on. He also extends the term to circumstances when people witness “miraculous” events or when they have dreams construed as messages from supernatural beings or “the beyond.” The most important category for our purposes is called visionary experiences.