Introduction
In recent decades, the question of whether religious experience can be construed as a reliable means of disclosing aspects of reality – on par with sensory perception – has received relatively little scholarly attention (Draper Reference Draper2020, 1). This neglect can largely be attributed to the rise of constructivist approaches in epistemology, which hold that human experience does not transparently reflect external reality but is instead mediated and shaped by the subject’s conceptual framework. In other words, the dominance of contextualist and constructivist understandings of experience has led many scholars to assume that religious experience is likewise constructed through the epistemic filters shaped by the subject’s internal and external contexts, interests, and prior experiences. As a result, the question of the epistemic status of religious experience has been regarded as largely settled.
However, this issue has recently regained scholarly interest. Richard H. Jones contends that the ascendency of constructivism in earlier debates over religious experience was, in part, due to a flawed typology and a corresponding straw man argument. Specifically, Jones revisits the perennialism–constructivism debate and argues that Steven T. Katz, a leading proponent of constructivism, blurred the distinction between perennial philosophy and perennial phenomenology (or psychology) by subsuming both under the general term perennialism. In doing so, Katz implicitly led scholars to choose between constructivism and a form of perennial philosophy that posits the direct acquisition of eternal truths through religious experience – an unattractive option for many, given the prevailing epistemological consensus shaped by post-Kantian thought. Consequently, many scholars were inclined towards adopting the constructivist position almost by default. In this context, Jones proposes a renewed examination of the debate, highlighting the need to distinguish more carefully among the various positions regarding religious experience (Jones Reference Jones2020, 1–3, 32–35).
Steve Taylor likewise agrees with Jones’s overall assessment, underlining that within the camps asserting the epistemic credibility of religious experience, there are perspectives that maintain the reliability of such experiences while accepting certain constructivist critiques. Furthermore, Taylor argues that inquiry into religious experience must not be confined to reports emerging solely from within religious traditions. Rather, it should also encompass accounts originating outside such traditions. If common features can be identified across experiences reported both within and beyond religious traditions, these shared characteristics may serve as a basis for defending the epistemic credibility of religious experience (Taylor Reference Taylor2024, 675–676, 679–680). This recent trajectory of discourse invites a renewed engagement with the debate over religious experience. However, any reconsideration of this issue must avoid repeating the conceptual errors of earlier debates. To be more specific, it is crucial to distinguish between religious experience and religious belief, and not to focus on the justificatory transition from the former to the latter. Instead, the question must centre on religious experience itself – specifically, whether such experience can, in any meaningful way, disclose the reality of that which is experienced. In this context, the present article seeks to determine whether religious experience should be understood as a construct of the subject or, alternatively, as a mode of disclosure – distinct from sensory perception – of a particular aspect of reality.
Through the critical reassessment, this article contends that a particular class of religious experience is not constructed through the epistemic framework or conceptual nexus of the subject, but rather – however fragmentary and indeterminate it may be – discloses, in some sense, an aspect of reality as it is. What is revealed through such experience, however, is not a conceptualizable entity but a state of affairs characterized by non-duality or a fundamental unity. Thus, religious experience does not yield concrete propositions, concepts, or informational content regarding the object of experience. What can be accessed are only the phenomenological attributes given within the experience itself. This fundamental limitation of religious experience shifts the focus away from its cognitive dimension towards its practical consequences. In other words, the epistemic reliability of religious experience is not established through the justification of concepts or propositional claims derived from the experience, but rather through the transformative influence such experience has upon the subject’s life. Only those religious experiences – reported across diverse religious traditions – that occasion a sense of transcendence over the self and produce enduring changes in the subject’s existence can be regarded as epistemically trustworthy, in that they are not merely constructed by the subject but disclose something that resists subjective fabrication.
To articulate this thesis, the present article begins by delineating the scope of religious experience as it is presupposed within epistemological debates concerning its justificatory status. Second, it critically examines two positions that reject the constructivist claim – namely, Robert F. C. Forman’s perennial psychology and his notion of the pure consciousness event (PCE), as well as William P. Alston’s minimal foundationalism and his concept of the direct perception of God. In this article, I adopt the term religious-experience-based epistemology (REBE) to describe the positions that understand religious experience as a means of apprehending ultimate reality or certain aspects thereof. Through this examination, this article argues that both Forman’s and Alston’s positions are vulnerable to the substantive criticisms posed by constructivists, and that only a revised form of perennialism – one that modifies Forman’s view – remains viable. Third, the study turns to the constructivist camp, engaging critically with the perspectives of Steven T. Katz and Matthew C. Bagger. It argues that Katz’s strong constructivism cannot withstand the objections it faces, whereas only Bagger’s moderate constructivism seems to be tenable. Fourth, drawing on Carlos Miguel Gómez-Rincón’s proposal of an embodied cognitive approach to religious experience, this article claims that the epistemic credibility of such experiences should not be sought on a purely cognitive level but in the domain of praxis – that is, in the transformative, transcendent shifts within the subject’s life. Within this embodied framework, this article further demonstrates that the revised version of perennialism and moderate constructivism are not only compatible but potentially synthesizable. Finally, the article addresses the underdeveloped cognitive dimension in Gómez-Rincón’s account by engaging with Keith E. Yandell’s structural analysis of religious experience. This embodied, practice-oriented understanding offers a way to resolve both historical and contemporary disputes over the epistemology of religious experience. Moreover, by moving beyond a cognitivistic framework, the embodied approach recovers a crucial aspect of religion’s public role – its capacity to inspire transformative forms of life in both individuals and communities.
Which religious experiences are epistemically contested?
Although it remains a point of scholarly contention, Matthew C. Bagger cautiously locates the origins of the claim that religious experience can yield knowledge of an ultimate transcendent reality in the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher posits a distinctive form of sensory apprehension – analogous to but distinct from the five physical senses – that enables religious intuition independently of the subject’s prior beliefs, language, or conceptual frameworks. He refers to this as an ‘immediate experience of the existence and action of the universe’ (Schleiermacher [1799] Reference Schleiermacher1988, 105; Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 22). Bagger notes that this account effectively aligns religious experience with a perceptual epistemology, wherein the experience is construed not merely as a subjective affective state but as a cognitive event that discloses reality. According to proponents of this perspective, just as perceptual experience provides justification for beliefs about entities and states of affairs in the empirical world, so too religious experience can serve as a cognitive ground for beliefs, knowledge claims, and truth-apt affirmations regarding a transcendent reality (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 21–23). In this vein, Richard Swinburne invokes his well-known Principle of Credulity, arguing that perceptual experiences should be regarded as trustworthy unless and until there is positive reason to suspect illusion or error. By analogy, he contends that religious experiences, prima facie, ought to be treated as veridical sources of knowledge and belief concerning God or the divine, unless they can be clearly shown to be hallucinatory or mistaken (Swinburne Reference Swinburne2004, 293–304).
What, then, does it mean to describe religious experience as analogous to perceptual experience – namely, as a source capable of generating knowledge of and justified belief in a transcendent reality? Richard Swinburne offers a detailed typology of religious experience that helps to clarify this question. Broadly speaking, he classifies religious experiences into two main categories: public and private perceptions. Within the category of public religious experiences, he further distinguishes two distinct subtypes.Footnote 1 The first type (1a) refers to experiences in which publicly accessible natural phenomena are understood through the lens of religious belief. For instance, an individual may observe the shape of clouds or a thunderstorm and interpret them as manifestations of the divine presence or providential action. The second type (1b) involves experiences of events or occurrences that appear to transcend the regular laws of nature. A paradigmatic example would be the early disciples’ reported experiences of the resurrected Jesus at the formative stage of Christianity (Swinburne Reference Swinburne2004, 298–299).
Within the category of private perceptions, Swinburne further delineates three subtypes of religious experience. The first (2a) refers to experiences that involve one’s sensory faculties but are accessible only at a subjective level – for example, encountering an angel in a dream. The second (2b) does not arise from perceptual experience but rather from the suspension or transcendence of the senses and ordinary perception. This includes experiences commonly reported in Christian mystical traditions or forms of Buddhist meditation, in which the subject claims union with the divine or encounters a state of nothingness or darkness. The third (2c) involves a form of perception that is not mediated by the five senses but by what is often described as a sixth sense. This category encompasses reports by religious individuals who claim to have heard the voice of the divine, seen a spiritual figure, or perceived a transcendent dimension within the framework of their religious belief system (Forman Reference Forman and Forman1990, 39; Swinburne Reference Swinburne2004, 299–301).
Among the various categories of religious experience, the types that scholars advocating for the epistemic reliability of religious experience tend to focus on are primarily 2b and 2c. This focus serves two key purposes. First, it underscores the claim that such experiences are not constructed at the subjective level but are instead given by a transcendent reality. Consequently, experiences such as 1a and 2a – which can be interpreted as subjective interpretations of natural phenomena or as constructions arising from unconscious processes – are excluded. Second, by avoiding 1b-type experiences, which involve events seemingly outside the laws of nature, these scholars aim to steer clear of claims that could be easily dismissed by individuals shaped by modern scientific rationality. Furthermore, experiences such as visions or locutions, which may be pathologized or highlight more the divergences than the convergences among religious traditions, are also typically excluded from serious epistemological consideration (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 9–10; Draper Reference Draper2020, 6). Although both type 2b and type 2c are characterized by their introvertive nature, type 2c is more closely associated with theistic religious experiences, in which the subject purportedly undergoes an internal encounter with a personal deity, while maintaining a clear distinction between subject and object. In contrast, type 2b corresponds to monistic experiences, marked by the collapse of the subject–object dichotomy and often described as unitive or non-dual states of consciousness (Wainwright Reference Wainwright1981, 36–38).
Religious-experience-based epistemology and its potential critics
Forman’s perennial psychology and the pure consciousness event
Forman offers a substantive critique of the constructivist position articulated by Steven T. Katz, who contends that religious experiences are necessarily mediated by the linguistic and conceptual frameworks in which the subject is embedded, thereby precluding the possibility of direct or unmediated access to the transcendent (Forman Reference Forman and Forman1990, 9–11). In response, Forman advances a set of counterarguments. First, he notes that if religious experiences were wholly constructed by one’s cultural and conceptual matrices, it would be difficult to account for their selective occurrence among individuals who share identical linguistic and religious backgrounds. Second, Forman questions Katz’s claim that all experiences are constructed by the subject’s conceptual framework. Since this framework is constantly evolving, if the constructivist view were correct, any encounter with the same object should yield fundamentally different experiences each time. Yet this is not borne out by phenomenological evidence, which often displays a striking degree of continuity and stability in experiential reports. Finally, in reply to the frequent constructivist objection that the diversity of religious traditions undermines the notion of a common experiential referent, Forman invokes Frege’s classic example of the morning star and the evening star, arguing that disparate conceptual interpretations can nonetheless refer to a singular ontological reality. On these grounds, he rejects the premise that religious experience is reducible to subjective or intersubjective construction alone (Forman Reference Forman and Forman1990, 15–19).
Forman characterizes religious experience as an unmediated and direct apprehension of transcendent reality, a phenomenon he designates as the PCE. While he acknowledges the existence of various other forms of religious experience – such as public perceptions (types 1a and 1b) and private experiences (types 2a and 2c) – he contends that these are ultimately derivative of, or grounded in, a more elementary and foundational form of experience exemplified by type 2b. The PCE, according to Forman, constitutes an introvertive and unmediated mode of consciousness, which he describes as ‘a wakeful though contentless (non-intentional) consciousness’ (Forman Reference Forman and Forman1990, 8). On this account, religious experience of this sort is not merely distinct in degree from ordinary sensory or perceptual experience, but differs from it in kind, representing a qualitatively unique mode of awareness.
For instance, in ordinary perceptual experience, when we see an object, our perception is accompanied by a corresponding concept. On this point, Forman agrees with Katz and other constructivists, acknowledging that typical sensory experiences are indeed structured by the subject’s pre-existing linguistic and conceptual frameworks. Using the example of seeing a doorknob, Forman argues that visual perception is not first a contentless experience to which the concept ‘doorknob’ is subsequently applied; rather, the perception and the conceptual identification occur simultaneously. As he puts it, ‘To see a doorknob is to think – consciously or very nearly so – the word “doorknob”’ (Forman Reference Forman and Forman1990, 41). However, Forman contends that religious experience, as exemplified by the PCE, is qualitatively distinct from ordinary perceptual experience. During a PCE, the subject’s linguistic and conceptual apparatus is suspended. Unlike in ordinary experience, where perception and interpretation are intertwined, in religious experience the two are separable. As a result, the interpretation and articulation of the PCE occur only retrospectively. For this reason, such experiences are frequently described as ‘ineffable’ (Forman Reference Forman and Forman1990, 41–43).
Stephen Bernhardt advances beyond Forman’s account by seeking to close the epistemic gap between mystical experience and its subsequent articulation or interpretation. He contends that if the PCE is construed solely as a non-intentional state of consciousness – devoid of intentional structure and content – then the post hoc assertions made by mystics, namely that their experiences were veridical encounters with a transcendent reality, risk being delegitimized. In response, Bernhardt proposes that the PCE may in fact retain a form of intentionality. Specifically, he argues that what is disclosed in such experiences is not a discrete object but rather a unitive relationality between subject and object – a collapse of the dichotomy between the two. While Forman insists that intentionality is suspended in the PCE, Bernhardt, drawing upon the phenomenological reports of mystics, maintains that these experiences involve a directedness of consciousness towards a state of union: either the dissolution of the ego and its integration with a transcendent dimension, or the experiential recognition of ontological unity between self and ultimate reality (Bernhardt Reference Bernhardt and Forman1990, 221–223).
Alston’s minimal foundationalism and the direct perception of God
William P. Alston also characterizes religious experience as a form of intentional experience, referring to it as ‘direct perceptions of God’ (Alston Reference Alston1992, 69). According to Alston, this type of experience is non-sensory, unmediated, and yet focal, allowing the subject to attain an intuitive and direct perception of a transcendent reality. While Stephen Bernhardt, extending Forman’s argument, confines the kind of knowledge accessible through monistic religious experience (i.e., the PCE) to a realization of non-duality or oneness among all that exists, Alston goes further by claiming that, through type 2c religious experiences, one can acquire more specific knowledge of the transcendent. Referring to an account included in William James’s writings, Alston cites the case of a Swiss man who, during a religious experience, not only recognized it as an encounter with God but also perceived qualities of the divine such as goodness and power (James 1902 [Reference James2000], 57–58). Furthermore, Alston notes that, according to sociological studies, more than three-quarters of Christians in the United States report similar perceptual experiences of God. On these grounds, Alston maintains that although religious experiences do not yield sensory or physical perceptions – such as colour, shape, or sound – and are thus distinct from ordinary perceptual experiences, they nevertheless allow for the perception of the divine through a non-sensory modality (akin to Swinburne’s so-called sixth sense), thereby enabling the acquisition of specific beliefs about the transcendent (Alston Reference Alston1992, 68–69).
Alston concedes that beliefs derived from religious experience must be subject to justificatory scrutiny, as without such epistemic grounding, they cannot be credibly regarded as knowledge (Alston Reference Alston1991, 2). What is particularly striking, however, is that he identifies religious experience itself as the primary epistemic basis for justifying the perceptual beliefs it engenders (Alston Reference Alston1991, 4). This position entails a form of epistemic circularity, wherein religious experience both generates and justifies belief. At face value, this might appear to concede that beliefs concerning a transcendent reality, when grounded solely in religious experience, are epistemically indefensible. Yet Alston counters this charge by drawing a structural parallel: perceptual beliefs about the physical world, which arise from sensory experience, likewise rely on a similar kind of epistemic circularity. On this analogy, he contends that the justificatory role of religious experience is no more problematic than that of ordinary sense perception.
As a concrete illustration, Alston considers a scenario in which an individual, at a specific time and place, visually perceives a morel mushroom and thereby forms a sense-perceptual belief. The belief in question – namely, ‘There is a morel mushroom at location s’ – must undergo a process of justification. Alston outlines several possible justificatory procedures: for instance, verifying whether other individuals present at the same time and place can also perceive the mushroom; subjecting the specimen to analysis in order to determine whether it is indeed a morel or a different species of mushroom; or, if these means are unavailable, assessing whether the individual in question possesses the requisite perceptual competence to reliably distinguish morels from other mushrooms. While these procedures illustrate the typical mechanisms of justifying sense-perceptual beliefs, Alston acknowledges that religious perceptual beliefs must be justified through qualitatively different means. This is because, unlike sense-perceptual experiences, religious experiences are not uniformly accessible to all persons situated in the same spatiotemporal context, nor are they directed at objects that can be subjected to empirical scrutiny or examined via physical instrumentation (Alston Reference Alston1992, 70–71).
Consequently, Alston contends that the justificatory procedures applicable to religious perceptual beliefs must diverge fundamentally from those employed in the case of sense-perceptual beliefs. It follows, then, that the latter cannot serve as an appropriate standard by which to assess the epistemic credibility of the former. That is, religious perceptual beliefs require an alternative mode of epistemic validation. In this regard, Alston highlights the role of intersubjective verification – a principle that undergirds the justificatory framework for sense-perceptual beliefs. Just as a perceptual belief concerning a physical object can be corroborated or falsified through the corroborative testimony of others, so too, Alston argues, can religious perceptual beliefs be subjected to a form of intersubjective scrutiny. Specifically, beliefs derived from religious experiences can attain justificatory status insofar as they are subject to confirmation or disconfirmation by the religious experiences of others. Alston further maintains that each religious tradition operates with its own internal system of intersubjective evaluation, and he asserts that such systems are, in principle, no less epistemically robust than the justificatory mechanisms employed within the domain of sensory perception (Alston Reference Alston1992, 73–74).
Second, Alston contends that it is mistaken to dismiss the justificatory status of religious beliefs simply because the realities they purport to disclose cannot be accessed through physical instruments or the sensory faculties. As phenomenologists have long emphasized, the subjective domain of other persons – their inner experiences and consciousness – likewise remains inaccessible to empirical tools or direct sensory observation, and yet we do not typically question the reality of other minds. In other words, despite our inability to access others’ subjective states through physical means, we nonetheless affirm their reality (Alston Reference Alston1992, 73). Moreover, Alston highlights that the justificatory procedures involved in affirming a sense-perceptual belief – such as the one concerning the morel mushroom – inevitably presuppose further sensory perceptions. That is, the justification of a given sense-perceptual belief requires the invocation of additional perceptual experiences, thereby revealing an inherent epistemic circularity in the structure of sensory justification itself. On these grounds, Alston argues that disqualifying religious experience and its justificatory mechanisms merely because they differ from those of sensory perception is incoherent. Such a stance, he contends, amounts to a form of epistemic chauvinism that unjustifiably privileges sensory experience over other modes of cognition (Alston Reference Alston1991, 234, Reference Alston1992, 74).
In this context, Alston defends the epistemic legitimacy of religious perception and belief by arguing that beliefs grounded in religious experience ought to be regarded as prima facie justified – that is, as justified until proven otherwise. Just as perceptual beliefs derived from sensory experience are treated as trustworthy in the absence of defeating evidence, so too, according to Alston, are beliefs about a transcendent reality based on religious experience to be considered epistemically credible unless they are successfully challenged.Footnote 2
Critical reflections on religious-experience-based epistemology
Positions such as those advanced by Forman and Alston – which affirm the possibility of perceiving a transcendent reality through religious experience or assert the epistemic justification of beliefs grounded in such experiences – have faced substantial criticism. The first line of critique runs as follows: If religious experience is, in essence, an encounter with one and the same ultimate reality, then how can we account for the profound doctrinal and conceptual divergences across the world’s religious traditions? Do these differences not indicate that what is experienced is not a shared, ontologically real phenomenon, but rather a construct shaped by the subject’s linguistic and doctrinal framework (Criticism 1)?
In response, scholars who uphold the epistemic status of religious experience commonly argue for a distinction between experience and interpretation (or description). According to this view, the experiential core of religious experiences is incomprehensible, universal, and oriented towards the transcendent. This shared core, they argue, underlies the reports of mystics and practitioners across diverse religious traditions, suggesting that the experiences themselves are phenomenologically similar. However, once the experience has concluded, the subject inevitably interprets and articulates it through the language, culture, and conceptual system to which they belong. It is this post-experiential process that accounts for the divergences among religious traditions (Bernhardt Reference Bernhardt and Forman1990, 227; Forman Reference Forman and Forman1990, 41–42; Jones Reference Jones2022; Taylor Reference Taylor2024, 686–687). Constructivist critiques of this response persist, and I will return to them in greater detail in a later section. For now, however, it may be said that if the distinction between experience and interpretation holds – if, indeed, doctrinal and conceptual differences arise only at the level of interpretation – then such diversity need not be seen as undermining the epistemic reliability of religious experience itself. Nonetheless, views such as Alston’s, which claim that religious experience yields propositional or conceptual knowledge of the transcendent, may find it more difficult to deflect this line of criticism.
A further criticism directed at REBE arises from a naturalistic perspective. According to this line of critique, if a thorough causal or scientific explanation of religious experience can be provided, then the postulation of a transcendent reality as its cause becomes unnecessary. Consequently, religious experience can no longer be regarded epistemologically as disclosing an object of transcendent reality (Criticism 2) (Webb Reference Webb2022; Jones Reference Jones2022). From this standpoint, religious experience has historically been interpreted as either a pathological event from a psychoanalytic perspective (Freud Reference Freud and Strachey1927) or as a wish-fulfilment arising from class struggle or psychological repression (Feuerbach Reference Feuerbach1841; Marx Reference Marx1844). In more recent years, neuroscience has increasingly sought to illuminate the organic relationship between religious experience and neurophysiological processes (d’Aquili and Newberg Reference d’Aquili and Newberg1999; McNamara Reference McNamara2022, 98–100, 118–123). Ongoing neuroscientific research is likely to yield ever more precise causal accounts of religious experience. However, even if future neuroscience were to offer a complete and exhaustive causal explanation of such experiences, it would not necessarily invalidate the epistemic significance or ontological authenticity of religious experience. As numerous scholars have pointed out, the existence of a naturalistic explanation for a given phenomenon does not, in itself, preclude the legitimacy of a religious or theological interpretation – particularly when such interpretations are concerned with dimensions that transcend the empirical scope of the natural sciences (Jung Reference Jung2020).
Another line of critique directed at REBE concerns the very nature of religious experience itself (Criticism 3). As previously discussed, Forman posits the PCE as an instance of conscious awareness devoid of intentional content – that is, a non-intentional experience. In response, Matthew C. Bagger raises a sceptical challenge: if the PCE is genuinely contentless, how can one retain any memory of it afterwards? (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 102). Similarly, Paul J. Griffiths, often associated with a form of perennialism, addresses this issue by pointing out that the assertion of a strictly contentless PCE generates serious conceptual problems. In particular, if such an experience truly lacks any content, it becomes indistinguishable from dreamless sleep.Footnote 3 Griffiths concedes that it may be plausible to describe the PCE as ‘contentless’ in the sense that it lacks conceptual or noematic content at the level of intentionality. However, he suggests that acknowledging the presence of certain phenomenological attributes within the experience might help resolve the conceptual tension raised by critics. By ‘phenomenological attributes’, Griffiths refers not to mental content or noemata in the strict sense, but rather to features of experience that are given to the subject from outside, prior to any act of cognitive appropriation. These attributes function as the raw materials for subsequent intentional or conceptual acts. For example, in a visual experience of a tree, the subject not only perceives the tree but also recognizes that the experience is visual in nature. This preconceptual recognition – what allows the subject to distinguish a visual experience from, say, an auditory one – is grounded in phenomenological attributes that precede and make possible the subsequent articulation of the experience in propositional terms (e.g., ‘I see a tree’)Footnote 4 (Griffiths Reference Griffiths and Forman1990, 72–73, 75–77).
Taylor, adopting an evolutionary perspective, draws a distinction between perception and cognition, emphasizing that perceptual engagement with internal and external stimuli long predates the emergence of higher-order cognitive functions such as conceptualization and abstraction. On this view, human beings – like other animals – first register sensory input in a perceptual mode prior to any active conceptual recognition. This suggests that even in religious experience, the experiencer may be passively presented with certain phenomenological features of the transcendent at a perceptual level, before any reflective or interpretive cognitive act occurs (Taylor Reference Taylor2024, 687). Katz likewise acknowledges that both animals and human infants are capable of undergoing experiences that are not shaped by conceptual structures (Katz Reference Katz1988, 755), a concession that lends some support to the model of religious experience advanced by Taylor and others.
On these grounds, one can discern a clear divergence within REBE regarding the nature of religious experience. As previously examined, Forman characterizes religious experience as entirely contentless, including the absence of phenomenological attributes. In contrast, the position represented by Bernhardt, Griffiths, and Taylor maintains that at least certain phenomenological attributes can be apprehended through religious experience. Alston, advancing a still stronger claim, argues that religious experience can yield not only phenomenological qualities but also direct cognitive content. This lack of consensus within REBE concerning the nature of religious experience may appear to undermine its capacity to establish epistemic credibility, especially when compared to the more standardized criteria of sense perception. Nonetheless, REBE may still circumvent such criticism by rejecting the more contested models – namely, those of Forman and Alston – and adopting the more defensible account advanced by Bernhardt, Griffiths, and Taylor – hereafter referred to as BGT perennialism – which allows for the formulation of epistemic standards capable of grounding the justificatory status of religious experience.
The final criticism directed at REBE applies specifically to Alston’s minimal foundationalism, rather than to the form of perennialism advanced by Forman and Bernhardt. At the level of epistemic consistency, minimal foundationalism exhibits a significant tension (criticism 4). In order to establish the epistemic reliability of religious experience, Alston underlines its structural analogy to sense perception (Alston Reference Alston1992, 67–68). However, when attempts are made to apply to religious experience the very standards of reliability that are used to evaluate sensory perception, Alston insists on their dissimilarity, denouncing such efforts as instances of epistemic chauvinism (Alston Reference Alston1992, 73–74; Gale Reference Gale1991, 321–322; Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 120). This internal tension appears to stem from a kind of defensive strategy aimed at safeguarding theistic belief by appealing to religious experience as its foundation. In other words, when a belief formed through experience becomes the subject of epistemic dispute – such as the belief in the epistemic credibility of religious experience, or the belief in the existence of a transcendent reality based on such experience – Alston shifts the burden of proof away from the proponent and places it instead on the critic (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 10, 113, 121, 201–202). What is particularly problematic is that Alston explicitly assumes the transcendent reality to be beyond the scope of empirical validation, thereby rendering any robust verification or falsification of such religious beliefs inherently impossible. Despite this, he appears to deploy a dual strategy in which he both affirms the epistemic independence of religious experience from empirical standards and yet demands that objections be disproven. This inconsistency underscores a weakness in Alston’s formulation of REBE.
Constructivism and its limitations
Constructivism and religious experience
Constructivism maintains that all forms of experience – including religious experience – are fundamentally constituted by the subject’s preunderstandings and interpretive frameworks. In this vein, constructivists diverge from proponents of REBE by denying that religious experiences constitute unmediated or pure encounters with ultimate reality. Rather, such experiences are viewed as interpretively shaped by the theological, cultural, and linguistic traditions in which the subject is enculturated. This constructivist approach can be traced back to the Kantian legacy, which posits that human experience is invariably mediated by the subject’s a priori cognitive forms and a posteriori conceptual content. Within this framework, constructivists deny the possibility of unmediated or direct access to the referent of religious experience (Gómez-Rincón Reference Gómez-Rincón2021, 2). The modern articulation of constructivism with respect to religious experience originates with Steven T. Katz, who is widely credited with developing this theoretical orientation (Draper Reference Draper2020, 4; Jones Reference Jones2020, 1; Gómez-Rincón Reference Gómez-Rincón2021, 2–4). In his seminal work, Katz articulates the following position:
There are NO pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences. Neither mystical experience nor more ordinary forms of experience give any indication, or any grounds for believing, that they are unmediated. That is to say, all experience is processed through, organized by, and makes itself available to us in extremely complex epistemological ways (Katz Reference Katz and Katz1978, 26) (italic original)
Katz argues that religious experiences are constructed through the influence of the subject’s surrounding social ideologies, cultural norms, and religious traditions. As evidence for this claim, he highlights the absence of reports within the Jewish mystical tradition that describe a loss of self-resulting from union with the divine. In other words, the idea of mystical union with God has been theologically problematic within Judaism and thus has not only been excluded from doctrinal formulations but also from the repertoire of experiential reports themselves. Katz considers this a ‘very strong piece of evidence’ supporting a constructivist account of religious experience (Katz Reference Katz and Katz1978, 34–35). According to him, ‘the preconditioning of the Buddhist consciousness’ and ‘that of the Jewish’ are necessarily distinct, and the religious experiences generated from these differing cognitive and cultural backgrounds must likewise be qualitatively different (Katz Reference Katz and Katz1978, 36).
As further evidence for his position, Katz examines the experience of ‘nothingness’ as it is reported in both Jewish and Buddhist traditions. He compares the Hebrew term Ayin with the Chinese and Japanese Buddhist concept Mu, highlighting that the former denotes an ontological simplicity that refers to a supreme being incomparable to all other existents, whereas the latter signifies the absolute ontological condition of all entities and does not refer to a being in any conventional sense. Katz thus argues that experiences of ‘nothingness’ in Judaism and Buddhism are, in fact, directed towards fundamentally different referents. On these grounds, he criticizes proponents of REBE for failing to attend adequately to such differences and for hastily advancing their claims based on superficial similarities among seemingly analogous experiences (Katz Reference Katz and Katz1978, 52–53).
Bagger advances Katz’s constructivist framework by offering a more developed critique of REBE-type accounts. Specifically, he challenges the REBE assumption that experience and cognition can be clearly separated, arguing instead that sense and perception are inextricably intertwined. According to Bagger, when an internal or external state of affairs presents itself as sensory input, the cognitive process of the subject does not passively receive this input; rather, it actively engages with it through a schema or preperception shaped by prior experience (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 34). A paradigmatic instance of this cognitive dynamic is the faculty of attention. William James famously links attention to one’s interests, asserting that perception is conditioned by what one finds meaningful or worthy of focus. As James explains, the majority of sensory data provided by a given situation is routinely disregarded, and perception is constructed from a selective set of inputs filtered through the subject’s particular interests. The informational gaps created by this filtering are subsequently filled by the mind, relying on past experiences, ingrained habits, and expectations (James Reference James1890 [1981], 273–275; Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 32–34). Within this framework, the state of affairs presented to the subject and the subject’s reception and cognitive engagement with it cannot be neatly demarcated, as Forman’s notion of the PCE implies. To undergo an experience is not to receive it in a vacuum but to actively impose form and content upon it through conscious cognitive activity (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 34).
Specifically, Bagger contends that when external and internal states of affairs are presented as phenomenological attributes within experience, what is given is not raw sensory data but information already mediated by the subject’s epistemic framework. To illustrate this, Bagger draws upon Charles Peirce’s analogy of the inverted triangle. In this metaphor, consciousness is likened to a surface of water, and the object of experience to an inverted triangle penetrating the surface. The point at which the apex of the triangle first touches the surface signifies the moment experience begins. From this perspective, Bagger argues, there can be no such thing as unmediated experience, since consciousness is always involved in shaping what is perceived (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 5, 26–29). Wilfrid Sellars likewise rejects the notion of pure experience, maintaining that even our sensory encounters and their associated phenomenological features are conceptually mediated. For example, when one visually perceives an object and recognizes its colour as ‘green’, this recognition occurs not through passive reception, but via the mediation of the concept of greenness already present in the subject’s cognitive framework (Sellars [Reference Sellars1956] 1997, 43; Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 30).
Within this framework, constructivists contend that no experience offers a pure and unmediated presentation of external reality as it is. Rather, experience is always mediated by the subject’s epistemic framework, which itself is shaped by past experiences, and is enacted in relation to the subject’s present interests, expectations, and attentional focus towards both internal and external states of affairs. Accordingly, Bagger characterizes experience ‘in general as a response to stimuli’ (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 47). He further asserts: ‘This response exhibits the logic of an inference to the best explanation and pragmatically reflects our interests, beliefs, and values. We experience what we infer to the best explanation of an event’ (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 47).
On this account, when an external reality x gives rise to a particular state of affairs that the subject experiences, the phenomenological attributes that appear within the experience are not determinate and positive information about x in an unmediated form. Rather, they are received as disordered and indeterminate stimuli that are then structured, interpreted, and conceptualized through the subject’s epistemic framework. Thus, Bagger argues that one must abandon the notion that religious experience in itself can yield meaningful information or phenomenological attributes about a transcendent reality. Instead, he maintains that what is perceptually accessed in religious experience amounts only to vague and indeterminate impressions or feelings, which may support, at best, the epistemic conclusion that the transcendent is something ultimately beyond human comprehension or experiential grasp (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 221–224).
Challenges to constructivist accounts of religious experience
Before proceeding, it is necessary to critically examine the constructivist account of experience. If experience does not afford the subject any positive or meaningful information about external reality – even in fragmentary form – and if all our understanding of reality is thoroughly mediated by the epistemic frameworks, concepts, and interpretive structures already possessed by the subject, one must ask: From where does any ‘new content’ in our knowledge of reality originate (Criticism 1)? That is to say, unless one adopts an extreme form of solipsism, it must be acknowledged that our constructed understanding of external reality – though shaped by the subject’s conceptual world (Umwelt), epistemic framework, preperceptions, expectations, and attention – is also, to some extent, responsive to and informed by the reality itself.
Constructivist scholar Matthew Bagger would likely concur with this line of reasoning, as his engagement with William James reveals an account of experience that seeks to synthesize elements of both idealism and empiricism. For Bagger, experience is neither a purely passive reception of information from external reality nor a process solely generated from the subject’s a priori conceptual structures. Rather, he maintains that through experience, the subject encounters fragmentary, indeterminate, and often chaotic experiential data originating in external reality. Such data are pragmatically integrated with the subject’s situated concerns and contribute to practical orientations towards the world (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 26–27, 37–38, 47–57). In this framework, religious experience is not ‘caused’ by the subject’s pre-existing set of beliefs, but rather ‘conditioned’ by them (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 96).
However, according to Jones, Katz’s constructivism is distinct from that of Bagger. While Bagger adopts a more moderate stance, Katz underlines the organic entanglement between experience and interpretation, maintaining that all forms of experience are constructed through the subject’s epistemic framework, worldview, and preperceptive orientation. In this context, Jones delineates three typologies of constructivist approaches: hard constructivism, soft constructivism, and non-constructivism. Hard constructivism asserts that the subject’s cultural background wholly constructs and determines the nature of religious experience; soft constructivism maintains that such background partially shapes the experience; and non-constructivism holds that most religious experiences are largely independent of cultural conditioning. On this basis, Jones classifies Katz as a proponent of hard constructivism (Jones Reference Jones2020, 4–6; Jones Reference Jones2022). If this assessment is accurate, then while Bagger’s constructivism may evade the charge of solipsism due to its more moderate orientation, Katz’s position, by contrast, appears less capable of avoiding the epistemological suspicion that such experiences are entirely confined within the conceptual apparatus of the subject.
A second major criticism directed at constructivism concerns its failure to adequately distinguish between phenomenological immediacy and epistemological immediacy (Criticism 2). This conflation, particularly characteristic of strong constructivist positions, leads to a neglect of the possible contributions that the external reality – i.e., the object of experience – makes to perception and cognition (Gómez-Rincón Reference Gómez-Rincón2021, 3). Massimo Marassi, while emphasizing the organic relationship between what he terms phenomenological and logical immediacy, nevertheless maintains a clear conceptual distinction between the two. Phenomenological immediacy refers to the unmediated, immediate givenness of the object in experience – the direct encounter with what presents itself – whereas epistemological (or logical) immediacy concerns the moment when the object enters a web of meanings and becomes accessible through cognitive acts. Within this framework, phenomenological immediacy highlights that the inception of knowledge is grounded not in the subject’s cognitive activity, but rather in the self-disclosure or donation of being itself (Marassi Reference Marassi2019, 34–37).
William James contends that, with the exception of newborn infants and individuals in semi-comatose states induced by sleep, drugs, or illness, most human experiences are shaped by unconscious processes and their associated fringes of consciousness, including memory and subliminal awareness. In this respect, his account partially echoes the constructivist understanding of experience. Nevertheless, James also underscores the notion of pure experience, which designates the immediate feeling or sensation of an event prior to the onset of conceptualization. This pre-cognitive phase precedes the interpretive intervention of the subject, at which point the experience becomes ‘identified and fixed and abstracted’ through acts of cognition – a stage at which the conceptual network already embedded within the subject begins to exert its influence (James 1909 [Reference James2008], 117, 135). Within this framework, James’s model clearly differentiates phenomenological immediacy from epistemological immediacy, suggesting that experience does in fact afford access – however fragmentary – to phenomenological attributes or content that precedes cognitive structuring.
The final critique levelled against constructivism is that it remains overly cognitivist in orientation. It is argued that the essence of religious experience lies not in cognitive apprehension but in embodied and practical engagement (Criticism 3). Wesley Wildman articulates a similar position by distinguishing between experience and interpretation, thereby emphasizing the non-cognitive dimensions of religious experience.Footnote 5 According to Wesley Wildman, religious experience does not directly convey specific knowledge or propositional content concerning a transcendent reality. Consequently, interpretations of such experiences vary across religious traditions, shaped by the theoretical frameworks internal to those traditions, thereby leading to divergent doctrinal articulations regarding the transcendent. Nevertheless, Wildman draws attention to a commonality across religious experiences: their transformative power in the lives of individuals and communities, as well as their capacity to confer meaning and purpose. He contends that the similarities among religious experiences are not found at the level of cognition, but rather at the level of praxis (Wildman Reference Wildman2011, 9–11). The shared features of religious experiences at this practical level indicate that such experiences cannot be entirely reduced to the preconceptions or theoretical constructs held by the subject. This challenges the plausibility of strong constructivist accounts – those which claim that religious experiences are wholly determined by the subject’s conceptual framework. Furthermore, it suggests that epistemic justification for religious experience may be grounded not in post-experiential conceptualization or propositional knowledge, but in the existential and communal transformation it brings about – a possibility that constructivism, due to its overtly cognitivist orientation, largely overlooks.
An alternative and constructive proposal for the reliability of religious experience: an embodied perspective
Thus far, we have critically examined two major perspectives on the epistemic reliability of religious experience –REBE and constructivism. This analysis has led us to the conclusion that only certain strands within each tradition remain tenable. Specifically, within REBE, the version of perennialism advanced by Bernhardt, Griffiths, and Taylor – BGT perennialism – appears defensible, insofar as it maintains that phenomenological attributes of the experienced object can indeed be apprehended through religious experience. Similarly, among constructivist accounts, Bagger’s moderate constructivism – which holds that religious experience is only partially shaped by the subject’s cultural and conceptual background – proves to be a viable position. These findings naturally prompt the question of whether a synthesis between BGT perennialism and Baggerian constructivism might provide a coherent and epistemically plausible version of REBE. To explore this possibility, the following section will critically examine two additional perspectives: first, Gómez-Rincón’s embodied-cognitive approach to religious experience, and second, Yandell’s subject/content model. Based on this analysis, I will propose a constructive alternative that integrates key insights from both frameworks.
Carlos Miguel Gómez-Rincón offers a critical assessment of the limitations inherent in prevailing epistemological accounts of religious experience. In particular, he identifies two major issues with constructivist approaches: the problem of epistemic validity and the problem of transcendence. Regarding the first, Gómez-Rincón echoes concerns raised earlier in this article, questioning the origin of the preconceptions that purportedly shape religious experience. If such preconceptions are not themselves derived from religious experience, he asks, then from what source do they arise? Given that these preconceptions are neither a priori nor grounded in the experiential domain, their genesis becomes problematic. Concerning the second issue, Gómez-Rincón argues that if religious experience is wholly constructed through the subject’s epistemic framework – comprising concepts, beliefs, and interpretive schemes – then it cannot be said to involve an encounter with anything genuinely transcendent. In such a case, religious experience would amount to nothing more than a projection of the self, thereby failing to qualify as a truthful or authentic experience of the transcendent (Gómez-Rincón Reference Gómez-Rincón2021, 2–3).
In addition, although Gómez-Rincón does not explicitly target perennialism or minimal foundationalism by name, he nonetheless critiques the broader assumption underlying these views – namely, the claim that religious experience consists of an encounter with an object independent of the subject, through which objective knowledge about that object can be acquired (Gómez-Rincón Reference Gómez-Rincón2021, 2–3). Criticizing both this REBE stance and the constructivist paradigm, Gómez-Rincón argues that prevailing epistemological approaches to religious experience are fundamentally flawed because they construe the subject not as a being-in-the-world, but rather as a disengaged agent, severed from the world. Within such a framework, religious experience is forced into a dichotomy: either it is viewed as a domain in which objective representations are delivered to the subject from without (as in minimal foundationalism), or it is seen as entirely constructed from within the subject’s epistemic apparatus (as in strong constructivism). In both cases, the transcendent becomes reified – either as an objectively given entity or as a subjective projection – thus reducing it to an object of cognition. Consequently, religious experience is no longer conceived as an existential or transformative encounter with transcendence, but rather as a merely cognitive act of grasping. Under such a schema, a fully adequate understanding of religious experience becomes impossible (Gómez-Rincón Reference Gómez-Rincón2021, 3–4).Footnote 6
As an alternative, Gómez-Rincón proposes an understanding of religious experience grounded in Heidegger’s concept of Verstehen (understanding) and James’s notion of truth. In Being and Time, Heidegger conceives ‘understanding’ not as a process by which the human mind assigns or discovers meaning through mediating representations, but rather as a pre-theoretical mode of engaged activity within the world. Because the subject already dwells in a world saturated with significance, it is as being-in-the-world that the subject – though often implicitly – already understands the world in a practical and embodied way (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1927 Reference Heidegger2001, 83, 183; Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus1995, 46, 86, 111, 184; Gómez-Rincón Reference Gómez-Rincón2021, 6). This Heideggerian conception of understanding resonates with William James’s pragmatist theory of truth. For James, truth is not a metaphysical entity to be discovered or apprehended as something inert and static, but is instead realized through a practical alignment with the given world. Truth emerges through the subject’s interaction with a dynamic reality, adapting to its changes and making use of what proves necessary within it (James 1907 [Reference James2000], 88, 93; Gómez-Rincón Reference Gómez-Rincón2021, 6).
Gómez-Rincón, drawing on the practical and pragmatic perspectives of Heidegger and James, proposes an alternative account of religious experience – one that does not regard it as a moment of rational or conceptual cognition of a transcendent reality that exists independently of the subject. Instead, he urges that religious experience be understood as a response generated in relation to the situation and context in which the subject is existentially situated – a response that produces the most appropriate posture and action required therein. In this view, religious experience is not a ‘rationalist-cognitivist event’ through which a religious tradition generates or legitimizes its doctrines and beliefs, but rather a kind of ‘lived experience’ that elicits inner transformation such as metanoia, liberation, or enlightenment. It is this transformative power that enables individuals and communities to overcome existential challenges and thereby transcend their present conditions. According to Gómez-Rincón, then, religious experience ought to be approached not from a cognitive perspective, but from a spiritual one. Such an interpretation, he argues, provides a viable defense of the epistemic credibility of religious experience – particularly by countering the critique that interreligious differences undermine its reliability (Gómez-Rincón Reference Gómez-Rincón2021, 10–11).
Gómez-Rincón’s spiritual approach to religious experience merits particular attention in light of a broader trend within contemporary philosophy of religion – namely, the shift from a rationalist to a spiritual paradigm in the study of religious phenomena (Cottingham Reference Cottingham2003, Reference Cottingham2005; Gómez-Rincón Reference Gómez-Rincón2021, 11). The spiritual paradigm, as articulated by Gómez-Rincón, does not regard conceptualized beliefs and doctrines – which often highlight interreligious disagreements – as the essential elements of religious phenomena. Rather, it emphasizes the concrete effects of religion in actual life, namely, its capacity to foster personal and communitarian well-being and growth, thereby sustaining and enabling human flourishing. This paradigm discloses the transcendent divine reality not through cognitive knowledge, but through practical action and its transformative effects (Gómez-Rincón Reference Gómez-Rincón2021, 11–12). Furthermore, his praxis-oriented and pragmatist account, grounded in the thought of Heidegger and James, offers a compelling alternative to dualistic models of religious experience that presuppose a strict subject-object dichotomy. In this respect, Gómez-Rincón’s proposal provides a constructive framework for reconciling the epistemological insights of BGT perennialism with those of Baggerian constructivism. As previously discussed, Bagger rejects the notion of pure, unmediated experience, maintaining instead that all experience arises as a response to internal and external stimuli, enacted within a given context and mediated by the subject’s prior interests, expectations, and attentional orientation (Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 47). This understanding of experience resonates with Gómez-Rincón’s own emphasis on the practical and transformative character of religious experience.
BGT perennialism may likewise be rendered compatible with Gómez-Rincón’s praxis-oriented and pragmatist understanding of religious experience. As previously discussed, unlike minimal foundationalism, this view constrains the epistemic claims of religious experience to the level of phenomenological attributes, rather than positing access to unmediated knowledge of transcendent reality. In addition, Taylor, a proponent of this position, emphasizes the practical dimension of religious experience, particularly the transformative effects that follow such encounters – e.g., the Buddhist bodhi, the Hindu moksha, and the Christian deification. He argues that the epistemic credibility of religious experience is best supported by the cross-cultural recurrence of these transformative outcomes (Taylor Reference Taylor2024, 682–683, 690). In this light, Gómez-Rincón’s practical-spiritual account offers a promising framework for bridging the residual gap between BGT perennialism and Baggerian constructivism, thus enabling a more comprehensive and coherent epistemology of religious experience.
Gómez-Rincón’s spirituality-based approach to religious experience thus contributes meaningfully to overcoming the limitations of dominant epistemological paradigms. Nonetheless, his account remains constrained by a residual dichotomy insofar as it sharply distinguishes between rational-cognitive and spiritual-practical approaches, ultimately privileging the latter. This binary framing risks overlooking a fundamental aspect of human nature – namely, the ‘will to know’ – and may inadvertently marginalize the intellectual dimension long preserved within religious traditions, as exemplified by the Christian notion of fides quaerens intellectum. A robust understanding of religious experience, however, ought to encompass both the transformative praxis of spirituality and the reflective pursuit of understanding. In what follows, I propose a rational-cognitive account that can be brought into harmony with Gómez-Rincón’s spiritual-practical model. As previously discussed, Gómez-Rincón characterizes religious experience as a force that not only sustains individual and communal life, but also reorients and transforms it towards transcendence. On this basis, it is possible to conceive of religious experience as an experience of transcendence.
Keith E. Yandell also underscores the transcendent dimension of religious experience. According to him, religious experiences as they are widely reported across traditions are not primarily cognitive acts of perceiving an object or gaining propositional knowledge. Rather, they are experiences that liberate the subject from states of despair and brokenness, offering healing and transformation (Yandell Reference Yandell, Taliaferro, Draper and Quinn2010, 405). This indicates that his concern was not limited to the cognitivist dimension of perceptuality in religious experience, but extended to its practical and transformative effects. In other words, Yandell’s emphasis anticipates the embodied dimension of perception – namely, its practical and transformative efficacy – which this article identifies as a crucial basis for the epistemic credibility of religious experience from an embodied cognitive perspective.
Yandell distinguishes between two structural types of religious experience: the subject/content model (SC model) and the subject/consciousness/object model (SCO model). The former refers to experiences in which the subject is aware of a particular internal state, such as ‘I feel a sense of peace’ or ‘I am comforted’. Moreover, the SC type of religious experience encompasses unitive experiences such as unio mystica or enlightenment, in which the experiencer and the transcendent reality are perceived as united. The latter, by contrast, refers to cognitively oriented experiences in which the subject is consciously aware of an external object or presence – e.g., ‘I see God’ or ‘I hear a divine voice.’ (Yandell Reference Yandell1993, 305–307, Reference Yandell, Taliaferro, Draper and Quinn2010, 407–408). Although Yandell ultimately concludes that these two structures reflect distinct types of religious experience that vary across religious traditions (Yandell Reference Yandell1999, 49–50), it is worth attending more closely to the SC model, which appears to be more universally shared across traditions. As Yandell himself acknowledges, the SCO model is typically found in monotheistic frameworks that posit a personal deity, such as Christianity. By contrast, experiences structured around the subject/content model are reported in a broader range of religious traditions.
However, Yandell unfortunately construed the SC model not as a feeling directed towards something beyond the self, but rather as ‘an aspect of her own being or something with which she is identical’ (Yandell Reference Yandell, Taliaferro, Draper and Quinn2010, 409). On this basis, he contended that only the SCO model can disclose the perceptual character of religious experience (Yandell Reference Yandell1993, 305).Footnote 7 Within this framework, Yandell drew a sharp distinction between SC and SCO, treating them as mutually exclusive and irreconcilable. Such a perspective reflects a traditional cognitivist orientation and represents precisely the position this article seeks to challenge. In other words, as noted earlier, while Yandell’s account exhibits certain elements that could be interpreted in line with an embodied cognitive perspective, his understanding ultimately remained firmly within the bounds of cognitivism. By contrast, affective experience can indeed be interpreted as perceptual experience. Again, from an embodied cognitive standpoint, the subject is not a disengaged observer but an embedded agent situated within the world. For such a subject, God is not encountered as an entity external to the self, but as the ground that permeates and sustains one’s very existence – hence the meaningfulness of the biblical expression: ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28, NRSV).
On this account, SC-type religious experiences can be construed as events in which the transcendent reality, which has always implicitly disclosed itself through perceptual engagement, is affectively apprehended in the form of subjective feeling. Mark Wynn does not regard affective experience as a merely inward, private state that fails to refer beyond itself to transcendent reality (Wynn Reference Wynn2009, 182). On the contrary, by construing religious experience as affective experience, Wynn emphasizes how the religious concepts already possessed by the subject are endowed with renewed meaning and value, become concretely realized, and are once again embodied through religious practices. Affective experience, when understood as religious experience, thus functions as a perceptual event that discloses transcendent reality beyond mere inner states, within the integrity of the affective–intellectual–behavioural whole (Wynn Reference Wynn2009, 180–187). For Wynn, religious experience does not consist in a disengaged subject having direct perception of God in a vacuum, but rather in phenomenologically elicited feelings and emotions that arise within the concrete spaces and places one inhabits. In this sense, transcendent reality is not apprehended conceptually in religious experience, but perceptually felt through the body. Accordingly, one may regard religious experiences of the SC type not merely as revelations of the subject’s interior states, but as perceptual disclosures of transcendent reality, experienced as the very ground of being that upholds the subject.Footnote 8
Elena Kalmykova also argues, from an embodied cognitive perspective, that the perception of the divine in religious experience is not the apprehension of propositional belief but rather the perception of more than what is immediately given in sensory data (Kalmykova Reference Kalmykova2021, 994, 1001–1002). Perceptual experience is not achieved by passively receiving limited sense data, but by bodily-based perceptual processes that allow us to apprehend the whole on the basis of partial data. Consequently, our perception always operates as perceptual faith (Kalmykova Reference Kalmykova2021, 995). Moreover, since perception is always embodied, Kalmykova emphasizes that there is always the possibility of ‘a better look’ at any given phenomenon, even when the experiences concern the same object or the same type of phenomenological event. The more complex the reality apprehended, the more such ‘better looks’ are required (Kalmykova Reference Kalmykova2021, 998–999). In this light, the sensory data disclosed through SC-type religious experiences can be understood as leading us towards a perception of something that transcends those data.
Religious experience, therefore, does not convey concrete conceptual apprehensions or noematic content of the transcendent reality; rather, it communicates, in the form of affective feeling, the existential recognition that one’s being is not grounded in oneself, thereby disclosing the transcendent. Within such experience, the subject’s existential brokenness is exposed and simultaneously healed, leading beyond the subject’s interiority to a perception of the transcendent power that effects this transformation. Yet it is crucial to distinguish between the perception directly afforded in such experiences and the conceptualized cognition subsequently constructed through interpretation. Although both Wynn and Kalmykova appear to suggest that ordinary perceptual experiences may also be considered epistemically reliable as religious experiences, I argue that epistemically credible religious experience should be restricted to type 2b experiences in Swinburne’s taxonomy. For the notion that any and every ordinary experience might be transformed into religious experience risks distorting the balance that an embodied cognitive approach seeks to maintain between the subject and the transcendent reality, potentially overemphasizing the subject’s active contribution in the process of knowing. Moreover, as Baggerian constructivists have rightly pointed out, such an approach could foster the mistaken assumption that perceptual knowledge constructed through the subject’s conceptual mediation amounts to pure knowledge of transcendent reality.
In this light, one might suggest that experiences conforming to the subject/consciousness/object model are those mediated by the subject’s conceptual apparatus and reflective awareness – in line with the concerns of constructivists, who emphasize the culturally and cognitively constructed nature of such experiences. On the other hand, experiences of the subject/content type, which are pre-reflective and affective, may be more plausibly interpreted as primary religious experiences of the kind highlighted by REBE theorists, with the notable exception of Alston. These experiences emerge not from deliberate acts of perception but from transformative encounters that precede full conceptual articulation and are shared across diverse religious contexts.
By interpreting religious experience in such a manner, one can reconcile BGT perennialism and Baggerian constructivism through a spirituality-oriented approach, thereby securing the epistemic reliability of such experiences. This is because the universally reported transformative power of religious experience – the power to transcend one’s life – can neither be reduced to a mere construct of human consciousness (contra strong constructivism) nor be fully captured by conceptual cognition (contra minimal foundationalism). In this context, Friedrich Schleiermacher conceives of the transcendent not as an object of discursive thought but as something encountered affectively in the form of ‘the feeling (Gefühl) of absolute dependence’, a foundational and originating power underlying existence (Schleiermacher [1830] Reference Schleiermacher2016, 16–27). Rudolf Otto identified the essence of religious experience as the encounter with the wholly Other (das ganz Andere), beyond the limits of rational comprehension. Unlike Schleiermacher, Otto argued that transcendent reality is not indirectly inferred from the feeling of absolute dependence but is immediately felt within religious experience itself, giving rise to what he called the ‘creature-feeling’. Within such experience, the transcendent manifests as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, evoking humility, awe, and worship, and sustaining the life of the subject (Wynn Reference Wynn2022; Otto Reference Otto1928, 25–41). Paul Tillich similarly argues that the essence of religious experience lies in the existential encounter with the power that overcomes fragmentation and alienation in both the individual and the community, which he identifies as ‘the ground of being’ (Tillich Reference Tillich1951, 106–118). Building upon these insights, Wolfhart Pannenberg maintains that such experiences – through which the decentred nature of the self is revealed and an encounter with the source that grounds and transcends the self takes place – do not yield immediate or propositional knowledge of the transcendent. Rather, they call forth an implicit and pre-thematic idea of God that is universally and a priori present within human consciousness (Pannenberg Reference Pannenberg1992, 1:73–82).
In this light, it may be argued that through religious experience, one can come to a non-conceptual yet cognitively accessible awareness of something that both sustains and transcends human life (Jones Reference Jones2020, 13; Bagger Reference Bagger1999, 223–224). To render such awareness intelligible, one must appeal to a universally and a priori given idea of the divine. This idea, however, only becomes thematized and conceptually articulated within the socio-cultural and religious frameworks to which the subject belongs. In other words, religious experience does not yield immediate descriptive knowledge of the transcendent reality itself; rather, it imposes upon the subject an explanatory demand to make sense of what has been encountered. Furthermore, if among the thematized and conceptualized articulations of religious experience one can identify propositions that are recurrent or resonate across multiple religious traditions, these may be regarded as the most epistemically credible contents of religious experience. This is because, by their very nature, the divine is associated with the property of truthfulness, and those claims that are intersubjectively confirmed – according to the coherence theory of truth – are most plausibly construed as reflecting genuine contact with the transcendent. In other words, among the concepts of transcendent reality constructed after religious experience, those that appear commonly across diverse religious traditions may be considered reliable concepts or propositions about the transcendent. This is not to suggest that truth is secured by intersubjective agreement; rather, as Pannenberg points out, true knowledge of the transcendent – truth itself – attests to itself within the context of coherence (Pannenberg Reference Pannenberg1992, 1:36–37, 53). In this sense, knowledge of transcendent reality grounded in religious experiences that are shared across religious traditions may be regarded as approaching true knowledge of that reality.
Conclusion
This study has examined whether religious experience can serve as a reliable avenue for disclosing an aspect of reality. To this end, it critically assessed the epistemological claims of REBE and the counterarguments offered by constructivist perspectives. The article began by analysing the positions of Forman and Alston, ultimately arguing that both approaches, in their original formulations, face significant limitations. It concluded that only a revised version of Forman’s view – here termed BGT perennialism – is epistemically viable. While understanding that religious experience does not afford direct access to conceptual or propositional knowledge about the transcendent, the study maintained that it can at least yield phenomenological features pertaining to what is being experienced. Subsequently, the paper engaged with constructivist critiques advanced by Steven T. Katz and Matthew Bagger. It argued that Katz’s strong constructivism, which holds that religious experience is wholly shaped by the subject’s cultural and conceptual framework, inevitably succumbs to the solipsistic implications raised by its critics. In contrast, Bagger’s more moderate constructivism was found to be partially acceptable, as it allows for a degree of experiential input while still acknowledging the mediating role of the subject’s epistemic framework.
Finally, this study explored Carlos Miguel Gómez-Rincón’s embodied approach to religious experience, highlighting that such experience cannot be adequately grasped through a cognitivist framework, but must instead be understood as a lived experience – a transformative encounter that empowers individuals to transcend their existential condition. By further engaging Keith Yandell’s structural analysis of religious experience, the article argued that the cognitive dimension – underemphasized in Gómez-Rincón’s account – can be integrated with its practical and spiritual elements. Interpreting religious experience from an embodied cognitive perspective opens a promising path for overcoming the long-standing deadlock between REBE and constructivism. Rather than treating the two as mutually exclusive, this approach points towards the possibility of a genuine synthesis. Moreover, it recovers an essential dimension often neglected by cognitivist paradigms: the existential and transformative power of religion to heal fragmentation, overcome alienation, and enable both individuals and communities to transcend themselves. In this light, religious experience may be more fruitfully understood not merely as an epistemic act, but as a profound encounter with the transcendent that is embodied, enacted, and lived.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Yonsei University Research Fund of 2025-22-0081.
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