Religious Experience
Religious Experience
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In this book, Phillip Wiebe examines religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences, assessing how these experiences appear to implicate a spiritual order. Despite the current prevalence of naturalism and atheism, he argues that experiences purporting to have a religious or spiritual significance deserve close empirical investigation. Wiebe surveys the broad scope of religious experience and considers different types of evidence that might give rise to a belief in phenomena such as spirits, paranormal events, God, and an afterlife. He demonstrates that there are different explanations and interpretations of religious experiences, both because they are typically personal accounts, and they suggest a reality that is often unobservable. Wiebe also addresses how to evaluate evidence for theories that postulate unobservables in general, and a Theory of Spirits in particular. Calling for more rigorous investigation of these phenomena, Wiebe frames the study of religious experience among other accepted social sciences that seek to understand religion.
- Provides a framework to assess religious experiences
- Provides case studies of religious experience
- Shows how scientific inquiry posits unobservables entities, and the parallels to religious experience
Product details
July 2025Hardback
9781108423717
234 pages
229 × 152 × 18 mm
0.454kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. The scope of 'religious experience'
- 2. The general theory of spirits
- 3. Testability and evidence
- 4. Phenomenological evidence
- 5. Evidence for the world of spirits.
