Alston's overall aim in Perceiving God is to show that we are rationally justified in believing that our apparent direct perceptions of God's presence (called ‘M-experiences’) are reliable and thus for the most part veridical, the objective, existentially-committed beliefs based on these experiences thereby being prima facie justified, subject to defeat by certain overriders supplied by some background religion. It is argued that our rational justification for believing this is of both an epistemic and pragmatic (or practical) sort, in which an epistemic reason for believing a proposition is truth conducive, rendering the proposition probable, while a pragmatic one concerns the benefits which accrue from belief. We will begin by considering the pragmatic justification, since the case he makes out for epistemic justification is built on its back.

William Alston's Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) is a most significant contribution to the philosophy of religion. The product of 50 years' reflection on its topic (xi), this work provides a very thorough explication and defence of what Alston calls the ‘mystical perceptual practice’ (MP) – the practice of forming beliefs about the Ultimate on the basis of putative ‘direct experiential awareness’ thereof (pp. 103, 258). Alston argues, in particular, for the (epistemic) rationality of engaging in the Christian form of MP (CMP). On his view, those who participate in CMP are (in the absence of specific overriding considerations from within CMP) justified in forming beliefs as they do because their practice is ‘socially established’, has a ‘functioning overrider system’ and a ‘significant degree of self-support’; and because of the ‘lack of sufficient reasons to take the practice as unreliable’ (p. 224).

After being dismissed for decades in philosophical theology, experiential arguments for the justification of religious belief, including belief in God, have again come to centre stage. One of the most thorough of these is William Alston's recent study, Perceiving God. Alston's purpose is to show that it is rational for someone to participate in what he calls Christian Mystical Practice (CMP) because CMP ‘is a socially established doxastic practice that is not demonstrably unreliable or otherwise disqualified for rational acceptance’ and to hold beliefs which that participation reliably generates. The thesis of this essay is that his individuation of mystical practices is not sufficiently nuanced. Once his naturalistic approach is brought more closely into line with actual practices, what he calls CMP splinters into multiple practices. A more complete account requires a more pluralistic understanding of the Christian traditions than Alston acknowledges.

I greatly appreciate the kind words from Gale, Tilley, and Schellenberg, and I appreciate even more the care with which they have read and reacted to my book. But my task here is to give my reactions to their reactions.

It has seemed to a number of recent scholars that God's acts in the world must have the fundamental character of being ‘basic acts’. Grace Jantzen has argued that ‘a theist wants to say that all of God's actions in the world are direct and basic…he does everything directly, without intervening apparatus…God can perform any physical action, and any such action on God's part is direct, basic’. Robert Ellis has claimed that ‘if we limit “basic” action to action upon/within one's body then God's immediate action upon the physical universe may qualify under such a description whether or not one holds to a view of the world as the body of God [a view endorsed by Jantzen] … All God's actions would [therefore] seem to be “basic”. And William P. Alston has suggested that ‘it is a live possibility that all God's actions are basic’. The question to be addressed is what theological and/or philosophical reasons can be advanced to make the case for regarding all divine action as basic? Would there be any significant diminution in affirming divine power if most or many of God's actions were non-basic?

The notion of transubstantiation has not fared well in analytic circles despite the revival of interest in scholastic philosophy. Common charges are that it leads to scepticism, does violence to the Aristotelian account of change and fails to achieve the purpose for which it was introduced by Catholic thinkers, namely, to account for the supposed real presence of Christ on the altar during the celebration of the Eucharist. In this paper I will argue that at least some of these objections rest on misconstruing the logical form of expressions like ‘There is bread on the altar’ and ‘…is the blood of Christ’.

The Anglican Thirty Nine Articles join catholic Christendom in affirming that:

There is but one living and true God…and in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

In a recent study entitled ‘Numinous Experience and Religious Language’, Dr Leon Schlamm has endorsed Rudolf Otto's well known and much discussed account of the relationship of religious experience to religious language, and then used this position to criticize some highly influential voices in the continuing debate on the precise nature of mystical experience. The aim of this paper, in response to Schlamm, is to question the plausibility of Otto's account in The Idea of the Holy of the nature of religious knowledge and his closely related understanding of the relationship between religious experience (or as he prefers, numinous experience) and religious language. By implication, this also calls into question Schlamm's use of Otto's position in his criticism of those writers on mysticism that he takes issue with, chiefly Steven Katz and those who propose an essentially Kantian interpretation of mysticism. However, for the most part I shall leave the contemporary debate on mysticism unaddressed, though my comments do have a bearing on it. If there is a wider target, it is chiefly those interpreters of religion, like Schlamm, who conceive of the relationship of religious experience (or the religious object itself) and religious language in essentially the same way as Otto. One thinks immediately here of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom Otto admired greatly, and who stands in the same Liberal Protestant tradition. Also Karl Barth, who ironically, for all his strictures of Liberal Protestantism, actually propounded a view of the meaning and nature of religious language which is remarkably similar to the views of both Schleiermacher and Otto; at least at the beginning of his theological career, in his famous commentary on Romans: all that talk of God as ‘the inexpressible’ and ‘the Wholly Other’. In addition one could mention those classical texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, which like many contemporary writers on mysticism (e.g. the late Deirdre Green), conceive of mystical experience and the truth which it reveals as ‘beyond the scope of discursive thought, language and empirical activity’.

In his long-awaited Mystic Union, Nelson Pike offers a phenomenology of mysticism. His account is based on the reports and descriptions of third parties, not on his own, first-person experience. So he calls his enterprise ‘phenomenography’, an attempt to describe the experiential content of conscious states by way of reports of them. Pike finds in the Christian mystical tradition three different kinds of experiences of mystic union, the ‘prayer of quiet’, the ‘prayer of union’ and ‘rapture’. These experiences differ phenomenologically, i.e. in experiential content. But they are all ‘theistic’ experiences; that is, they are all phenomenologically of God. By this Pike means: (a) whether these experiences are veridical or not, their object – what they are veridical or hallucinatory experiences of – is God; and (b) that they are of God is part of, or given in, the phenomenological content of the experiences themselves.