ABSTRACT
The interest of religious experiences for the philosophy of religionlies in whatever potential they may have for providing informationabout what there is. Those who think that there are experienceindependent material objects typically suppose that perceptual experience – seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching1 – are on the whole a reliable source of information about these objects.2 Moral experience typically is taken by moral realists – roughly, those who think that there actually are obligations, duties, right and wrong ways of behaving, ways of being a good or an evil person, and the like – to have similar information potential. The discussion that follows is governed by an underlying query: what sort of information about what there is might religious experience provide, and how could one tell? While this underlying question does not receive direct attention until later chapters, the presentation here looks forward to the discussion there.
