ABSTRACT
The traditional arguments for religious belief can be loosely described as either rationalist or empiricist. The ontological argument using no empirical premisses and the cosmological arguments using only very simply and universally acknowledged ones are classically rationalist; arguments from design and from religious experience are usually classically empiricist. However, this does not just mean that the former arguments are based on reason and the latter on experience, but that they are based on a particular concept of reason characteristic of rationalism, and a particular concept of experience characteristic of empiricism. Reason and experience must both play essential roles in all forms of knowledge including religious knowledge, but it may well be so, and I believe that it is, that rationalists and empiricists have misdescribed reason and experience. Rationalists typically model reason on geometrical deduction, and empiricists typically model experience on sense perception, conceived as the imprinting of images on a passive and initially blank consciousness. Both are typically foundationalist, holding that there is a special subset of knowledge which is indubitable because of the means by which it is arrived at, and that all knowledge should be founded on this.
