ABSTRACT
It is the contention of this chapter that religious knowledge is much more like other sorts of knowledge than is commonly thought. Of course there are differences between all areas of knowledge: the abstract sciences are not like the concrete sciences, the sciences in general are not like practical knowhow, knowhow is not like knowing a person, knowing someone else is not like knowing yourself, knowing your own conscious states is not like knowing your unconscious or your character, and so on. Religious knowledge too has its own peculiarities, but no more so than other kinds. Insofar as it is unlike other kinds, it is like them in being unlike. But it is knowledge in the same sense as other kinds of knowledge – it claims to be true about something, and is mistaken if what it is about does not exist or is different from how it is conceived. And its sources are the same as those of other areas of knowledge, namely authority (reliable hearsay), checked and tested by experiences which have themselves been made possible by that hearsay.
