ABSTRACT
Does science offer us a suffi ciently rich and promising framework within which to explain MEs? Supposing it to be so, can the theist help herself to whatever explanations science has produced, only adding the rider that the causes found by science are just God’s way of working-in the case of theistic MEs, that they are God’s way of providing human beings with perceptual experiences of Himself? Contrariwise, if that pig lacks legs and we are faced with a stark choice between natural causes and God, which is the better explanation? My answers to these three questions will be: yes, no, and science. In the course of defending the third answer, I will be arguing that the available naturalistic explanations are so much better than the supernaturalistic ones that even if one accepts a principle of credulity, one still ought not conclude that mystics are in touch with the divine. That’s because the naturalistic explanations supply effective and unrefuted overriders for mystically based theistic beliefs.1
