ABSTRACT
Countless individuals claim to have had a religious experience of one sort or another. One study indicates that at least thirty percent of the global population has had such an experience.1 For some, these experiences provide first-hand evidence or proof for the reality of what the experiencer (the one having the experience) believes in and perhaps even for his or her religion as a whole. For others, they are illusions or delusions, psychological experiences brought on by a number of different but purely natural factors. In this chapter we will explore the meaning and diversity of religious experience. We will examine arguments which claim that religious experience provides justification for religious beliefs and rebuttals to those arguments. We will also look at attempts to offer purely naturalistic explanations of religious experience.
