The central thesis of this book is that experiential awareness of God, or as I shall be saying, the perception of God, makes an important contribution to the grounds of religious belief. More specifically, a person can become justified in holding certain kinds of beliefs about God by virtue of perceiving God as being or doing so-and-so. The kinds of beliefs that can be so justified I shall call "M-beliefs" ('M' for manifestation). M-beliefs are beliefs to the effect that God is doing something currently vis-à-vis the subject—comforting, strengthening, guiding, communicating a message, sustaining the subject in being—or to the effect that God has some (allegedly) perceivable property— goodness, power, lovingness. The intuitive idea is that by virtue of my being aware of God as sustaining me in being I can justifiably believe that God is sustaining me in being. This initial formulation will undergo much refinement in the course of the book.
One qualification should be anticipated right away. The above formulation of my central thesis seems to be referring to God and thus to presuppose that God exists. Moreover, in using the "success" terms, 'the awareness of God' and 'the perception of God', it seems to presuppose that people are sometimes genuinely aware of God and do genuinely perceive God. Since the book is designed for a general audience that includes those who do not antecedently accept those presuppositions, this is undesirable. We can avoid these presuppositions by the familiar device of specifying the experiences in question as those that are taken by the subject to be an awareness of God (or would be so taken if the question arose). One can agree that there are experiences that satisfy this description even if one does not believe that God exists or that people ever genuinely perceive Him.
This is basically a work in epistemology, the epistemology of religious perceptual beliefs. I will go into descriptive questions concerning the experi-
Product Comments