Understanding Religious Experience From Conviction to Life’s Meaning

In this book, Paul K. Moser offers a new approach to religious experience and the kind of evidence it provides. Here, he explains the nature of theistic and nontheistic experience in relation to the meaning of human life and its underlying evidence, with special attention given to the perspectives of Tolstoy, Buddha, Confucius, Krishna, Moses, the apostle Paul, and Muhammad. Among the many topics explored in this timely volume are religious experience characterized in a unifying conception, religious experience naturalized relative to science, religious experience psychologized in merely psychological phenomena, and religious experience cognized relative to potential defeaters from evil, divine hiddenness, and religious diversity. Understanding Religious Experience will benefit those interested in the nature of religion and can be used in relevant courses in religious studies, philosophy, theology, biblical studies, and the history of religion. The book will enable enquirers about religion to: • understand the importance of religious experience; • identify where key religious evidence can be found in religious lives; • and understand how religious experience bears on the meaning of human life from a range of diverse and influential religious perspectives. Paul K. Moser is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He has published widely, most recently as author of The God Relationship (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He serves as editor of Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society and Cambridge Elements in Religion and Monotheism.