THE BAYESIAN ARGUMENT FROM RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE TO THEISM

Abstract

The article presents and critically discusses Richard Swinburne's argu­ment from religious experience presented in The Existence of God (2004), one of the most important works in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. The argument proposed rests on some concepts of the probabilistic theory of induction that are introduced here. The paper then explains elements of the perception theory as well as the theory of justification of perceptual beliefs, which are supposed by Swinburne. Next, it discusses four challenges against his argument from religious experience. In the last section, two answers to the challenges are considered, so that the phenomenon of religious experience can still be employed in the debate about the existence of God in an argumentative way.