فصلنامه روش شناسی علوم انسانی
پیاپی 38 (بهار 1383)

Among the important kinds of religious experiences one can refer to the interpretational experience.Using a descriptive and analytic procedure, this article seeks to study this sort of religious experience from the Islamic point of view, explaining and analysing the essential Quranic insights into these kinds of religious experience. The article first gives conceptual explanation for the interpretational experience and goes on to mention its reliation to religious explanation and then divides the explanations into rational and irrational ones, showing that religious interpreatations are rational.In addition to the above issues, the article seeks to cast light on the interaction between the interpretational experience and human states and emotins, the relation between the interpretational experience and certain essential Islamic doctrines, including Unity of Divine Acts and Divine Names, and gives some curious remarks on the erroneous character of interpretational experience and its objectivity.

The present article addresses the epistemic value of religious experience as espoused by William Alston, one of the eminent figures in philosophy of religion. The discussion on the epistemic justification in Alston's epistemology comes first in this article. In order to examine the procedure which leads to the formation of religious beliefs, the writer of the article seeks to cast light on the chain of arguments Alston follows to provide a distinction between the idea of sense perception and religious perception from the perspective of epistemic justification. Putting forward two approaches to the epitemic justification, i. e., evaluative and normative approaches, he shows that the epistemic pretension of sense perception can be justified only on the basis of minimum approach to the normative justification, and then examines the religious (Christian) perception approach against this attitude towards epistemic justification, concluding that this epistemic approach, like the other one, is justifiable and religious experience can justify certain religious beliefs under certain conditions with the stipulation that such a prima facie justification may be undermined or confuted by other strong counter-arguments.

Religious experience'' is one of the very important issues in the contemporary philosophy of religion to which there are various approaches. In accordance to this view, revelation is not to be considered as a proposition, but a kind of religious or mystical experience which comes to the divine prophets.Having given a preliminary glimpse of the religious experience, the present article which is devoted to the study of this view seeks to provide the definition of religious experience and its nature and comes to deal with it in the tradition of Christian liberal theology and in that of the Muslim thinkers and goes on to give some critical remarks on the aforementioned view. The article is concluded by mentioning the differences between revelation and religious experience and the effects of such a view on religious faith.

Hume's study in the realm of philosophy of religion was motivated after he had carefully verified the truth of the religious beliefs and examined the causes of such a phenomenon as religion in history and various societes. In his studies of religion, Hume often applied the same method which was termed ``experimental reasoning'' or ``causal inference'' by him. His application of this method was due to the fact that he was an empiricist, holding that our judgments on all things around, including what constitutes religion like belief in the existence of God or the occurrence of miracles, are acceptable on the condition that they are proved by casual inference. The issues examined by Hume in philosophy of religion were influenced by this methodological approach on the one hand, and were slected under certain historical condition of his time on the other. For, in his time, scholars and men of science were mainly interested in ``the argument from miracles'' and so on. Accordingly, these issues were given priority in the realm of his studies in philosophy of religion.