The central concern of this article is the critique advanced by postmodern thinkers against Alston’s account of religious experience, approached here through an analytic–critical methodology. Alston, drawing upon the notion of ‘doxastic practices,’ conceives of religious experience as analogous to sense perception and defends its epistemic legitimacy. He characterizes religious experience as a form of non-inferential justification that may be regarded as valid within the framework of a given epistemic system. This approach, on the one hand, is rooted in reliabilism, while on the other hand seeks to avoid the pitfalls of traditional foundationalism. Gadamer’s hermeneutical critique, which emphasizes the indispensability of pre-understanding, together with Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism, demonstrates that epistemic systems such as religious experience cannot be evaluated from an external standpoint. Furthermore, Lyotard’s rejection of meta-narratives undermines the epistemic legitimacy of religious experience as a ‘universal apprehension of the divine.’ Finally, feminist approaches underscore the inescapable entanglement of religious experience with structures of power, gender, and ideology. The conclusion reached is that, although Alston makes a significant step toward the rationalization of religious experience, his account remains vulnerable to contextualist and interpretivist challenges, and thus requires reconsideration in the direction of hermeneutical and phenomenological methodologies.

Keywords: Alston, religious perception, doxastic practices, postmodernism.

     

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