Justification of Religious Belief by Near-Death Experiences

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Department of Philosophy, College of Institute For Humanities and Cultural Studies, Qom, Iran

10.22059/jpht.2024.362240.1005977

Abstract

One of the debates surrounding the issue of religious experience in the philosophy of religion is whether religious experience can be used to justify religious beliefs. Although the term “religious belief” can include various beliefs, this discussion is usually limited to proving God's existence based on religious experience. This limitation is because it is generally supposed that what is experienced in religious experience is absolute existence, or those who categorized these experiences only considered a certain type of religious experience. But if we consider the diversity of religious experiences and what is experienced within them, these experiences can be used to justify other religious beliefs, such as supernatural entities, the afterlife,  and the embodiment of deeds, ideas which are also important in the system of religious beliefs. Some of them can ultimately justify belief in God based on several arguments. In this article, regarding the variety of religious experiences, we want to show that these experiences can justify different religious beliefs. For this purpose, we will take help from near-death experiences, which can be considered a kind of religious experience, and we will show that if religious experiences are to be used to justify religious belief, these experiences have important advantages over the experience of absolute existence.

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References

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Philosophy of Religion
Volume 21, Issue 2
July 2024
Pages 89-102

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