John Kwan's Argument Analysis

Kwan argues that religious experience can offer prima facie justification, or PFJ. He defines PFJ as follows: “An experience has PFJ if the claims of the experience are probably true unless there are positive reasons to the contrary” (Kwan 507). He will frame the argument in terms of justification for the individual having the experience; he is not arguing that everyone should believe in God on the basis of religious experience. Rather, if the argument succeeds, it will show that those who have had religious experiences of God (of the right sort) have prima facie justification for belief in God.

Kwan’s argument is based on what he calls the principle of critical trust, or PCT, which is derived from his notion of prima facie justification. He gives a moderate and a weak form of the PCT; the moderate PCT asserts that noetic experience (of which religious experience is one type) provides PFJ for beliefs based on them. The weak PCT says that they provide some, but insufficient, justification for such beliefs; they can lend weight as part of a cumulative case for some belief, …show more content…
The argument runs as follows: (1) If it seems to S that p on the basis of experience E, and E belongs to a well-established type of experience, then S is justified in believing p in the absence of any defeaters for p. (2) Theistic experience is a well-established type of experience. (3) It seems to me that God exists on the basis of a theistic experience E. (4) Theistic experience E is not defeated. (5) Therefore, I am justified in believing that God exists (Kwan 512). It is expected that premise (3) will go unchallenged, since it is simply a self-report. Thus, the defender of the argument has three premises to defend: that the Type Principle of Critical Trust (of which premise (1) is a form) is true, that theistic experience meets the criteria for a well-established type, and that there are no defeaters for theistic