A New Exposition of William Alston's View on the Reliability of the Epistemology of Religious Experience

Are the beliefs founded on religious experiences justified? William Alston tries, through postulating a similarity between religious experiences and sensory experiences, to show that the beliefs founded on religious experiences are as justified as the beliefs founded on sensory experiences. In this article, we try to defend Alston’s claim using an approach which is to some extent different from the one adopted by Alston. At first, we introduce an epistemic justification system by means of the concept of reliability of epistemic practices; then by introducing three steps/levels for each epistemic practice we reduce the reliability of epistemic practices to the reliability of these steps/levels. Finally, we will show that an epistemic practice founded on religious experiences is as reliable as practices founded on sensory experiences for the basic reason that each step/level of this experience is as reliable as its corresponding step/level in an epistemic practice founded on sensory experiences.