Religious Experience as perception of God

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Religious Experience as Perception of God is some what of a prequel to Alston’s book Perceiving God in which he delves deeper and expounds more on his arguments concerning religious experience and perception. In Religious Experience as Perception of God, William Alston is focusing on direct awareness of God versus indirect awareness of God and presents his “Theory of Appearing” model of perception, in which he states that something presenting itself to you in a certain way, apart from your judging and /or conceptualizing it constitutes perception (Peterson, 45). Alston has divided this essay into five parts in an effort to present his argument gradually and in stages, I can only assume for better understanding and clarity, however, his technical writing makes it hard for the non-professional philosopher to fully understand his arguments. Alston uses section one as a foundation or introduction for his discourse; explaining that what he is calling an “experience of God” encompasses an array of all experiences the subject has related to the aforementioned experience and giving his reasons for focusing on “direct experience of God” and “nonsensory experiences” (Peterson,45-47). In Section two, Alston advocates a “perceptual model” of mystical experience (Peterson, 47). Alston explains this concept by first addressing sense perception as the form of perception we are most familiar with and it is by generalizing from this form that we are able to gain a wider idea of perception (Ibid, pg. 47). Alston asserts that presentation is the phenomenon at the heart of perception, yet essentially independent of belief, judgment, or conceptualization (Ibid, pg.47). Alston asserts that mystical experience is similar to the perception of physical objects in sense experience (Peterson, 47-48). In Section III, Alston applies the perceptual model to mystical experience,
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