Is the critical trust approach to religious experience incompatible with religious particularism? a reply to Michael Martin and John Hick

Abstract

In contemporary philosophy of religion, many philosophers, e.g., William Alston, argue that we should treat religious experiences as prima facie reliable unless we have reasons to doubt them. I call this a Critical Trust Approach to religious experience. John Hick and Michael Martin have argued that this approach is incompatible with a particularist solution to the problem of religious pluralism. I argue that this is a misunderstanding of the Critical Trust Approach. I further explore how a religious particularist who accepts this approach can deal with conflicts between presumptive data, and argue that the particularist approach to religious experience is not necessarily inferior to atheistic and pluralist approaches.