The Illusion of Divine Peace: Emotional Evidence and the Demand for Diagnosticity - 27

The illusion examined here is not the feeling of peace but the inference that the feeling publicly identifies a specifically Christian source. The paper separates emotional intensity and personal significance from evidential diagnosticity, then asks whether coarse peace-like affect distinguishes the Christian peace-as-sign claim from rival religious interpretations and ordinary cultural, social, and psychological pathways. Cross-cultural work on ideal affect and spiritual attribution, together with research on prayer, ritual, and religion-related emotion regulation, does not measure the required likelihoods or show identical experiences across traditions. It does establish that culturally shaped interpretation and ordinary eliciting mechanisms are serious competitors that a public source-identification claim must address. A three-way test then shows that uniqueness requires a demonstrated unique feature, a common divine source does not select specifically Christian teaching, and privileged inner discernment needs independent validation to avoid circularity. The central result is that current evidence supplies no independently validated feature that makes coarse peace-like affect publicly identify the specifically Christian source. This is an evidential limitation, not a metaphysical disproof: the experience may be genuine, beneficial, privately warranted, or divinely mediated, and a robust differentiator specified and tested independently could change the result.