Religious Experience without Belief? Toward an Imaginative Account of Religious Engagement

It is commonly supposed that a certain kind of belief is necessary for religious experience. Yet it is not clear that this must be so. In this article, I defend the possibility that a subject could have a genuine emotional religious experience without thereby necessarily believing that the purported object of her experience corresponds to reality and/or is the cause of her experience. Imaginative engagement, I argue, may evoke emotional religious experiences that may be said to be both genuine and appropriate, despite not necessarily including beliefs of the aforementioned kind.I go on to maintain that such religious engagement is compatible not only with non-belief but also with disbelief.