Description:
Defends a new type of epistemology, the Critical Trust Approach, and then applies it to the experience of God in the contemporary multicultural context.
Brief description: Kai-man Kwan is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Review Quotes:
"The argument to God 'from religious experience' is often presented as an argument from a very peculiar type of experience which religious people have, quite unlike our other experiences. This book is unique in describing so comprehensively and within one volume the data of many different kinds of related human experience, data often hard to describe and so easy to neglect. It thus locates the 'argument from religious experience' within a rich and deep background, which brings it to life and makes it much more plausible. I am very happy to commend this wide-ranging book, to what I hope will be a wide-ranging public." --From the Foreword by Richard Swinburne, FBA, Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, University of Oxford, UK
"Kwan's book is an attempt to articulate an epistemology based on the notion of critical trust, a concept broadly based upon the Principle of Credulity articulated by Richard Swinburne in the assessment of religious experience. [...] He does not restrict his interest to religious experience, but articulates the place of critical trust to a 'rainbow of experiences' that include moral, aesthetic, theistic, and interpersonal experience, as well as our experience of the natural world, ourselves, and more. Kwan offers an epistemology that is an alternative to narrow empiricism (especially), foundationalism, coherentism, Popperian fallibilism, and skepticism. [...] Kwan's work is very clearly laid out, closely argued, and a fine contribution to a form of philosophy whose value he initially doubted." --Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (Reviewed by Phillip H. Wiebe, Trinity Western University)