Religious Experience as Consciousness Explaining Religious Experience Based on John Searle’s Theory of Consciousness

 Religious experience, as an epistemic experience, is one of the evidences of belief in existence of God, which in addition to justifying the principle of belief in God, also gives rise to knowledge of divine attributes and actions. In the contemporary era, the famous philosopher William Alston offered a new formulation of the authority of religious experience and regarded it as an epistemic experience of God with authority such as sensory experience. Alston’s theory of the epistemological validity of religious experience has been the subject of criticism, most notably the material explanation of religious experience on the one hand, and the variety and sometimes inconsistency of various religious experiences according to the past experiences of their owners on the other. Since the epistemological view of religious experience considers this experience as conscious experience, the present thesis attempts to design religious experience in the structure of consciousness, thereby explaining the validity of religious experiences and their diversity and providing a convincing answer to the two dilemmas mentioned. To this purpose, after describing various theories of consciousness, John Searle’s theory is described as the best explanation of consciousness, and then religious experience has been explained in the form of Searle’s theory of consciousness. By explaining consciousness in the context of Searle’s proposed theory, the two dilemmas of the material aspect of religious experience and the diversity of these experiences has been explained and thus has been defended the validity of religious experience. By incorporating the concept of religious experience into Searle’s explanatory paradigm, religious experience is entirely the result of neurological biological processes in the brain, and therefore creates a complex set of neurological biological phenomena, all of which cause different emotions and biological manifestations in the individual. On the other hand, the religious experience, like other intentions, is formed from a given perspective and is therefore, like other experiences, meaningful. This familiar perspective is the product of the experience of the life of the owner. So the religious experience comes from the perspective of living experience for the possessor of experience. In another part of this thesis, with the description of several linguistic theories and several theories on the philosophy of language, the dilemma of the diversity of religious languages has been explained ​​based on John Searle’s theory, that is, linguistic intentionality is derived from mental intentionality, And it has been shown that religious language can be recognized and denied in accordance with the Searle model