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<p>Can visual experience represent deific properties? I argue that it can. Some perceptual experiences, I argue, could represent properties like <i>being a creation of God</i> or <i>being a manifestation of divine beauty</i>. To defend this thesis, I use Susanna Siegel’s method of phenomenal contrast. I compare an ordinary perception of an object with a perception of the same object during a similar experience in which it appears imbued with transcendent significance. These experiences differ phenomenologically. The best explanation of this difference, I argue, is that in the second experience a deific property partly constitutes the visual phenomenology. I consider several rival explanations—shifts in attention, post-attentive gestalt properties, inference from lower-level features, cognitive phenomenology, emotional accompaniment, background mood—and argue that none adequately accounts for the contrast. I also argue that genuine cognitive penetration is compatible with, rather than opposed to, deific perception. If deific perception is real, it has significant epistemic consequences: perceptual experience may furnish defeasible, prima facie justification for some theistic beliefs, connecting the high-level-content debate in philosophy of perception with long-standing questions about the evidential force of religious experience.</p>

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Does perception track deific properties? A case for deific perception

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月31日

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  • Hamid Nourbakhshi

摘要

Can visual experience represent deific properties? I argue that it can. Some perceptual experiences, I argue, could represent properties like being a creation of God or being a manifestation of divine beauty. To defend this thesis, I use Susanna Siegel’s method of phenomenal contrast. I compare an ordinary perception of an object with a perception of the same object during a similar experience in which it appears imbued with transcendent significance. These experiences differ phenomenologically. The best explanation of this difference, I argue, is that in the second experience a deific property partly constitutes the visual phenomenology. I consider several rival explanations—shifts in attention, post-attentive gestalt properties, inference from lower-level features, cognitive phenomenology, emotional accompaniment, background mood—and argue that none adequately accounts for the contrast. I also argue that genuine cognitive penetration is compatible with, rather than opposed to, deific perception. If deific perception is real, it has significant epistemic consequences: perceptual experience may furnish defeasible, prima facie justification for some theistic beliefs, connecting the high-level-content debate in philosophy of perception with long-standing questions about the evidential force of religious experience.