Alston's Essay On Perceiving God

Something I found very interesting about Alston’s essay on “Perceiving God” was their notion of how one’s experience of God, and their beliefs about the being which they call God, play a tremendous role in one’s understanding of God. In short, it seems that Alston’s views one’s religious experiences as being validated, and given context, through the context of religious beliefs they share in their culture. Thus, the phenomenon of belief in a religion, says Alston, has to be predicated on the phenomenon of experience of religious themes, or encounters with God. Or this seems to be Alston’s general thesis. People cannot simply find collective value in their religious beliefs, without having had the shared basis of experience of the thing those beliefs are supposed to refer to. And this further leads Alston to assert that any reductions of the relgious experience, any analyses of the religious experience, or religious beliefs, which ignores this shared basis of experience, is highly reductive of the relgious experience, and religious belief.
I found this rather interesting to read about, since it implied questions of what really differentiated naturalistic explanations from religious experiences in the question of faith. Now, presumably, a naturalistic explanation is not dependent on faith in quite the same way as the religious explanation for a phenomena. Whereas the naturalistic explanation needs to be able to describe phenomena under multiple conditions, repeatedly, in order to be held as valid, a religious explanation does not have to do this; partly for the fact that the contents of religious experience are held to be beyond the natural world (and so subjecting these contents to a naturalistic explanation is inherently unfair from Jordan’s view), and partly for the fact that faith—rather than tangible evidence—becomes the ultimate basis of truth within the religious