Knowledge

How can I persuade someone who is convinced that spiritual experience is the most reliable basis for establishing truth that empirical evidence is in fact more reliable?

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Pray for them. Just kidding, though perhaps a prayer would not be uncalled for! I wonder if your friend is an extreme skeptic when it comes to empirical experience. Perhaps he is akin to Peter Unger in his book Ignorance, in which he seeks to undermine our confidence in our claims to know about ourselves and the world. Plato seemed to adopt a position not completely unlike your friend: he appers to have held that we may be more certain of the things of reason (mathematics, knowledge of the forms) than we can about the reliability of our senses. It is easy to have some sympathy with such an outlook: I am, for example, more convinced that 2+2=4 than I am convinced that I am not merely dreaming about the website AskPhilosophers. But your friend is in an usual position. Most of the philosophers who today defend the evidential role of religious (or spiritual) experience such as Richard Swinburne, William Alston, Jerome Gellman, Caroline Franks, K.M. Kwam, etc, argue for the reliability of such experiences by analogy with the reliability of ordinary perceptual experience. In other words, they treat what you are callling empirical evidence as veridical and sound and then, while conceding that religious experiences are not as uniform and are more varied, etc, they then argue for taking religious experience seriously. In this line of reasoning, though, none of them (to my knowledge) think that "spiritual experience is the most reliable basis for establishing truth" versus "empirical evidence."

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