The Psychology of Religious Knowing

The book seeks to describe the psychological processes that are involved in arriving at religious knowledge. The view that direct knowledge is impossible in the religious domain, only \'faith\' possible, is rejected. It is argued that the ways in which people come to know other things, in particular how people arrive at personal insights, is close at many points to how they arrive at religious insights. The psychological processes involved in religious knowing are described in the terminology of contemporary cognitive psychology.

Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Psychological research on religion; 3. Psychoanalytic approaches to relgious experience; 4. Faith and knowledge; 5. Analogues of religious knowing; 6. Emotional regulation and relgious attentivness; 7. Self knowledge and knowledge of God; 8. The interpretation of experience in prayer; 9. Concepts of God; 10. Recapitulation; Notes; Index.