Experiential Knowledge as the Basis of Religious Consciousness

Formulation of the claim

Experiential knowledge constitutes a basis for understanding religious consciousness.

Explanation

The text links experiential knowledge to the way believers’ conception of God takes shape, while indicating that the Qur’an contributes to this formation. In this sense, the text is not presented as an external reference only, but as an element within the experiential structure in which religious consciousness takes form.

Its place in the book’s argument

This idea appears within a broader discussion of the sources of religious consciousness and how it is formed through the interplay of knowledge and lived experience. It supports the view that understanding religion is not complete through theoretical knowledge alone, but also requires attention to its experiential dimension in shaping belief and representation.

What the atom does not say

Here, the concept of experiential knowledge is not explained from a detailed theoretical perspective, nor are the mechanisms by which religious consciousness is formed set out. The text merely establishes a general link between the Qur’an and the structure of believers’ religious representation.

Brief evidence passage

When we examine closely the basic structure of the linguistic mode of expression used in the Qur’an, we discover that the validity of the holy book rests primarily on a linguistic basis. There is no doubt that the traditional believer imagines this divine validity as something conveyed in fact by supernatural means, that is, by heavenly or divine modes of transmission through the angel Gabriel… etc. (the modern anthropologist tells us that these supernatural modes are nothing more than metaphorical, imaginary, or mythical). In any case, one fixed truth remains: the tangible and perceptible manifestation of the revelation, or of the transmitted message, occurred in a human language—Arabic here—and in it we observe that the speaker of the discourse asserts itself through the use of a form

Related links

the Qur’an