Based on the author's thesis (Th. D.)--Duke Divinity School, 2014, titled: The problem of perception and the perception of God : John McDowell and the theology of religious experience.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 457-490) and index.

Introduction -- The problem of perception and the perception of God -- Freeing theology from the problem of perception -- Marion, Alston, and the myth of the given -- Preller, Hector, and Sellarsian coherentism -- McDowell's naturalized Platonism as a minimal empiricism -- Religious experience in modernity : an exculpatory explanation -- Gregory of Nyssa : a minimally empiricist reformulation? -- Christian religious experience : a posttherapeutic proposal.

The central claim in this work is that there is a radical mistake in many contemporary accounts that require grounding a theological story of God's availability to us in experience in a prior general philosophical theory of perception. Instead, it is argued that the philosophical problem of perception is a pseudoproblem. The study concludes with a new reading of Gregory of Nyssa and his theology of the spiritual senses, which is free from the bewitchment of the problem of perception.