Edward L. Schoen a1 a1 Department of Philosophy and Religion, Western Kentucky
University,
Bowling Green KY 42101-3576
Abstract
While reports of sensory encounters with the divine come from a
variety
of religious traditions, philosophers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and
Robert Oakes
have argued that such experiences of incorporeal divine beings are impossible.
Nevertheless, by clarifying various relations among acts of perception,
perceptual
detections of presence and kinds of perceptual recognition, the sensory
perception of
imperceptible things emerges as a coherent possibility. So, even if they
are essentially
unobservable, incorporeal divine beings still fall well within the range
of normal
human sense perception.
