The commentary of Shabara elaborated on the epistemological themes of the sutras; in particular, Shabara sought to establish the intrinsic validity of experiences and traced the possibility of error to the presence of defects in the ways of knowing.
Secondly, some of the proposals, at least, are perfectly compatible with the validity of experiences of God.
If the Argument from Experience leads to such contradictory results, it cannot provide evidence in favor of the validity of experiences of God.
While I do not doubt the validity of her experience, I point to my experience as someone who took the drug for three years to treat attention deficit disorder.
Wainwright has argued that a naturalistic explanation is compatible with the validity of an experience since God could bring about an experience through a naturalistic medium (Wainwright, 1981, Chapter 2).
Therefore, unlike with sense perception, the failure of others to have an experience of God under conditions similar to those in which one person did, does not impugn the validity of the experience.
The empirical investigator, as such, has no special access to the critical question of the validity of religious experience.
The question of the cognitive import or the objective validity of religious experience is one of the most difficult problems encountered in the philosophy of religion.
Proponents of mysticism, such as Rudolf Otto, Rufus Jones, and W.T. Stace, maintained the validity of immediate experience of the divine, and theologians such as Emil Brunner stressed the self-authenticating character of the human being's encounter with God.
A number of thinkers have insisted on the validity of religious experience but have denied that it can be understood as wholly immediate and self-supporting, since it stands in need of analysis and critical interpretation.
