"There is a sense in which everyone can admit that religious experiences occur: for people do report having experiences which they take to be perceptions of God. But then, won't the acceptance of some kind of principle of credulity require one to regard these reports as prima facie evidence that such people have veridical perceptions of God? No. The reported content of these experiences is compatible with ever so many hypotheses about the nature of the creators of the world, including hypotheses involving neglectful or deceptive creators, and hypotheses on which there are no creators. Hence, all that a reasonable principle of credulity could require is that one accept that such people do have experiences with the reported content; that these people take the content of these experiences to be experiences of a particular deity should not provide one with any reason to suppose that the experiences really are of that deity. Indeed, more strongly, one could not take these experiences to be of a particular deity unless one had come to believe in the existence of that deity. (It should also be noted that principles of credulity must be carefully constrained: reports of experiences of alien spacecraft landing in suburban backyards surely should not be taken to constitute even prima facie evidence that there have been alien spacecraft landing in suburban backyards.)" Graham Oppy, "In Defense of Weak Agnosticism" (1995)