Can Religious Experience be a Legitimate Source of Knowledge?

Yes, of course. Absolutely. The question is, what kind of knowledge. Most people, especially in the past, have accepted what their senses have presented to them as reality. Thus, when someone has had visions, say, of Buddha, or Allah, or Zeus, or the Virgin Mary, they have accepted those visions as either literally real or at the very least as manifestations caused by that god. We are now, in some cultures, becoming a little more sophisticated than that, and are questioning the emotional, environmental, and neurological basis for religious thoughts, visions, and so forth. And so the kind of knowledge we are obtaining is psychological, neurological, and ethological. Why do humans have such experiences? What purpose have they served, in the course of the evolution of humanity and of cultures? It is questions like these that are just beginning to be asked (although Freud and others at the turn of the last century asked similar questions also) in the context of contemporary empirical studies.