[ACC] How Much Significance Should We Ascribe To Spiritual Experiences?

A 2019 Adversarial Collaboration Contest entry (GUEST: Jeremiah Gruenberg, a theology PhD + Christian-spirituality podcaster, and Seth Schoen, an SF technologist) on whether the empirical study of personal spiritual experiences justifies taking them seriously as evidence of an important component of human life. A thorough, heavily-cited (92 footnotes) nine-section survey: definitions (empiricism vs rationalism; spirituality vs religion); the psychology-of-religion literature (James, Hardy, Hood/Hill/Spilka; ~1/3-1/2 of people report a significant religious experience; neuropsych; agency-detection; the reductionism debate); William Alston's Perceiving God epistemology (mystical perception as analogous to sense perception; 'M-beliefs'; and the striking epistemic-circularity argument that we can't non-circularly prove even ordinary sense perception reliable, which 'levels the playing field' between spiritual and sensory perception); NDEs via Zaleski (cross-cultural consistency; the materialist objections and their limits; her symbolic-not-literal stance); entheogens (the Griffiths 2019 'God-encounter' PLOS ONE study where 2/3 of prior atheists no longer identified as atheist after; the Good Friday/Marsh Chapel experiment; Huston Smith; Sam Harris's caution that context-produced experiences can't confirm specific doctrines; the Eleusinian Mysteries' kykeon/ergot hypothesis); Schoen's 'problem of dreaming' objection (dreams feel real and meaningful yet aren't veridical); and an epistemic-humility perspectives section (blind-men-and-the-elephant, read both ways). Both authors moved toward agreement with the (deliberately mild) thesis -- Gruenberg strongly, Schoen (the initial skeptic) weakly.

Quality 73 · Strong. A serious, broad, intellectually-honest scholarly survey with genuine epistemic payoffs (the Alston epistemic-circularity 'leveling' argument; the Bayesian reframing of mystical perception as evidence; the dreaming objection), and the adversarial format genuinely works (a theist and a skeptic both move). But it is dry and literature-review-heavy -- more careful synthesis of others' work than original argument -- and lands on a soft, low-controversy thesis. Solid Strong: above the Christmas (64) and Automation (71) ACC entries, below the quantitatively-sharper Eating-Meat ACC (78) and the strong 'Your Review' finalists.

Claude’s paradigm shift 42 · Moderate. Moderate. Synthesizes and fairly weighs existing scholarship (Alston, James, Zaleski, Griffiths, Harris) rather than introducing a new frame; the empiricism-as-common-language and skepticism-levels-the-field points are mildly fresh applications, not novel at publication.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Minor (2). A niche scholarly contest entry; real-world effect is essentially within-blog/community. It surveys consequential developments (e.g. psychedelic-assisted therapy) but does not itself move laws, institutions, or broad practice.