Abstract Can visual experience represent deific properties? I argue that it can. Some perceptual experiences, I argue, could represent properties like being a creation of God or being a manifestation of divine beauty . To defend this thesis, I use Susanna Siegel’s method of phenomenal contrast. I compare an ordinary perception of an object with a perception of the same object during a similar experience in which it appears imbued with transcendent significance. These experiences differ phenomenologically. The best explanation of this difference, I argue, is that in the second experience a deific property partly constitutes the visual phenomenology. I consider several rival explanations—shifts in attention, post-attentive gestalt properties, inference from lower-level features, cognitive phenomenology, emotional accompaniment, background mood—and argue that none adequately accounts for the contrast. I also argue that genuine cognitive penetration is compatible with, rather than opposed to, deific perception. If deific perception is real, it has significant epistemic consequences: perceptual experience may furnish defeasible, prima facie justification for some theistic beliefs, connecting the high-level-content debate in philosophy of perception with long-standing questions about the evidential force of religious experience.
Hamid Nourbakhshi (2026) studied this question.