Lessons In Apologetics #3: Experientialism & Evidentialism  The
next methodology is experientialism. Though fideism strives to
make faith alone the justification for religious knowledge or
belief, Geisler observes that this faith is ultimately justified
in terms of an experience had by the individual (65).  To the
experientialist, God or the Ultimate is not so much something to
be understood or comprehended but rather felt. Stretching all
the way back to the Neoplatonist Plotinus, experientialism views
what the believer refers to as God as “the one beyond all
knowing and being (66).”  In fact, God is so far beyond what the
finite mind is capable of comprehending that to really say
anything about God is highly inaccurate as to do so would be
limiting God. As such, the best the individual can aspire to is
an intuitive mystical union with the universal by turning inward
through an ascetic detachment from the physical world around us
in pursuit of a metaphysical unity.  Friedrich Schleiermacher
provided for a mor