When Faith and Science Clash

[Faith No More]

That's my point. Is that "personal experience" a part of the cognitive faculties? Or is it the point where you analyze the experience that cognition comes in.

cog·ni·tion
Noun:
The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.

I think, at least under this defintion, that most of personal experiences fall into this category. Emotions would probably at least one aspect of personal experience that would not be considered cognitive, but understanding and analyzing our emotions would be under cognitive faculties.

Experience - pure experience - is not prima facie knowledge unless it has been processed and analyzed by our mind. The personal experience your theist felt was the result a complicated social situation and represented just a warm feeling and a presence. Using his cognitive faculties would have required him to analyze that experience. But he skipped that part and took it as the prima facie evidence of god.

I'm saying that when theists say that they feel the presence of god, they are not using their cognitive abilities. The feeling itself may very well be a result of their cognitive abilities - such as the subconscious processing the information - but since they didn't use their cognitive faculties and jumped straight to the conclusion, that is not where the fault lies.

I think the experience of god does fall under cognivitve, because under the defintion you provided cognition is knowledge gained through the senses. Any experience of god would need to be perceived, thus being filtered through the senses.

Even if the actual experience is not cognitive, I still see what the theist takes away from that experience as a failure of those cognitive abilites and not simply a failure to utilize them. Take for example the theist I mentioned before. He was actively asking people what a natural explanation for his experiences could have been, but when given different scenarios, he dismissed everything, choosing to believe it was god. I think most people, regardless of religious affiliation, will eventually consider the nature of their experiences, which is where, at the very least, they engage their cognitive faculties.