Kai-Man Kwan

Kai-Man Kwan is a Hong Kong philosopher of religion, associated with the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University. Trained in analytic philosophy, he has worked extensively on the epistemology of religious experience, drawing particularly on the work of William Alston and Richard Swinburne. His monograph The Rainbow of Experiences, Critical Trust, and God (2011) develops a principle of critical trust applied to religious experience, arguing that theistic experiences possess prima facie evidential force comparable to perceptual experience. He also engages cumulative-case apologetics in the tradition of Basil Mitchell and Swinburne, integrating arguments from cosmology, design, morality, and religious experience. Kwan has published in Chinese and English, mediating between Anglophone analytic philosophy of religion and Sinophone Christian intellectual contexts, and has contributed to volumes addressing the New Atheism. Critics question whether the principle of credulity can be extended from sense perception to religious experience without overgenerating support for incompatible religious claims, and whether cumulative-case strategies escape the objection that weak arguments cannot reinforce one another. Kwan defends the legitimacy of broadly Reidian and Swinburnean approaches against such objections, while engaging Chinese cultural and religious diversity as a test case for his epistemology.