How much can we learn from experience?  Quite a bit, actually.  To exist is to experience, and to experience is to exist.
    The larger question, however, is this:  how much should we believe our experience? Specifically, I think of the religious experience.  Go around the world and talk to people of every faith; they all will tell you that they "feel" or "experience" the spirituality of their religious experience.  And, they add, they "know" they do.
     I have no doubt that these people feel something.  I do not dispute that they experience religious sensation.  If experience is all they use to justify their religious convictions, however, we are obliged to look at their claims with a measure of skepticism. Though they "know" they are experiencing, how can we know that they are, other than their assertion to this effect?
     Unless the religious experience is grounded in and connected to a measure, big or small, of materiality, though it may be thoroughly wonderful to those who taste it, we have no reason to suppose that we will, too.  Anyone can have an experience, and anyone can have feelings.  Anyone.
     If the person of religion is to justify her experience as being universally true, she must demonstrate that it reflects and corresponds to earthly reality.  She must prove that her experience, while it may well have a supernatural basis, has a natural basis, too.
     And she can.  A solely ethereal God is of no use to anyone.  A God who is both metaphysical and physical, however, will speak to all of us, for he will speak to what we are:  physical creatures living in a metaphysically present world.
     It's difficult to see any other way for God to explain himself to us.