‘all in the mind?’ revision summary. religious experience the claim that religious experience...

‘All in the mind?’ revision summary


Religious experience

The claim that religious experience can tell us nothing about God because it is ‘all in

the mind’ strikes at the heart of the problem of religious experience:

‘If you’ve had such an experience, you may find yourself firmly believing that it was

real. But don’t expect the rest of us to take your word for it, especially if we have the

slightest familiarity with the brain and its powerful workings.’ (Richard Dawkins)

The study of religious experience, which took off with William James’ definitive study

in 1902, has put the topic at the forefront of current theological debate, with the

fields of neuro-theology and psychology making considerable contributions.


Peter Donovan

‘Awareness of God, oneness with God, the sense of his presence…is

vital for religious belief. It has kept it alive in the past and makes it

plausible for millions of people today… What such experiences do is

generate a sense of knowing God.’


William James

William James’ study identified four characteristics that he suggested

were shared by all genuine religious experience:

noetic (revealing new knowledge)

ineffable (inexpressible)

passive (not generated by the experient)

transient (not long-lasting)


Rudolph Otto

Rudolph Otto famously coined the term ‘numinous’ to encapsulate the feelings

of awe and wonder generated by religious experience.

Above all, however, religious experience generates a sense of presence and

closeness to God/the divine, a sense that is invariably so overwhelming to the

experient that the cognitive fallout is irrelevant to them: alternative

explanations will inevitably fail to count against their conviction that they have

decisively experienced God.


The weight of experience

There can be no doubt that religious experience plays a significant role in religious

belief.

As Peter Donovan observes, it is ‘particularly attractive to Christians and consistent

with the teaching of the Bible about how God is known’.

The sheer weight of testimony to religious experience means that it presents a real

challenge to those who would reject the claims of the experient that it can, in any

significant way, reveal God.


William Alston and William Wainwright

Alston and Wainwright both argue that genuine religious experience is

self-authenticating.

The subjective nature of the experience presents no difficulties to the

experient, who is under no more obligation to justify their conviction

that their experience has given them an overwhelming sense of God’s

reality than they are under to justify the subjective claim ‘I am in pain’.


Richard Swinburne

Richard Swinburne famously supports the cumulative argument for the existence of

God by way of religious experience, suggesting that it ‘tips the balance’ in favour of

God’s existence.

He argues that religious experience is consistent with the nature of a loving God

whom it is reasonable to expect would want to interact with his creation on at least

some occasions.

Perhaps more significantly still, he proposes the principles of testimony and

credulity, which he considers, are principles of rationality.


Patricia Churchland

An equal number of scholars are more persuaded that religious experience is ‘all in

the mind’.

Patricia Churchland observes that ‘the brain is capable of lots and lots of

hallucinatory activity. It’s one of the things it does best, so we need to keep our wits

about us and decide what is real and what’s just imaginary’.

Churchland is right — the human brain, a great evolutionary advantage, came at a

price. Humans are the only animals that can anticipate their own death. To

compensate for this fearful knowledge, the limbic system and temporal lobes also

evolved to provide a capacity for imagination and creativity, developing a religious

sense that enables humans to cope with the prospect of death and offers them hope

for this life and the next.


The ‘God helmet’ (1)

Canadian neuroscientist Michael Persinger developed the famous ‘God helmet’,

which tests the effect of electrical stimulation on the parts of the brain associated

with a sense of God arising from religious experience.

It targets the relatively mysterious part of the brain called the forty hertz component,

which is responsible for giving humans their sense of self-identity. By suppressing

this part of the brain, the sense of individuality is temporarily lost. The right and left

temporal lobes feel separated from each other, with each part experiencing that

there is ‘something there’ but not knowing what it is.

The brain, in a sense, is freed from the limitations of the self and experiences

infinity, or God.


The ‘God helmet’ (2)

Persinger, however, is not persuaded that God is responsible for these feelings. In

the laboratory he has created all the sensations associated with religious experience,

but he concludes that such feelings are simply down to ‘a few seconds of electrical

activity in the normal human brain’.

Persinger’s experiment revealed that subjects with a high level of limbic activity —

sensations associated with a sense of hearing the individual’s name called at night,

and a non-empirical sense of calling or destiny — are more likely to have an

experience under the helmet.


Trusting intuition

Despite A. J. Ayer’s acerbic observation that ‘those philosophers who

fill their books with assertions that they intuitively “know” this or that

religious “truth” are merely providing material for the psychoanalyst’,

Alston argues that most mystics are intelligent, well-balanced people

and that because some religious experiences can be explained

neurologically or psychologically, it doesn’t follow that all of them can

be.


Fraser Watts

Fraser Watts, reader in theology and science at the University of Cambridge, also

challenges this ‘nothing but’ approach to religious experience.

While Francis Crick claimed that human beings are ‘nothing but a bundle of neurons’,

Watts argues that this defies common sense and takes no account of the reality of

our thoughts and feelings.

Watts suggests that it should be no shock to the believer that the brain is involved in

religious experience and this is consistent with the theology of the incarnation.

As God involved himself directly with humanity in the person of Jesus, he makes

himself known through the activity of the human brain.


Corporate experience

Hare argues that in moral decision making we need to consider our own preferences

and those of others. ‘equal preferences count equally, whatever their content’.

People are happy when they get what they prefer but this may clash with the

preferences of others.

Hare says we need to ‘stand in someone else’s shoes’ and try to imagine what

someone else might prefer.

We should treat everyone, including ourselves, with impartiality — he also argues for

universalisability.


I-You

Despite the obvious problems of intuition, Donovan allows that not all experience of

God must be illusory, nor should we dismiss those who claim to have religious

experience as talking ‘simple minded nonsense’.

The possibility that people are made aware of God’s reality and activity remains

probable as long as it remains a matter of probability whether Christian teachings

are true or not.

At the heart of such experience is the notion of I-You, as coined by Martin Buber.

Theologians who argue that God can be known by personal encounter draw

particularly on the special nature of person-to-person encounters. Since God is

personal, it is reasonable to believe that he would be made known through personal

encounter — I-You rather than I-It.


‘Experience of’ vs ‘knowledge about’

Donovan only reached this conclusion after carefully and objectively reviewing a

range of evidence raised against knowing God by experience.

He allows that it is a ‘risky business’ to claim to know something without being

able to offer reasons for that claim, and notes that ‘irrational and misguided

things’ are said and done on that basis.


A. J. Ayer

A. J. Ayer certainly does not resist this conclusion. Having established, on the

basis of Logical Positivism, that there are ‘no transcendent truths of religion’, he

defends his claim that religious experiences are interesting only ‘from the

psychological point of view’.

He rejects ‘mystical intuition’ as offering no knowledge at all, but rather being

the fall-back position of the mystic who has no empirical evidence to offer in

defence of his or her claim to have knowledge of God.

For Ayer, religious experience offers no ‘information about the external world’,

but instead gives ‘indirect information about the condition of [the mystic’s]

mind’.


Conclusion

Are we satisfied with the evolutionary explanation of the origin of the religious sense,

or does it point to something beyond that: a personal, transcendent being who, out

of love, seeks to make himself known to his creation?

While that question remains unanswered and, perhaps, unanswerable, opinions such

as those of Sam Harris will continue to be attractive to many thinkers and to the

general non-religious population:

‘We have names for people who have beliefs for which there is no rational

justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them ‘religious’,

otherwise they are likely to be called ‘mad’, ‘psychotic’ or ‘delusional’. Whilst

religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.’

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