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WillowOne's Positions

Religious Experience

My Positions

  1. Religious experiences happen, to people of every religion and of none. They are states of the brain, and what they tell us about is the brain.
  2. The content of the experience is supplied by the culture of the person having it, which is why Catholics meet Mary and Hindus meet Krishna, and why nobody has ever met a god they had not heard of.
  3. The experience is not evidence for the thing experienced. The argument is dealt with under Experiential Argument; this note is about what the experience is.

Notes

  1. The shape of the thing. William James identified four marks of the mystical experience in 1902: it cannot be put into words, it feels like knowledge, it is brief, and it feels as if it happens to you. The second of these, the "noetic quality", is the important one. The experience comes with an overwhelming sense of certainty attached, and I have argued under Certainty that the feeling of certainty is a psychological state that correlates poorly with being right. A feeling of knowing is not knowing.
  2. It can be switched on. Temporal lobe epilepsy produces hyper-religiosity often enough to have a name in the clinical literature. Psilocybin, given under controlled conditions at Johns Hopkins in 2006, produced a "complete mystical experience" in about two-thirds of volunteers, who rated it a year later as among the most meaningful events of their lives; the experiment has since been repeated with clergy. Sleep deprivation, fasting, rhythmic movement and group chanting, which is to say the standard equipment of every revival and retreat, reliably produce the same states. A thing that can be caused by a chemical is a thing the brain does.
  3. The "God helmet". Michael Persinger reported in the 1980s and 1990s that weak magnetic fields applied to the temporal lobes produced a "sensed presence" in most subjects. A Swedish team in 2005 ran the experiment double-blind and found that the sensed presence followed suggestibility, not the field. Either way the experience is produced by the apparatus of the mind: by the magnet, or by expectation, and neither is a god.
  4. Speaking in tongues. Brain imaging of Pentecostal glossolalia shows reduced activity in the frontal regions associated with self-control; the speakers are not faking, in the sense that they are not deliberately composing. Linguists who have analysed the speech find that it is not a language: it uses only the sounds of the speaker's native tongue, has no grammar, and conveys nothing that can be decoded. It is a trance behaviour that the congregation has taught itself, and it is learned, as the fact that it only occurs in congregations that practise it shows.
  5. The decisive observation. Religious experience is distributed exactly as expectation is. The visions come in the form the visionary was raised to expect, to people who were seeking them, in settings designed to produce them. Hindus do not meet Jesus unprompted; evangelicals do not meet Ganesh. A real external object would not care what you were expecting. This is also why the experience is unavailable to people like me, which believers sometimes offer as a diagnosis and which is in fact the prediction of the naturalistic account.
  6. None of this makes the experience worthless. Awe, dissolution of the self, the sense of unity: these are states worth having, and the psychedelic research suggests they are therapeutically powerful. The error is in the inference, not the experience. See Spirituality for what I keep and what I decline.

Sources

  • James, W., The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lectures XVI–XVII
  • Griffiths, R. R. et al., "Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance", Psychopharmacology 187 (2006)
  • Granqvist, P. et al., "Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields", Neuroscience Letters 379 (2005)
  • Newberg, A. B. et al., "The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia", Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 148 (2006)
  • Samarin, W. J., Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (1972)

Also see