In the So what do people want me to write about? David Ellis asked:
Anything on the psychology of religion. Lately I’m more interested in knowing more about why people believe irrational things than in dissecting plainly bad arguments.
Which was followed by Andy Scicluna saying:
Gotta go with Ellis. A lot of Theists nowadays seem to be argueing that, since Religion and Religious experiences have no complete natural explaination, they seem to imply the existence of God. Also, I’d like to see what you’ve got on dualism (chalmerian vs theistic).
Psychology of religion is something I don’t have a lot to say about. I recently re-read a bit of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and remembered how great it was. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it, and I may blog about some of the cooler parts at some point.
In this post, though, I want to focus on Andy Scicluna’s comment, because it makes me realize that while I tend to think it’s obvious what the main issues with religious experience are, what’s obvious to me isn’t always obvious to everyone. So first: it’s a mistake to think that the best response to the appeal to religious experience is to try to “explain away” religious experience. Really, there isn’t anything about the brain we understand 100%, so we’re not going to have a 100% explanation of anything brain-related.
Some atheists, I think, have the idea that the reliability of religious experience is somehow undermined by discoveries in neuroscience. It’s hard to see how this could be so, though. Neuroscience now gives us strong reason to think that whenever something happens in the mind, there’s corresponding stuff happening in the brain. So when we make the specific discovery that there are specific kinds of events in the brain associated with religious experience, that’s just what we’d expect on general principles. It neither confirms nor disconfirms religious experiences.
This is an important general point. Waaay too much popular neuroscience boils down to, “OMG! When X happens, something happens IN YOUR BRAIN!” We’re past the point where that should be surprising. Like when someone says “pornography is bad because pornography CHANGES YOUR BRAIN!” Yeah, memory involves changes in your brain, so if you can remember watching porn, porn has changed your brain. This is just a scientifically confused way of saying “You watched it, you can’t unwatch it!”
Similarly, the fact that messing with people’s brains can induce religious experiences doesn’t prove people don’t ever genuinely experience God. Messing with people’s brains can also make them hallucinate spiders, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t ever see real spiders. If someone knows of a neuroscience-based argument against religious experience that I’m not aware of, please fill me in, but from what I know now I doubt there are any good arguments of that sort.
The real problem with religious experiences is that religious experiences are wildly inconsistent with each other. Not just sometimes inconsistent, the way visual experiences are, but pretty much all the time: Mormons routinely have religious experiences that seem to them to validate Mormonism, Catholics routinely have… well, you get the idea. Adherents of some Eastern religions even have what could be considered “atheist religious experiences”; here’s Richard Carrier on an experience he had back when he was a Taoist:
The most fantastic experience I had was like that times ten. It happened at sea, well past midnight on the flight deck of a cutter, in international waters two hundred miles from the nearest land. I had not slept for over 36 hours, thanks to a common misfortune of overlapping duty schedules and emergency rescue operations. For hours we had been practicing helicopter landing and refuelling drills and at long last the chopper was away and everything was calm. The ship was rocking slowly in a gentle, dark sea, and I was alone beneath the starriest of skies that most people have never seen. I fell so deeply into the clear, total immersion in the real that I left my body and my soul expanded to the size of the universe, so that I could at one thought perceive, almost ‘feel’, everything that existed in perfect and total clarity. It was like undergoing a Vulcan Mind Meld with God. Naturally, words cannot do justice to something like this. It cannot really be described, only experienced, or hinted at. What did I see? A beautiful, vast, harmonious and wonderful universe all at peace with the Tao. There was plenty of life scattered like tiny seeds everywhere, but no supernatural beings, no gods or demons or souls floating about, no heaven or hell. Just a perfect, complete universe, with no need for anything more. The experience was absolutely real to me. There was nothing about it that would suggest it was a dream or a mere flight of imagination. And it was magnificent.
I’ll do another post on dualism at some point, but the issue of why some kinds of dualism are ruled out is a neurosciency one, so I’ll toss in a link to Sam Harris here, who said it better than I could. I should mention that Chalmersian dualism isn’t the only kind of dualism that tries to avoid these issues. Richard Swinburne wants the soul to be responsible for personal identity through time, but I think he accepts that memory, personality, intelligence, etc. is dependent on the brain. I reject Swinburne’s view, but more because I don’t see the point than for a definite scientific reason.
Most Theists I’ve met will say that every “experience” is valid. They will say that, although every recipient can sense God, that doesn’t mean their specific Religious beliefs are true. They just have the power to detect a higher power. I guess it’s an answer, even if it is a bad answer.
Here’s a potential argument from neuroscience against the reliability of religious experiences of supernatural events or agents:
We can reproduce religious experiences in a lab, and we also know situations where these experiences can organically arise. Because of this, we can account for religious experience in a naturalistic way, without making any new assumptions or positing new organisms.
Since a naturalistic explanation is simpler, and fits in with the background evidence of newly found neuroscience, it is preferred over supernatural explanations, which posit entirely new types of beings to explain the experiences, and thus, modern neuroscience undermines the reliability of religious experience.
An experience of a spider, on the other hand, is much better explained by positing the existence of a spider, because we have outside, independent reasons for thinking spiders exist, and it is more likely that the sensation of a spider is explained by an actual spider than by anomalous mental functioning.
Does that work at all?
I don’t know… some theists have argued that Religious experiences (and belief in god) must be authentic, since evolution would cause them to disappear (since religious experiences offer no evolutionary advantages).
Of course, the argument doesn’t work if Religion does have evolutionary advantages…
@Nolan: I’m not seeing the relevance of the lab thing. Organic causes for religious experiences (say, epilepsy) are more interesting, but part of the reason to see them as malfuctions rather than the result of a well-functioning sensus divinitatus or whatever is the inconsistency among them.
And with spiders, I don’t see that we have much in the way of “independent reasons” for thinking they exist, not independent of visual information. I mean, there’s always feeling them, but that doesn’t get us very far with spiders.
@Andy Scicluna: yeah, religion could have evolutionary advantages, and on top of that, the theory of evolution doesn’t say every trait has to be adaptive. It allows for traits to be byproducts of other, adaptive, traits, for example.
Nolan’s reasoning is valid. It’s all about the prior probabilities. The prior probability of a spider existing and actually causing the sensation is much, much higher than the prior probability of god existing and actually causing the sensation. In other words, we have a huge list of correlating sensing a spider with a spider being there. We have no such data for god and religious experiences. All we have are the religious experiences, and no verified instances of god causing the religious experience.
I think J. Quinton is expressing what I was getting at.
@Chris HallQuist: A spider can be shown to others, picked up, expected to reliably be looked at tomorrow, create webs that can be examined, etc. We can make predictions about what the universe is like that only the existence of a spider would entail, to the exclusion of the hypothesis that a spider is a hallucination. Using these methods, we’ve confirmed that spiders exist.
With religious experience, we can’t (to my knowledge) show them to others and get independent confirmation that the other person is experiencing the same thing, nor can we make reliable predictions that the validity of these experiences would entail.
That’s why a spider existing is usually a good explanation for a spider experience. We have previous confirmation that spider experiences reliably entailed spider existence.
Not so with religious experience, and thanks to neuroscience, we have an alternate explanation that we do in fact have evidence for, and that explains these experiences and has a higher prior plausibility than the religious experiences being valid.