Religious experience is just brain chemistry.

Question

Stimulate the temporal lobe, get a mystical experience. Take psilocybin, meet God. Epileptic seizures produce conversions; brain tumors produce visions of angels. If we can reliably trigger encounters with the sacred by poking neurons, the encounters tell us about the neurons, not the sacred.

The Mystic · Answer

Mechanism is not refutation.

When I see a tree, light strikes my retina, neurons fire, the visual cortex assembles an image. I can describe every step of this process and the tree does not vanish. The mechanism by which I perceive is not an argument against the thing perceived. To say "your experience of the tree is just neurons" is to confuse the channel with the broadcast.

Religious experience has a neurological substrate. Of course it does. So does mathematical insight, romantic love, and the recognition of your mother's face. Showing the substrate has never disproved the object in any other domain. It is curious that this particular argument is deployed only against the sacred.

The mystic does not claim that her experience of God bypasses the brain. She claims that the brain, when properly disposed, perceives what is actually there. The atheist owes us a reason to think this case is different from every other case of perception.

C.S. Lewis · Answer

The genetic fallacy is still a fallacy.

Tell me where a belief came from and you have told me nothing about whether it is true. Newton's apple, Kekulé's dream of the snake, Archimedes in the bath — discoveries arrive through neurons firing in particular ways, and the discoveries are still true. To call religious experience "just brain chemistry" is to commit the same fallacy in reverse.

There is also a self-defeat at the heart of the objection. If religious experience is debunked because it has a neural cause, then every experience — including the experience of being persuaded by neuroscientific arguments — has a neural cause. The atheist's confidence in his own reasoning is also "just neurons firing." If the objection works against the believer, it works against the objector. If it does not work against the objector, it does not work at all.

The honest question is not whether religious experience has a mechanism, but whether the mechanism is reliable. That requires looking at the lives the experiences produce, not at the scans alone.

Thomas Aquinas · Answer

The soul is the form of the body. Of course the brain is involved.

The objection presupposes a Cartesian dualism that the Church never taught. It imagines the soul as a ghost attached to a body, and triumphantly announces that touching the body affects the ghost. But the human person is not a ghost in a machine. The soul is the form of the body — the principle by which this matter is this living, thinking person. Naturally, then, what affects the body affects the person, including in his perception of God.

That a stroke can change personality, that a tumor can produce visions, that psilocybin can occasion mystical experience — none of this is news to a Thomist. The intellect, in this life, depends on the senses and on the brain. Nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu. We always know God through the body, never apart from it.

What the neuroscientist can show is that religious experience uses the brain. He cannot show, by neuroscience alone, that the brain generates the object rather than perceives it. That is a philosophical claim, not a neurological one.

The Scientist · Answer

Correlation is not the whole of causation.

The cognitive science of religion is a real and interesting field, and I will not dismiss it. We have good data that certain brain states correlate with reported religious experience. We have plausible evolutionary stories about why humans are disposed to detect agency, to feel awe, to seek transcendence. All of this is genuine science.

But the inference from "religious experience has neural correlates" to "religious experience has no real object" is not a scientific inference. It is a philosophical one, smuggled in. The same data are equally compatible with the hypothesis that the brain evolved to detect a real transcendent dimension of reality, and with the hypothesis that it evolved to fabricate one. Choosing between these requires arguments outside neuroscience.

A careful scientist distinguishes what the data show from what she wishes they showed. On the question of whether the object of religious experience exists, the brain scans are silent.

Religious experience is just brain chemistry.

The objection, in full

Mechanism is not refutation.

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