Subdecks (1)

Cards (9)

  • there are 4 scientific challenges to religious experience:
    • Freud + wish fulfilment
    • temporal lobe epilepsy
    • neurotheology
    • use of drugs to stimulate 'supernatural' experiences
  • wish fulfilment:
    • visions are just illusions created by subconscious fears + desires
    • people are so desperate to see something that they trick themselves
    • it is the mind forcing hallucinations to appease our helpless state
  • temporal lobe epilepsy:
    • suggests religious experiences are no more than abnormal states of the brain
    • example: St Paul may've suffered from this - showing symptoms of visions, hearing voices, blindness etc
  • neurotheology: (attempts to explain religious experiences in neuroscientific terms)
    • suggests religious experiences are produced by electrical stimulation of the temporal lobes of the brain
    • example: God Helmet - stimulation of the temporal lobes lead to experiences like 'religious' ones; suggests that experiences are simply due to particular states of the brain
  • use of drugs:
    • drugs such as LSD are hallucinogens - capable of generating experiences
    • example: Walter Pahnke Good Friday Experiment, 1962 - 20 theology students, 10 took a hallucinogen, 10 took placebo: those who took the drug had a 'religious experience'
  • there are challenges to religious experiences from philosophy + theology:
    • we only have the word of the experient
    • experiences are highly subjective + personal; therefore not objectively real
    • inability to describe mystical experiences suggests they're not real
    • religious experience is so alien to the experiences of most people that it cannot be believed