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