challenges

• 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