The importance of religious experience. Part 3

The importance of religious experience

Part 3: What if religious experiences have an entirely natural cause?

I don’t think there is a way to answer this question with certainty, and each person simply has to decide what they think is most plausible. However, we can return to the issue that there is no doubt that the religious experiences themselves are real. The only issue is what causes them. However, let’s focus on the experiences themselves, because they are powerful and beneficial. And they are, for most people, I think, the basis of religious belief. Something causes them, and the dispute is whether they are caused by a God who really, truly exists, or whether they are “just” caused by our own minds.

Let’s consider the “just in our minds” option, referring to the evidence that can be gathered about the nature of religious experiences.

A Professor Persinger has created a helmet that stimulates the brain in such a way that people have experiences that echo what believers say about religious experiences. This is meant to be evidence that religious experiences are “not real” in the sense of existing because we are in contact with God. They are just in our minds because this helmet can create them. However, these simulated religious experiences only happen with the help of an expensive, high-tech piece of equipment, while real religious experiences can happen without it.

Nevertheless, it raises the possibility that particular circumstances can create an experience that is misunderstood as a religious experience of God.

So, perhaps a religious experience is a product of the correlation of a number of external and internal factors that by chance happen to overlap on this particular occasion. This would explain why religious experiences are for most people very rare, but also explain why a very large proportion of people have at least one very impressive experience in their lives that has all the hallmarks of a religious experience.

So, let’s suppose that you are looking at a beautiful sunset, after a lovely meal, at the start of your summer holiday. So, you have a number of external features all conducive to well-being. Suppose that today is also the end of a long period of stress at work, and you’ve also had a phone conversation with an old friend whom you’ve not seen for years, which has reconnected you with a happy period of your life. So, you also have overlapping internal states conducive to well-being. So, it is a possibility that this unusual, coincidental correlation of good factors is sufficient to stimulate or trigger the mind into an experience of overwhelming well-being, feeling as though you are on top of the world, at peace and at one with the whole world. Normal experiences of well-being are enough to make you feel good, but not enough to trigger this “religious experience”. In this explanation the “religious experience” is a real experience, but is being wrongly attributed to experiencing the presence of God.

In a way, we might even want to keep the term “religious” in calling it a religious experience because it is so overwhelmingly wonderful, but accept that it is an entirely natural product of the way our minds work. We can even explain the phenomenon to ourselves that – because people have heard of the concept of God, and this concept is of a supremely wonderful person – when people have a supremely wonderful experience they – mistakenly – assume that they must be having the experience because they are meeting God.