Abstract

Feeling something beyond yourself, bigger in space and time, can be stimulated.

Dr Michael Persinger, Laurentian University

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 30 August 2002

Investigating God!

Believers like to claim that only believers should investigate God because unbelievers are biased against Him. Yet, equally, a believer cannot investigate God because they already accept that He exists. God’s existence must be examined from a scientific perspective which demands skepticism, disbelief or at least sufficient doubt to be effective. The Christian response is that God is not of this universe and therefore he is not susceptible to scientific inquiry, but an entirely transcendental God could have no effect on the universe and might as well not exist.

Science investigates phenomena that manifest themselves in the real world, and Christians claim God does manifest Himself in the real world—He created it, appeared on earth in human form, wiggles His index finger in history, and answers prayers. If God exists and does all this, he must be observable through science. If believers say God exists but every test applied is negative, why should we, or they, believe He does? When God does not interact with the world on any scientific criterion, how can anyone continue to believe He exists and answers prayers? If He exists somewhere else and does not interact with the world, then what is the use of praying?

Where does religious belief come from? Why do people want to see a reason in the universe? We have evolved to notice patterns, and will even find them in random data such as stock market fluctuations. Those analysts always have a reason why the stock market went up or down. In fact, statistical analysis shows it is random.

The Presence of God?

Divine revelation is crucial to most faiths, and it is revealed typically by very strange people called prophets or mystics. S Paul and Moses had divine visions. Believers are convinced that these are God’s revelations, while those still able to think for themselves reject them as fraud or madness. Yet, these experiences are common. You might have felt something like it too—in the mountains or forest, by the sea, holding a new born child, or listening to moving poetry or music. More than half of people report having had some sort of mystical or religious experience. What is uncommon is that the experience is so intense it changes their life forever. It draws them to prayer, meditation, ritual and church.

What is it? A trick of the the brain? A glimpse of a higher plane of being? The presence of God? The religions of the world have always claimed such sensations as their own. They are taken to illustrate something beyond the natural—a supernatural experience. Why then is it evidently such a natural and scarcely uncommon experience? Why is it singularly moving to some but merely an interesting experience to others?

It is perfectly natural but religionists contrive to make it sound like insanity in their efforts to keep it supernatural!

All our thoughts and sensations involve the brain, and so fall into the realm of the neuroscientist among others. Dr Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, admits the neurobiology of religion is an awkward interest for a scientist.

I always get concerned that people will say I’m a religious person who is trying to prove that God exists, or I’m a cynic who is trying to prove that God does not exist. But we try to approach it without bias.

Newberg could not be respected as a scientist without claiming to be unbiased, but he is careful not to admit whether he is religious or not. Bob Holmes, in New Scientist (21 April 2001, 24), cites him as saying:

Just as physicists cannot fully understand the electron as either a particle or a wave, but only as both at once, so we need both science and a more subjective, spiritual understanding in order to grasp the full nature of reality.

So, Newberg is biased! This poor analogy is not a scientific argument. It is a bishop Butler argument. A NOMA argument! By “subjective” and “spiritual”, Newberg can only mean “religious”, yet nothing in science, or even in his own work suggests his conclusion. Newberg’s turns out to be a religious and not a scientific stance, so he can be presumed to be doing his “scientific” work for tendentious reasons.

Holmes reports that Newberg, Eugene d’Aquili, also from Penn, and Vince Rause studied the sensations that are unique to religious experiences but shared by people of all faiths. They published a book which Holmes says “lays out the most complete theory to date of how mystical or religious experiences can be generated in the brain”. One of these is the sense of “oneness with the universe” that Einstein knew of. The other is the feeling of awe that accompanies such revelations and makes them stand out as more important, more highly charged, and in a way more real than our everyday lives.

Religious Experience

Whether Holmes is himself religious, he too does not admit, but this reporting is replete in religious language and assumptions. A revelation implies a revealer, and so to use the word implies the supernatural. No scientist would use such a word in a scientific context. What sensations are “unique to religious experience?” The two mentioned are only unique to religious experience because the writer and presumably the scientists he reports on assume that these sensations are religious ones. The argument begins with circularity, and it is impossible to believe that these could possibly be scientists. The main experience is that of feeling a “oneness with the universe”. Is the universe therefore God? The universe is the totality of Nature, so the experience, if not purely illusory, is one of realising the wonder and extent of Nature, not of the transcendental.

Anyway, these scientists have to accept that mystical experiences are not to be called up to order and so have to fall back on something not mystical, or not so mystical—meditation and prayer.

They studied eight practiced meditators who were willing to undergo brain imaging. The volunteers came to the lab one at a time, and began to meditate with an intravenous tube in one arm. They were told to meditate focusing on a single image, usually a religious symbol. The goal was to feel their everyday sense of self begin to dissolve so that they became one with the image. Michael Baime, one of the meditators, describes the sensation as:

It’s as if the film of your life broke and you were seeing the light that allowed the film to be projected.

Radioactive tracers in the bloodstream allowed Newberg to image the brain at the height of a meditative trance using Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography, or SPECT. Newberg and d’Aquili then compared the activity of the subjects’ brains during meditation with scans taken when they were resting.

The researchers found intense activity in the parts of the brain that regulate attention—a sign of the meditators’ deep concentration. The temporal lobes were involved but the parietal lobes, towards the top and rear of the brain, which give us our sense of touch, taste, pressure, pain, temperature, time and place, and language was much less active than when the volunteers were merely sitting still.

This is the region of the brain which seems to distinguish between self and other, and people meditating describe a loss of sense of self. The left-hemisphere of the parietal lobe deals with a person’s sense of their own body image, while the right-hemisphere handles its context—the space and time inhabited by the self. It seemed, as the meditators developed the feeling of oneness, they lost the activity of the part of the brain that distinguishes the self from the rest. The inactivity of the parietal lobes might be the cause of it.

Of course, the purpose of meditation is to avoid distraction by external stimuli like… touch, taste, pressure, pain, temperature, time and place, and language! In meditation, people cut themselves off to the outside world and the parietal lobe gets no input. It is not surprising then that the parietal lobes, deprived of all this, seem to stop working. Deprived of input, these regions no longer function normally, and the person feels the boundary between self and other begin to dissolve, and as the spatial and temporal context also disappears, the person feels a sense of infinite space and eternity.

It is abnormal for a brain, normally subject to constant stimulation, to be treated in this way, and so it looks as though the religious feeling is a response to peculiar and perhaps dysfunctional circumstances. It is hard to see how this differs from sensory deprivation, significantly, a method used in brainwashing.

Daniel Bateson, a Kansas psychologist, thinks God gave us a brain so that we could experience religion. Most of us would imagine that without a brain we could experience nothing at all. Indeed, we would be dead! So the brain is rather more useful than doltish religionists give it credit for. Moreover, stopping input to the brain seems often to bring on these religious attacks.

Newberg has repeated the experiment with Franciscan nuns in prayer. The nuns—whose prayer centres on words, rather than images—showed activation of the language areas of the brain, but they too shut down the same self regions of the brain that the meditators did as their sense of oneness reached its peak.

This sense of unity with the universe also carries a hefty emotional charge, a feeling of awe and deep significance. Holmes says neuroscientists think this sensation originates in a region of the brain distinct from the parietal lobe—the “emotional brain”, or limbic system, lying deep within the temporal lobes on the sides of the brain.

Epilepsy, the Limbic System and Mysticism

Hindus and Buddhists consider meetings with God as confronting one’s self. They are right. Psychological “disorders of the self” often involve the limbic system, the middle and lower parts of the temporal lobes of the brain, that activate particularly easily. Temporal lobe epilepsy studies show that phenomena like mystical experiences are caused by brain seizures. Temporal lobe seizures often cause experiences of altered states because the temporal lobes control states of consciousness. The amygdala infuses our moment-to-moment experiences with meaningfulness. Temporal lobe epileptics were more likely to undergo multiple religious conversions. Moreover, the mental disorder that gives visions of God also concerns the limbic system.

The temporal lobes emit a constant 40hz EEG cycle, except when someone is in dreamless sleep. It suggests it relates to memory, and the brain is “conscious” in that it is still remembering things. Memory is necessary for self-awareness. “We” cannot be present in dreamless sleep because our brains are not remembering anything. The absent cycle shows the sense of self is inactive. The 40hz activity involves the surface of the temporal lobes, the amygdala and the hippocampus.

The limbic system monitors experiences and registers especially significant events, such as the sight of your child’s face, with emotional tags to say “this is important”. During a religious experience, researchers believe that the limbic system becomes unusually active, tagging every thing with special significance. This could explain why people who have had such experiences find them so difflcult to describe to others.

The contents of the experience—the visual components, the sensory components—are just the same as everyone experiences all the time. Instead, the temperolimbic system is stamping these moments as being intensely important to the individual, as being characterised by great joy and harmony. When the experience is reported to someone else, only the contents and the sense that it is different can be communicated. The visceral sensation cannot.

Neurologist, Jeffrey Saver, University of California, Los Angeles

Plenty of evidence supports the idea that the limbic system is important in religious experiences. Neurosurgeons who stimulate the limbic system during open-brain surgery say their patients occasionally report experiencing religious sensations. And Alzheimer’s disease, which is often marked by a loss of religious interest, tends to cripple the limbic system early on, says Saver. Most famously, people who suffer epileptic seizures restricted to the limbic svstem, or the temporal lobes in general, sometimes report having profound experiences during their seizures. The word “sometimes” implies that for most people experiencing such epilepsy, there is no such feeling. Nevertheless, Saver says:

This is similar to people undergoing religious conversion, who have a sense of seeing through their hollow selves or superficial reality to a deeper reality.

As a result, the people with the great mystical experiences have historically tended to be epileptics. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, wrote of “touching God” during epileptic seizures. Other religious figures from the past who may have been epileptic include S Paul, Joan of Arc, S Theresa of Avila and Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century founder of the New Jerusalem Church.

Temporal lobe epilepsy, first recognised in 1881, is a partial epilepsy in which a patient suffers seizures indicated by excess activity in the temporal lobes of the brain. The brain has two temporal lobes, one on each side of the brain, located near the ears. They control hearing, speech, memory, meaning and other experiences, and are interchangeable, so if one is damaged the other should suffice. Awareness may or may not be lost in temporal lobe epilepsy attacks, depending on whether one or both lobes are involved in the seizure. Automatic behaviour is typical.

Ellen G White was a prophet of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. At the age of nine she was hit by a rock thrown by another child and was never the same again. At the age of 17, it seems she began to hallucinate. Her visions were typical of temporal lobe epileptic partial-complex seizures. Hodder and Holmes in 1981 characterized them as:

1. paroxysmal loss of consciousness,
2. eyes staring upwards,
3. visual hallucinations,
4. affective changes,
5. gestural automatisms,
6. preservation of speech,
7. post-ictal-like period.

Her personality traits also resemble those of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy—paranoia, anger, dependence, religiosity, sadness, philosophical interest and humourlessness. D M Bear and P Fedio, in 1977, distinguished left temporal patients as having a sense of personal destiny and a concern for meaning in events, believing in powerful forces working in one’s life and the need for careful examination of them. These concerns permeate Ellen White’s prolific writing—hypergraphia is also tyoical of patients with partial-complex seizures. Holmes thinks the blow to the nose would have vibrated Ellen’s brain in the same fashion as a boxer suffers a punch to the head. Moreover the bones above the nose are not strong, so the stone could have caused unusual damage. It is impossible to prove now that Ellen White suffered from partial-complex seizures, but her whole behaviour seems epileptic.

Temporal lobe epilepsy causes fits, and religious hallucinations, but neurologists think only a few patients with temporal lobe epilepsy experience them. They think patients with temporal lobe epilepsy who experience religious hallucinations may show how the human brain can cause religious experiences. Clinical evidence also links the temporal lobes with religious sensations. Professor Vilayanur Ramachandran (University of California, San Diego) showed people words and measured their reaction to them with a type of lie detector. Average people were most excited by the sexually loaded words, but those with temporal lobe epilepsy responded most to religious words, and sexual words were less exciting even than neutral ones.

Such evidence suggests that religion is a malfunction of the brain, like epilepsy, but if it is taken that the malfunction fortuitously allows a glimpse into the unknown, it does not suggest that it is a glimpse of anything supernatural. Quite the opposite. The oneness is with what exists in the cosmos.

Dr Michael Persinger, a Canadian neuroscientist, in a 1997 study questioned 1480 university students about their religious beliefs and general habits. Some of the questions measured “limbic lability” which is an indication of the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy. Central to it all was a question that asked whether the subject would kill for God. One in 20 would have! The four factors that turned out to be related to an affirmative answer to the question were:

1. Having had a religious experience. People who have had religious experience use them as the benchmark for their spirituality, rather than the scriptures or teachings. They feel that others just do not understand. They see themselves as favoured from God, members of an elect among the godless throng.
2. Weekly church attendance. This is taken as a proxy for religious orthodoxy. Being members of the group strengthens their sense of being an elect, and their self-esteem, which otherwise is often low.
3. Being Male. A male engaged in a task has fewer brain structures activated, generally, than a woman doing the same thing. Men seem more single minded than women, perhaps.
4. Limbic lability. Odd sensations such as deja-vu and the sense of a presence seem to be triggered by a dysfunction of the temporal lobes like the microseizures that occur in temporal lobe epilepsy. Often these sensations seem meaningful, and need to be interpreted, the ultimate interpretation being God.

Of people who had all four traits, 44 percent would kill someone if they thought God wanted it. Persinger says “The God Experience is an artifact of transient changes in the temporal lobe”, that it promotes passivity, and because of its random emotional associations will lead to unreasoned decisions.

Such experiences are thought to be correlated with the amygdaloid-hippocampal parts of the temporal lobes, associated with the experience of meaningfulness, the sense of self and its relationship to space-time, with its religious or cosmic associations, fear, dreams, experiences of movements like spinning or floating, smell, and memory storage and retrieval. These are indeed experienced in different subjects. Because an important part of the temporal lobe receives visual information from the edges of the visual field, flickering sensations can occur in the upper peripheral vision. The subject is convinced that what they sensed was real, and that something profound has happened. The visitors disappeared with carbamazepine, a drug that is specific for complex partial epilepsy and hypomania.

Magnetical Mysticism

If abnormal brain activity in temporal lobe epileptics conditions their responses, Persinger wondered whether altering brain patterns artificially could do the same for ordinary people. He designed a helmet to concentrate weak moving magnetic fields on the temporal lobes. Even if feelings of oneness and awe fall short of the personal experiences of God that many people report, anyone who still doubts the brain’s ability to generate religious experiences need only visit Persinger at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, to check it out. Almost anyone can have a mystical experience just by wearing his magnetic hat.

Persinger uses transcranial magnetic stimulation to induce all sorts of surreal experiences in ordinary people (New Scientist, 19 November 1994, 29). Subjects were told the purpose of the test was to study relaxation. Persinger began just seeking what causes impressions, creativity and inspiration. Through trial and error and a bit of educated guesswork, he found that a weak magnetic field—1 microtesla, which is roughly that generated by a computer monitor—rotating anticlockwise in a complex pattern about the temporal lobes causes four out of five people to get a feeling of “not being alone”. The effect can be anything from nothing through psychedelia and the feeling of a presence to meetings with dead relatives. The “sensed presence’ of someone or something standing near you is the most common feeling. The imagined visitors might be good or bad, according, perhaps, to mood or which emotional center (amygdala), left or right, is more active. For non-religious people, it is the feeling of a ghost, but some religious types describe it as a religious sensation, and even identify the presence as God. Persinger says:

This is all in the laboratory, so you can imagine what would happen if the person is alone in their bed at night or in a church, where the context is so important.

Gerald Edelman (The Remembered Present, 1989) thought the human experience of self is a linguistic phenomenon. Split brain studies show that each hemisphere can manifest an almost independent mind. Self awareness involves both sides of the brain. The left-sided self, where language happens, is dominant in most people from the time when we learn to speak in childhood. Language is our main way of relating to others, and also conditions our self-awareness. The right lobes give us a sense of self in space, and this is fed to the left lobes for expression.

Because the right lobe controls our sense of self, when communication between the lobes is interrupted, the result is a separate sense of self on the right side to that of the left. In other words, the sense of self in space is there even when the left lobes of the brain are not expressing it. It causes a sense of presence. On occasions when people realise they are alone, they can get a sense of presence even though they know no one else can be there. No one else is! The presence they sense, albeit in the part of the brain that cannot express it, is themselves. This is the feeling that one is “not alone” or that of “being watched”, and is most probably an evolutionary adaptation that makes us alert in potentially dangerous situations. In daily experience, the presence is felt most frequently in the early morning hours. If the person is asleep, he or she will suddenly awaken, often feeling some fear or even immobility. The feeling is usually undeniable and unexplainable. This explains how the brain creates a God experience.

There are partial out-of-body experiences in which someone finds themselves in two places at once, but normally the sensed presence is someone else. Sometimes, when people are being creative, they amaze themselves with their ability and then they get a feeling that someone else is responsible—an angel or a dead parent or guide. It is the voiceless part of the brain that is being stimulated but cannot express itself.

Sometimes the voiceless right lobe stimulates parts of the brain to do with vision or smell or hearing then visions or scents or sounds might seem to be heard that confirm the presence being felt. Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976), suggested that inner voices were once universal, and were believed to come from beyond self. They were the voices of spirits or gods. He argued that the brain activity of ancient people—those living roughly 3,500 years ago, before logic, reason, and ethics were consciously expressed—resembled that of schizophrenics. Like schizophrenics, the ancients heard voices, summoned up visions, and lacked a sense of metaphor and individual identity. Rational thought has overlaid these ancient methods of thinking which remain now as the underated skill of intuition, but might explain sensations of God or spirituality in some people. A schizophrenic hippocampus is different from normal one, and a depressed person’s amygdalas are different from normal. 60 percent of all temporal lobe epileptics might be misdiagnosed as schizophrenics.

Various types of intense training, such as meditation and prayer, allows parts of the brain to be activated at will, and then people might claim to be prophets through whom God is speaking, a most dangerous delusion for some. Really, we are still talking of self, not any actual contact with a god, yet intensely pious people come to believe that their own will is divine will. Others seem to succeed in not succumbing to this delusion and can appear to be saints. There is no God separate from the self. Persinger says:

Our major thrust has been to understand creativity. Many of the great thinkers—be they religious or scientific—often had these inspirations and didn’t know how or why they’d obtained them. Religious people try the helmet and get all the same results as an atheist: sensed presence, detachment from their body, cosmic significance, and both groups always chalk it up to God, or a dead person. The point is that these things that you think are God are really coming from inside. That will mean two things. One, don’t take everything you think of as God as valid. And two, we can begin to explore ourselves. The most fundamental and profound spirituality for anybody would be finding out how their own brain is organized. But many people come in, knowing they’re in a laboratory wearing a helmet that is magnetically stimulating their brain, and they still believe they’re being visited by the supernatural. The God experience in the history of the human being is a trivial phenomenon. Right now, when people have an experience and they attribute it to God, depending upon their culture, they may often use it as an excuse to kill others.

Not everyone accepts that Persinger’s apparitions could equal what religions’ devotees experience. Julian Shindler of the Chief Rabbi’s office, London, thinks:

That is quite detached from anything that is a genuine religious experience, in the same way that psychoactive drugs can affect mood, but not in a legitimate way. It is not the genuine article, somehow.

So science could find a method or a drug that would let everyone become Moses and converse face to face with God, but the rabbis will not admit it as religious. Religionists always accommodate new scientific discoveries, with no noticeable impact on their dogmas. What of God as a brain malfunction? Those who are committed to religion, through money or through their own inadequacy, will never accept that the brain is responsible for anything. God always is, even though we supposedly were given Free Will which ought to mean that we are free of God if we chose to be. Not so, it seems. The religious explanation of Persinger’s work is that we are programmed to believe in God—faith is a mental ability humans have developed or been given. Daniel Bateson says the brain is just the instrument that God plays to generate religious impulses within us. So God plays the fiddle with our most self-defining organ even though He says He has given us Free Will. Even religious people should be outraged at this trickery. Needless to say, they are not.

Mystical experiences are not only what we sense, but also how we, and more importantly, the clergy interpret it.

We fit it into a niche, a pigeonhole. The label that is then used to categorise the experience will influence how the person remembers it. And that will happen within a few seconds.

Persinger

Besides the experience and its interpretation, there is a third aspect—the reinforcement that humans, as social animals, get from sharing religious rituals with others. The richness that limbic stimulation brings to experience may explain why religions rely so heavily on ritual, claims Newberg. The deliberate, stylised motions of ceremony differentiate them from everyday actions, he says, and help the brain flag them as significant. The limbic system is also evolutionarily an early development of the brain, and this should not be forgotten in interpreting its function in this respect. The behaviour of animals which depend upon the primitive brain that the limbic system comprises, might have adopted ritualised behaviour as an early type of intelligence. Since then birds, dinosaurs and mammals have progressed to higher brain centers. Religion, on this interpretation is simply a throwback to primeval behaviour patterns.

Religion is all three of those, and all three are hardwired into the brain. We are hardwired to have experiences from time to time that give us a sense of a presence, and as primates we’re hardwired to categorise our experiences. And we crave social interaction and spatial proximity with others that are the same. What is not hardwired is the content. If you have a God experience and the belief is that you have to kill someone who does not believe as you do, you can see why the content from the culture is the really dangerous part.

Persinger

All in the Brain

So, our big, powerful brains allow us occasionally an experience that lets us glimpse that we are only a minute part of the vast wonder of Nature. We sense our own insignificance and the fact that the cosmos is majestic. We call this religion. Sceptics of religion note that all of this happens in the brain.

The real common denominator here is brain activity, not anything else. There is nothing to indicate that this is externally imposed or that you are somehow tapping into a divine entity.

Horn Barrier, American Atheists, Cranford, New Jersey

The God botherers insist that the evidence shows human beings are “hardwired” to experience “God”. They claim the brain is predisposed towards a belief in spiritual and religious matters. This is scientific baloney. Only a proportion of the people have temporal lobe epilepsy, and the majority never experience anything like it. And of those who experience temporal lobe epilepsy only a few have any religious experiences. What Persinger has shown is that certain low level frequencies, electromagnetic or sonic can give people unusual experiences. Since these phenomena occur in such natural troubles as earthquakes, they seem to be simply an embryonic, or an atrophied sense. Animals often get excited before an earthquake, showing that they have some sense of it. It might easily be the same sense—the legendary Sixth Sense. Persinger says:

We know geomagnetic activity influences the temple lobes because when we look at correlational data there’s an increase in seizures, temporal lobe seizures and convulsions when there’s an increased global geomagnetic activity all over the earth.

Persinger thinks, rather too particularly, the reason these phenomena have evolved is health. People with religious faith have longer, healthier lives, suggesting that religious behaviour has a survival advantage.

If you look at the spontaneous cases of people who have God experiences and conversions, their health improves. So if we can understand the patterns of activity that generate this experience, we may also be able to understand how to have the brain—and hence the body—cure itself.

Well, it plainly enough had a survival value at certain times in Christian history. At those times, those who did not believe, or believed the wrong thing, were burnt at the stake or suffered some other horrible death. Moreover, those who have the experience of God are more willing to kill for it. It stands to reason then that religious feeling is self-selecting, once the religious zealots get into a position of power. The best thing for the rest of us is to make sure they do not.

But any real evolutionary advantage will be much less particular. It might be simply the heightened sense of alertness when the presence of something is sensed. It would allow a flight or fight reaction when a herd of wildebeest are stampeding towards us, an earthquake or eruption is threatening or a flash flood is heading our way. Those who sense this will be more prepared to take suitable action, and will have more chance of surviving.

It is anything but proof that God has a real existence, but Newberg, who began by saying he was unbiased, finds a facile and futile counter argument.

Our experience of reality, our experience of science, our mystical experiences are all in the brain.

All of our experiences are in the brain, but the brain has these mystical experiences because, if there is a God, Newberg thinks He must have designed the brain so that we can interact with Him. Professor Ramachandran also feels that brain circuitry is an antenna to make us receptive to God.

Like all religionists—for that is what he must be—Newburg forgets that God, to the religious mind, made the universe. He can do whatever He likes, brain wiring or no wiring. So, why has this Almighty God got to implant some religious instrument into us? Why has He to plan some way of interacting with His intellectual Creation? If He wanted to contact us or make us religious, He could do it in a femtosecond with no advanced brain engineering just using His supernatural almighty powers. Yet, He manages as always to devise the most idiotic and ambiguous methods.

If there were an almighty God that wanted to communicate with the ants He has made, He could do so with no problems. That is what being almighty means. God has no need to engineer our brains. If He has, it must be because He is not almighty. He does not communicate with us, so, either He has no compelling reason to do so, or He does not exist. The truth is that God-botherers just refuse to be rational. They will believe what they will even if they had irrefutable proof of the opposite. They would just declare it Satanic, and ignore it. Meanwhile, atheists look forward to religious cranks who still cause such misery and murder, being cured with a pill. Undeterred Newberg goes on:

You can have a dream and it feels real at the time, but you wake up and it no longer feels as real. The problem is, when people have a mystical experience, they think that is more real than base line reality—even when they come back to base line reality. That turns everything around.

It seems now, the only way we can judge the reality of an experience is by how real it feels. To Newberg, it means that reductionist science, powerful as it is, has its limitations. In society, people who cannot properly judge what is real and what is not are considered demented. Newberg wants us to accept dementia as equal to sanity. The reason is clear. He has proved that religion is a form of dementia.

That there is no objective basis to the religious interpretation is suggested by the dependence of the experiences on the person’s culture. People sense something or someone with them, but the interpretation of the feeling is culturally dependent. God botherers think it is God. Atheists rightly think it is a trick of the brain. Some imagine angels, ghosts or cartoon characters, and Persinger thinks those who report being kidnapped by aliens may also do so because of low level electromagnetic fields. Alien kidnapping reports and UFO sightings correlate slightly with seismic activity which produces low level fields and vibrations.

Citing the Minnesota twins study directed by Thomas J Bouchard Jr, the BBC says that “identical twins separated at birth and brought up separately” indicate “a 50 percent genetic component to religiosity”. Without explanation, this is almost meaningless. It could mean there is no genetic component to religiosity in that the probability of twins being influenced by a different religious upbringing would be about 50 percent if there were no genetic component at all, but it would hardly be surprising if identical twins had similar interests, including religious interests. What governs people’s religion above all is the one they are brought up in. Religion is a cultural construct.

A Washington Post article quoted Nancy Murphy, a Christian philosophy professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California, as saying that scientific exploration “reinforces atheistic assumptions and makes religion appear useless. If you can explain religious experience purely as a brain phenomenon, you don’t need the assumption of the existence of God”. Wow! You can tell why she is a Christian professor! It also quoted Persinger as saying:

Religion is a property of the brain, only the brain and has little to do with what’s out there.

Yet, a reporter called Michael Valpy of The Globe and Mail says that Persinger thinks “science is the value free pursuance of the unknown regardless of what values scientists may carry”. Quite so! But non-scientists think that means that science cannot come to any conclusions without ceasing to be value free. The whole point of the empirical method is to come to conclusions—sound ones. Science has come to the conclusion that the whole edifice that is called “Science” is true, because it has been experimentally verified.

Most of my colleagues tell me why do you study this because you’ll never get grant money, why do you study this because your reputation will be put on the line because you’re looking at things that should not be studied, religious experience, paranormal experiences, they should never be studied because they’re outside of science. And my question is: why not, why shouldn’t we study them? The experimental method is the most powerful tool that we have, that’s how we find truth and non-truth.

Dr Michael Persinger, Laurentian University

Persinger is also reported as saying:

My point of view is, “Let’s measure it”. Let’s keep an open mind and realize maybe there is no God. Maybe there might be. We’re not going to answer it by arguments—we’re going to answer it by measurement and understanding the areas of the brain that generate the experience and the patterns that experimentally produce it in the laboratory.

Persinger says he is less concerned with trying to prove or disprove the existence of God than with understanding and documenting the experience. However, in his view:

If we have to draw conclusions now, based upon the data, the answer would be more on the fact that there is no deity.

It is a cautious and valid conclusion deduced from the observations. Only those pre-disposed to deny science in favour of mere belief would reject it.

Neuroscience, through experiments like these, is showing that God exists all right, but only in the brains of religious people. When people see something like a table, there is no table in their heads, but they know from experience that such visions denote tables. No one has ever experienced God, but from an early age most of us are given phony descriptions of supposed epiphanies of God. Particularly those people who dwell on these images will interpret them as the experience they have from low level electromagnetic vibrations, or whatever causes the “sensed presence”.

From R Le Sueur

To suggest that there is a God and our brains have been designed to interact with Him sounds like the work of creationists and other enemies of real science. What is wrong with a rational explanation? I suggest that as our brains evolved, the parietal lobes developed in tandem with our increasing sense of self and body awareness. Some people discovered, by accident, that they could undergo sensory deprivation to the extent of isolating their parietal lobes from external input, and so induce in them random hallucinatory activity, thus producing the subjective mystical experience, and then they pursued it by deliberate training and practice. To account for this expereince, they invented God.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History