This is hardly a subject with a whole lot of room for opinion. "Religious" experiences are actually biological reactions to external stimulus. (see here, here, here, and here. Wikipedia here) To claim otherwise is to put more importance on unfounded and religiously biased claims than on actual observations made through extensive research.
How many times do we have to discover the natural causes behind previously presumed supernatural phenomena? We must assume that unexplained phenomena have a natural cause. This is the only way to be intellectually honest with ourselves. There is no reason to believe that anything exists outside of the natural word.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck don't assume it's a unicorn.
3 comments:
What makes you think that a religious experience must be supernatural?
You cite:
1. Some charismatic religious leaders could have been epileptic
2. Properly placed electrodes can cause people to feel like there's somebody else in the room and some people interpret this using their own religious iconography [and this experiment could not even be replicated; classic bum-science sign]
3. People doing some traditional religious rituals activated some regions of their brain associated with long-term cognition.
4. This commentary concludes that neuroimaging studies "are not suited for an explaination of religion," which appears to contradict your entire premise.
I'm not epileptic. I've never felt a "Presence." So none of this has anything to do with me, or most "believers" either. Additionally, you're addressing a group of people who believe that God CREATED biology, so arguing that religion comes from biology isn't going to mean much.
And: exactly what constitutes a religous experience? Jack explained this well. Every study I've discovered assumes that all religious activity constitutes religious experience. But anybody who has ever been dragged to sunday school as a teenager on a sunny day knows this is far from true. They're going to have to do much, MUCH better than having people recite a rosary in an fMRI machine! Jack and I both believe that the vast majority of "religious experience" is phony. So identifying what we feel is phony as being indeed phony doesn't mean much.
ptr
There is no reason to believe that anything exists outside of the mind.
Haha Garrett! Good to hear from you!!!
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