Flesh or Spirit?

J. D. Walters · Friday, 30 September 2011

This article was originally published in the Spring ’07 issue of Revisions, Can Technology Save Us?

Neuroscience is certainly one of the fastest growing and promising fields of scientific research of our time. Along with excitement at the prospects of new insights and understanding, however, there has also been a keen sense of anxiety over what this new knowledge might mean for our self-understanding. One of the most consistent trends in modern neuroscience has been the tightening of the link between various aspects of our mental life and the function of the brain.¹ Recently even religious experience (which might include mystical encounters with God, visions and religiously significant dreams, etc.) has begun to be studied, with the prospect of localizing religious experience in certain parts of the brain becoming more and more plausible.² This prospect has led some scientists to argue that Feuerbach and Freud were right: God and religious experience really are just “projections” or “constructs” of the brain, without any objective referent. Believers also fear that science will show belief in and experience of God to be illusory. I shall argue, however, that such worries stem from an inadequate understanding of how human beings come to have knowledge of the world, including the sacred.

There are two aspects of the scientific study of religious experience which seem particularly worrying too many people. First is the prospect that religious experiences are connected with various pathological or abnormal psychological conditions, such as epilepsy or schizophrenia. This appears to give fodder to militant atheists who argue that religion is unhealthy and should be eradicated. The second and perhaps more significant aspect is the very idea of linking religious experiences to activation in specific areas of the brain. Does this not imply that they are not spiritual experiences at all, but rather result from ordinary electrical or biochemical stimulation of the implicated brain regions? Is religion just “all in the head”?

William James was one of the first psychologists to address both these concerns. In his celebrated Gifford lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, he described a view called “medical materialism,” which threatened to reduce religious experience to the functioning of the brain, and abnormal functioning at that: “Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as a hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as a hereditary degenerate.”³ However, he goes on to argue that this view overlooks one very important fact: all of our experience, not just religious experience, is mediated by the brain (and even religious skeptics would admit that some of our subjective experience actually does refer to an external reality). “[T]here is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are.”⁴ Given this fact, it would seem that science cannot say whether a saint having a mystical experience is truly perceiving God or not. Many neuroscientists agree with this dictum: “The external reality of religious percepts is neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by establishing brain correlates of religious experience.”⁵

Some skeptics argue, however, that this claim is too simplistic, especially when one takes into account the possible connection between religious experience and abnormal psychology. Massimo Pigliucci insists that “if we realize that mystical experiences originate from the same neurological mechanisms that underlie hallucinations from sensorial deprivation and drug-induced visions, I bet dollar to donut that the reality experienced by meditating Buddhists and praying nuns is entirely contained in their mind and is not a glimpse of a “higher” realm, as tantalizing as that idea may be.”⁶ He argues that of the two competing explanations for the origin of religious experience (God or a “higher” reality vs. hallucinations generated by the brain), the hallucination theory is more parsimonious and does not require postulating an extra entity, i.e. God, to account for these experiences. If religious experiences are often associated with hallucinations caused by various brain malfunctions, is it not safer to assume that all religious experiences are hallucinations?⁷

There are two factors which count against this interpretation. First of all, the link between religious experience and abnormal psychology has been greatly exaggerated. To be sure, there is some evidence which links increased religious awareness and experience with temporal lobe epilepsy,⁸ as well as with other neurological syndromes, but there also seem to be significant differences between religious and abnormal experience.⁹ In any case, there is no consensus that anything that is part of “normal” experience is good, whereas any “abnormal” or uncommon experience is bad or false. As neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran points out, “On what basis does one decide whether a mystical experience is normal or abnormal? There is a common tendency to equate ‘unusual’ or ‘rare’ with abnormal, but this is a logical fallacy. Genius is a rare but highly valued trait, whereas tooth decay is common but obviously undesirable…Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experiences in any way ‘inferior’ to the more mundane truths that we scientists dabble in?”¹⁰

Secondly, it is probably a mistake to speak of God and neurology as competing causes given the Christian doctrine of Creation. As Fraser Watts points out, “The physical brain is part of God’s creation. Like everything else in creation, it would be seen, theologically, as existing within the life of God and being dependent on God. When God seeks to reveal [Himself] to people, it would be bizarre to suppose that God would wish, or need, to bypass this aspect of creation in order to do so.”¹¹ Many people seem to think that in order for religious experience to be genuine, there must be no “scientific” explanation for it, or that it should not be associated with any material, physical changes. But that would be like insisting that writing, in order for it to convey genuine information, could not be committed to paper. Christians should not find it surprising that God would convey knowledge of Himself through the physical mechanisms which He has created.

Worrying that correlating religious experience with brain structures means such experience is not “genuine” or that religion is “all in the head” reveals a misunderstanding of how knowledge is mediated by the brain in the first place. As William James noted, all of our experience is mediated, or “constructed,” by the brain, in the sense that the brain fashions representations of the external world which it uses to coordinate behavior. This does not mean, however, that we can have no real knowledge of the world. Many of our constructions are constrained by feedback from the environment, and so they reliably track changes in the “real” world.¹² So the real question regarding the veridicality of religious experience is not whether it is mediated or constructed by the brain; rather, it is about whether this experience is constrained by feedback from an external reality, or whether it is simply the result of the malfunctioning of the brain. This second question is not at all easy to address from a purely “neutral” standpoint. Religious communities develop criteria for evaluating whether a religious experience is genuine or not, such as (in the case of Christian communities) whether the experience results in a manifestation of the fruits of the Spirit, whether any cognitive content is in line with previous revelation, etc. But such criteria are internal to these communities and cannot easily be extended to count as a perfectly “objective” measure of the validity of religious experience. Even so, there are many religious experiences which do indeed suggest a supernatural origin and can be used as evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm.¹³

It seems, therefore, that theology and science can offer complementary explanations for religious experience. The upshot of the scientific study of such experiences, however, is that Christians need to learn to take our essentially embodied nature much more seriously. Some theologians go so far as to argue that we are completely physical beings, not a union of body and soul as has been commonly held throughout history.¹⁴ Such claims are certainly quite controversial, but at the very least we should learn to appreciate just how much of our experience is tied up with brain and bodily processes. This does not imply a demeaning of our status as image-bearers of God. To the contrary, it is a reaffirmation of the essential materiality of the Christian worldview. Philosopher Kevin Corcoran notes that “The Christian story, from the beginning of the narrative in Genesis to its dramatic climax in Revelation, is an ‘earthy’ story, a story that celebrates materiality, laments its perversion by human sin, and eagerly awaits its ultimate glorification in the resurrection.”¹⁵ In closing, it is also worth noting that such a view is more in line with religious experience as it actually occurs. The conclusion of Fraser Watts seems a fitting endpoint for my own discussion: “[T]he traditional religious understanding [is] that the everyday world is one that God created, in which he has incarnated, and in which he can be discerned by those ready to do so.”¹⁶ Modern science in no way threatens to undermine our genuine perception of the divine.

Malcolm Jeeves, Human Nature at the Millennium (Grand Rapids: Baker Books), 49. [↩]
Mario Beauregard and Vincent Paquette, “Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns,” Neuroscience Letters 405 (2006), 186–90. [↩]
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor, 1958), 29. [↩]
Ibid., 29–30 [↩]
Jeffrey L. Saver and John Rabin, “The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience,” Journal of Neuropsychiatry 9:3 (1997), 498; cf. Andrew B. Newberg and Bruce Y. Lee, “The Neuroscientifc Study of Religious and Spiritual Phenomena: or why God doesn’t use biostatistics,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 40:2 (2005), 479. [↩]
Massimo Pigliucci, “Neurotheology, a rather skeptical perspective” in Rhawn Joseph (ed.), NeuroTheology: Brain, Science, Spirituality and Religious Experience (San Jose: University Press, 2003), 270. [↩]
Ibid., 270–271. [↩]
Saver and Rabin 1997, 499–504. [↩]
Ibid., 505–6. [↩]
V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakesee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1998), 184–5. [↩]
Fraser Watts, “Cognitive Neuroscience and Religious Consciousness” in Robert John Russell et al. (eds.), Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Berkeley: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1999), 330. [↩]
Michael Arbib and Mary Hesse, The Construction of Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2–3. [↩]
For an argument that religious experience constitutes evidence for the existence of a supernatural world, see Philip H. Wiebe, “Religious Experience, Cognitive Science, and the Future of Religion” in Philip Clayton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 503–22. [↩]
Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). [↩]
Kevin Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006), 14 [↩]
Fraser Watts and Mark Williams, The Psychology of Religious Knowing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 151. [↩]