Posted by alexandra_k on February 1, 2005, at 2:10:46
In reply to Re: Newsweek article on religion and the brain, posted by smokeymadison on January 30, 2005, at 18:04:46
Yeah, that is a hot topic at the moment. I know someone who fairly recently finished her PhD on the neural basis of religious experience (she studied it within the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies).
So it seems to be the case that certain kinds of religious experience are correlated with certain kinds of brain states.
That is interesting.
What is interesting to me (and this is something that we argued about a bit) is whether religious experience is the result of MALFUNCTION of the brain. In the way that people want to consider hallucinations, dissociation, and related phenomena to be malfunctions (coping strategies to be sure, but still malfunctions). If it is the result of malfunction then rather than 'seeing things the way they really are' and such, people may be just under the illusion that this is the case.
Why should religious experiences be taken to be more in touch with the ultimate nature of reality than the rest of our experiences?
It doesn't follow that because there is a neural basis that there is a god.
But then it doesn't follow that becaue there is a neural basis that there isn't a god either.The finding of a correlation between certain kinds of religious experiences and certain kinds of brain states cannot hope to provide evidence of either of those: whether there isn't a god or whether there is a god has to be settled on conceptual grounds. Or it can be a matter of faith.
The person I know didn't like the 'malfunction' idea.
I don't hold on to that especially but I don't like her much and so it was fun to annoy her :-)
She is deeply religious, but a real sickler for the 'rules' (when it suits her).
Anyways, that is what I think...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:449954
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050118/msgs/450892.html