Varieties of Religious Experience



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The Gods of Neuroscience

As the old millennium closes, the world is inching (a micron at a time) toward a behavioral neurology of religion, a topic slightly more valid and acceptable now than when William James first spoke about it nearly a century ago. James H. Austin Zen and Brain.38

James’s VRE was written at a time when the new psychology of the subconscious was emerging in Europe, one hundred years later the most striking development in psychological theory—at the beginning of twenty-first century—is the continual expansion of neuroscience. This move from subliminal theory to neuroscience reflects the political domination of empirical methods; it is a sign of the move from descriptive method to quantitative and experimental

37 Foucault, M., The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Routledge, [1969] 1989, p. 211.

38 Austin, J. A., Zen and the Brain, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1998, p. 697.

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method that has marked scientific discourse in the twentieth-century. The huge advances in technology were central to the emergence of such ideas. If the beginning of the twentieth-century saw the start of “the decades of the unconscious”, it ended with the so-called “decade of the brain” in the 1990s. The experiential questionnaire was soon coupled with technical developments in brain scanning equipment. From the 1920s the electrical activity of the brain could be monitored through EEG (electroencephalogram). Advances in technology towards the end of the twentieth-century gave even more precision with such devices as PET (positron emission tomography), scans showing oxygen and glucose tagged with radioactivity, and more direct scans such as MEG (magnetoencephalography), which monitored the electrical activity of the brain cells.39

These advancements meant that electrical activity of the brain was now being monitored before, after and during so-called “religious experiences”, early studies, for example, explored states of meditation and prayer.40 The aim was to deduce which functions of the brain were operating during religious experience. The irony, which I will return to later, was that plotting electrical activity alone did not show anything unless a correlation could be established with reported experience. Personal inventories were therefore used alongside the brain scans in order to evaluate the mental experience and the physical activity of the brain.41 Reported experiences, with all their discursive and cultural variables, were still the central criteria. The imprecision of language was set against the attempts to pin-point electrical activity in brain cells, with philosophical assumptions that linguistic displays and neurons could in some way provide statements of reality.

The domination of experimental methods can be seen in a number of recent attempts by psychologists and neuroscientists to evaluate a range of experiences that James previously assessed according

39 Greenfield, S., Brain Story, London: BBC, 2000, p. 23; Newberg, A. B. & d’Aquili, E. G., “The Neuropsychology of Religious and Spiritual Experience” in Andresen, J. & Forman, R. K. C., Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps, Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 2000, p. 252.

40 Wulff, Psychology of Religion, pp. 176-188.

41 Makarec, K. & Persinger, M. A., “Temporal Lobe Signs: Electroencephalographic Validity and Enhanced Scores in Special Populations” in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1985, Vol. 60, pp. 831-842; Persinger, M. A. & Makarec, K., Temporal Lobe Epileptic Signs and Correlative Behaviours Displayed by Normal Populations’ in The Journal of General Psychology, 1987, Vol. 114, No. 2, pp. 179-195.

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to biography, questionnaire and interview. Such work was recently brought together in Cardeña, Lynn & Krippner’s examination of the scientific evidence for such “anomalous” experiences as hallucination, synesthesia, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experience, near-death experience and mysticism.42 The work presents the “current empirical and conceptual developments” in psychology and neuroscience with an open mind rather than dismissal. It assumes it follows the “spirit of James’s ‘radical empiricism’” and “pays homage” to James with its title, Varieties of Anomalous Experience.43 To what extent it follows the “spirit” of James’s VRE is another matter, but it does, at least, acknowledge the limits of the project.

Science may not have come very far in addressing the ontological status of these questions, but readers of the book will discover that psychology has much to offer in terms of proposing appropriate ways to obtain and evaluate evidence, characterize variables associated with these phenomena, and describe and investigate anomalous experiences.44

The advances in neuroscience and religion are without doubt fascinating and insightful, but the scope of their project may perhaps be overestimated. Such studies persistently suffer from a convenient utility of disciplinary amnesia and above all forget the foundational insights of William James’s first Gifford lecture on “Religion and Neurology”. In so far as it forgets the remit of its work, there is a fundamental methodological flaw in much of the recent work applying neuroscience to religion (not to mention the debates within neuroscience itself). Neuroscience is a valuable and important part of the biology of human mental functions, it can locate functions and activities, help in the understanding of mental diseases and neuronal dysfunction. However, to apply such knowledge to assessments of religious experience is to make a fundamental category error. An error James realises in his assessment of the project in 1901 and 1902. This disciplinary amnesia of contemporary neuroscientific assessments of religion is significant and requires an important and urgent return to James.

42 Cardeña, E., Lynn, S. J. & Krippner, S., Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2000.

43 Cardeña, Lynn & Krippner, Varieties of Anomalous Experience, p. 7.

44 ibid., p. 10.

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James established a crucial distinction between two orders of enquiry “existential judgement or proposition” and “propositional value” or “spiritual judgement”; one judgement cannot be deduced from the other.45 In a similar way to Theodore Flournoy’s distinction between the “principle of the exclusion of the transcendent” and the “principle of biological interpretation”, James was trying to separate out two different orders of reality.46 As James made clear: “They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations …”.47 To identify the biological or psychological grounds for an experience does not necessarily eradicate it spiritual worth. The key assumption here is that “the existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the value”.48 The neuroscientific facts may well contribute to the assessment of the religious value of an object, but they do not in themselves reduce experience to a material fact. This very straightforward and basic methodological fact has often been forgotten in later work in the psychology of religion and category errors abound in the scientific literature. The principal reason for such confusion is that neuroscientists and psychologists have little critical training in the nature of religious language and social theory. There is a mistaken assumption in some scientific circles that the field of religion has not developed its own thinking and critical assessment in the last hundreds years of scientific development. To locate discursive ideas such as “God” in the temporal lobes shows no appreciation of the complexity of religious language and the nature of such referents in the linguistic-cultural processes of experiences demarcated as “religious”.

James’s argument becomes even stronger in his assessment of what he calls the “medical materialists”, who reduce Saint Paul’s Damascus road experience to a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex or George Fox’s spiritual insights to a disordered colon.49 James’s assessment of such reductive assumptions can be applied to the literature of psychologists and neuroscientists. Whether it is examination of Zen meditation by electroencephalographic studies of alpha waves,50



45 James, W., The Varieties of Religious Experience, London: Routledge, [1902] 2002, p. 9.

46 Flournoy, T., “Les principes de la psychologie religieuse” Archives de Psychologie, 1903, Vol. 2, pp. 33-57.

47 James, The Varieties, p. 9.

48 ibid., p. 10.

49 ibid., p. 16.

50 Kasamatsu, A. & Hirai, T., “An Electroencephalographic Study on the Zen Meditation (Zazan)”, 1966, in Tart, C., Ed., Altered States of Consciousness, San Francisco: HarperCollins, [1969] 1990, pp. 581-595.

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near-death experiences through the visual cortex and anoxia51 transients of the temporal lobes,52 holistic operators in mystical states53 or more far-fetched ideas about an evolutionary neurobiology of meaning,54 to name but a few examples, there is a confusion of method which requires a return to James. Some 80 or 90 years before these studies James had already marked out the territory of the subject:

Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete.55

As James goes on to illustrate, there is confusion here between existential and spiritual judgements.

According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to, there 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 …56

This foundational statement of the psychology of religion has been forgotten and only by recalling such methods can the psychology of religion assume its rightful place in the understanding of religious experience. The fundamental problem is that scholars are never specific about what they are dealing with when they refer to religion, which they dismiss so easily. As Jacob Belzen makes clear: “As with all cultural phenomena, religions are multifarious and complex, not to be explained by one single scientific discipline, but neither to be approached by one single theory or method within a branch of scholarship. Simple as this sounds, it is still a not too common realisation.57 Dismissing religious practices or beliefs because of a direct correlation between neurological functions

51 Blackmore, S., Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out-of-Body Experiences, London: Heinemann, 1982; Blackmore, S., Dying to Live: Science and the Near-Death Experience, London: Grafton, 1993.

52 Persinger, M. A., Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs, New York: Praeger, 1987.

53 Newberg, A. B. & d’Aquili, E. G., “The Neuropsychology of Religion” in Watts, F., Science Meets Faith: Theology and Science in Conversation, London: SPCK, 1998; Newberg, A. B. & d’Aquili, E. G., “The Neuropsychology of Religious and Spiritual Experience”.

54 Ashbrook, J. B. & Albright, C. R., The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion and Neuroscience Meet, Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 1997.

55 James, The Varieties, p. 16.

56 ibid.

57 Belzen, J., “Religion as Embodiment”, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1999, Vol. 38, No. 2, p. 237.

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and religious experience is like trying to argue that identifying electrical activity and functions of the brain of a football player somehow reduces the skill of the player, undervalues the rules of the game, reduces the excitement and emotion of the crowd, questions the value of a stadium, the importance of football associations and the cultural values of sport. Neuroscience clearly cannot comment on anything other than the physical activity, even though it regularly reaches beyond its remit, in a form of cultural dominance, to explain wider forms of reality.

The key point here is to ask why explorations are made by neuropsychologists into something called “religion”. Why, we may ask, do not neurologists analyse the brain functions of scientists during scientific experimentation or the writing of books on the psychology of religion? One of the reasons, as Danziger has pointed out, is that the history of psychological theory is the politics of the community which ascribes value on methods and perspectives and gives weight to arguments.58 The functional attributes of the scientist’s brain are not studied because they do not serve a political purpose in the struggle for power-knowledge. The scientist studies the brain functions of an experience understood as “religious” in order to establish some authority over that domain of knowledge. It makes the “religious” experience “subject” to its power-knowledge, rather than putting itself under the power-knowledge of other cultural models of being human. Psychology and neuroscience are thus forms of discourse struggling for a hegemonic reading of human experience, an attempt to eradicate those experiences—arbitrarily held under the signifier “religion”—which threaten the certainty and domination of a scientific worldview. To live within a space of limits and not-knowing is challenging, but this is precisely the value of certain forms of religious language, or, at least, those forms not determined by religious fundamentalism. Certain forms of religious language have the potential to hold mystery and render humanity its humility. The problem is that religious language functions in a different way to scientific language and to confuse the two is to enter a political power struggle for ideological supremacy on the nature of human experience, a dangerous form of fascism.



58 Danziger, K., “The History of Introspection Reconsidered” in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1980, Vol. 16, pp. 241-262; Danziger, Constructing the Subject.

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The other important factor that William James identifies is that “religious” emotion is constituted by a whole array of other human emotions. There is no distinct emotion which is religious or spiritual. Religious emotions are not somehow different from the “common storehouse of emotions” that human beings experience.59 Fear, love and joy are human emotions, what makes them “religious” according to James is the “object” to which they are directed. James long recognised, what scholars of religion rediscovered at the end of the twentieth-century, that “religion” did not stand for any “single principle or essence” but was an abstract conception holding many complex factors.60 What, perhaps, James did not fully appreciate, but which is now understood from discourse theory, is the fact that what makes something “religious” is the discursive context or framing of an experience. Religion in this sense is a narrative construction of experience and its correlation with material reality is secondary to the reality of its cultural-discursive operation. Neurology can tell us no more about the reality of “religious experience”, or any other form of experience, than its mechanics. To continue the analogy, it can tell us how the car works but not about the “experience” of driving the car, or the language used to understand the experience and the environment or reality outside the car. Reality is far more complex than materialist science can appreciate. Science itself is bound by a cultural logic and a series of linguistic registers that limit its scope. It seeks closure of one discourse (religion) by assuming the rules of another discourse (neurology).

Studies in neuroscience and religion over the last 15 years only serve to demonstrate the disciplinary amnesia of the subject. The central confusion is related to the scope of analysis. There is an assumption that neurology is offering some insight beyond the limits of its own disciplinary apparatus—a kind of disciplinary arrogance that neglects careful exploration of the history of religious concepts and ideas. Neuroscience tells us very little about religion, but a lot about the brain (the actual scope of its remit) and the politics of neuro-scientific discourse in Western society. The fact that it tells us very little about “religion” can be seen by briefly exploring the fascinating work of Canadian neuroscientist Michael Persinger.



59 James, The Varieties, p. 27.

60 ibid., p. 26.

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Persinger and the Temporal Lobes

Persinger has played a leading and important role in confirming earlier insights into the relationship between temporal lobe disorders and certain types of religious experience.61 Through initial experiments examining the neural basis of paranormal experiences, he discovered the importance of electrical activity in the temporal lobes and examined a continuum of experiences from temporal lobe epilepsy to what he called TLTs (temporal lobe transients) or slight electrical activity in the temporal lobes. TLTs were experiences regarded as “normal” and included such things as “personal dilemma, grief, fatigue, and a variety of physiological conditions”.62 Unlike other forms of epileptic disorders, such as petit mal (black outs) and grand mal seizure (epileptic ‘fit’), temporal lobe epilepsy is “not necessarily associated with convulsions”.63 It is rather electrical instability in the temporal region, which can cause such experiences as “vivid landscapes”, bright lights, sounds, smells, or intense feelings. The associated feeling can range from fear to euphoria and hold powerful emotions, even if the precise nature of the event remains vague. According to Persinger, the temporal epileptic is at one end of a spectrum, along which we all reside. He even goes as far to suggest that “the essential symptoms are seen in a milder manner within every type of religious experience that has been reported”, such as “being touched by God” or “being at one with the universe”.64

Persinger may well be correct when he states that “there is something about the temporal lobe and religious experience that cannot be refuted”.65 But establishing some correlation between temporal lobe activity and experiences demarcated as “religious” is one thing, to suggest “the God Experience is a normal and more organised pattern of temporal activity” is quite another.66 While Persinger does qualify his position by saying he is not suggesting “the experiences of God are synonymous with temporal lobe epilepsy” or that the experience of God is “localized within the temporal lobes”, he

61 Dewhurst, K. & Beard, A. W., “Sudden Religious Conversion in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy” in British Journal of Psychiatry, 1970, Vol. 117, pp. 497-507.

62 Persinger, Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs, p. x.

63 ibid., p. 17.

64 ibid., p. 19.

65 ibid., p. 20.

66 ibid., p. 17.

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is suggesting that “religious experiences” are related to slight activity of temporal lobe transients.67 Persinger may well be critical of those who try to separate “semantics from science”, but there are important factors about religious language and the politics of ethnic and cultural experience which Persinger fails to fully acknowledge in his work.68 Persinger’s error is to take the correlation between religious experience and neural activity beyond the “existential judgement” to a whole series of “spiritual judgements”, without the technical skills of religious or philosophical scholarship. He, like Blackmore in relation to Near-Death experience, makes a category error out of a politics of knowledge.69 Such writers need to return to James to understand their disciplinary amnesia.

One of the most striking features in Persinger’s book Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs is that only the first two chapters discuss the empirical material we find in his more considered empirical articles on the subject.70 The rest of the book is a series of speculations (judgements) about religion (principally Christianity) in regard to learnt behaviour, conditioning, compartmentalization and personality, which have no empirical grounding in neuroscience. The neuroscience becomes a technical packaging for making a whole series of reflections on religious practice, without the history and context of religious ideas. If a scholar of religion was to enter the field of physics and make all sorts of assumptions about the universe he or she would be laughed out of court, but the weight of scientific discourse allows Persinger, and others, to make sweeping statements about God, Yahwah, Allah, Cosmic consciousness, Pentecostal and Southern Baptist groups, biblical literature, the Catholic concept of the Virgin Mary, Tibetan Buddhism, Asian religions, ritual initiation in Catholic, Islamic, Protestant and Jewish groups, the Catholic Mass, religious dogma, to mention just a few of the areas that are drawn into the discussion (without detailed textual evidence, chronology, or cultural specification).71 On the grounds of empirical correlation between certain experiences and the



67 ibid., pp. 14, 17.

68 ibid., p. 16.

69 Blackmore, Dying to Live.

70 Persinger, M. A., Religious and Mystical Experience as Artifacts of Temporal Lobe Function: A General Hypothesis’ in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1983, Vol. 57, pp. 1255-1262; Persinger, M. A., 1984 “Propensity to Report Paranormal Experiences is Correlated with Temporal Lobe Signs” in Perceptual and Motor Skills, Vol. 59, 1984, pp. 583-586; Makarec & Persinger, “Temporal Lobe Signs”; Persinger & Makarec “Temporal Lobe Epileptic Signs”.

71 Persinger, Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs, pp. 24, 31, 60, 68, 79, 90, 96, 107, 116.

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temporal lobes (valid as it may be, but certainly not undisputed), Persinger is able to disregard entire technicalities of knowledge about the history and method of the study of religion. The status of science, as a powerful explanatory discourse, serves as an excuse for doing the hard work of cultural, social and linguistic analysis.

One of the greatest errors of Persinger’s study is to assume that the signifier “God” and the construct “experience” are valid registers to account for all the very diverse phenomena found in religious activities. What we may ask is the “God experience”? Or what does Persinger mean by the idea that “God experiences are products of the human brain”. 72 Persinger does seem to concede in one early moment that “God Concepts are determined by verbal conditioning” and “derived from multiple references by the power of peer-group affinity, social pressure, and the individual’s identification with the group”. 73 Despite the problem of assuming all religious experiences are held under the Christo-centric signifier “God”—a crude form of Christian imperialism operating under scientific rubric—there is just no evaluation of the infinitely complex social realities understood by the term religion. To say that God, Allah and Cosmic Consciousness are the same realties found in the temporal lobes, or even that the “professed atheist displays some form of God belief” is to seriously underestimate the nature and value of culture, language and the politics of experience. 74

Persinger attributes the “God Experience” (sic) to an evolutionary development of the human brain, serving certain survival functions. 75 The experience, according to Persinger, stabilised the self by providing a mechanism to cope with the “terror of personal extinction”. 76 As Persinger states, somewhat boldly:

The capacity to have the God Experience is a consequence of the human brain’s construction. If the temporal lobe had developed in some other way, the God Experience would not have occurred. 77

Persinger fails to realise that while it is true that the evolved form of the brain can only carry out the functions it has developed, the capacity of the brain for language and imagination has made all sorts of religious and non- religious realities possible. It is also the

72 ibid., p. x.

73 ibid., p. 1.

74 ibid., p. 3.

75 ibid., p. 12.

76 ibid.

77 ibid., p. 14.

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case, as James has indicated, that religious experiences are no different from other experiences. For one person the chemical effects of LSD may be framed according to religious language, but the same chemical reactions for another will be just chemical reactions. The key feature that Persinger and others in neuroscience fail to realise is that the location of the “experience” in neural processes does not offer the meaning or significance of the reality. The human brain has also evolved to appreciate that realities can be of different orders and that language can function in very different ways. The key problem is the fusion of different orders of statement and a refusal to consider the nature of scientific language.

The problem can be seen more explicitly in a new set of writings described, perhaps more accurately, as “neuro-theology”. In a fascinating study drawing together contemporary insights from neuroscience and theological models of divinity, James Ashbrook and Carol Albright attempt a theology of neuroscience. While such work holds an important appreciation of analogy, it can easily be mistaken for empirical science, especially when different languages are so closely fused and confused. The key to the whole project can be seen when Ashbrook and Albright acknowledge that their approach is one of “convergence and overlap among the technical disciplines”. 78 As they indicate: “We combine the languages of religion, whether understood in broad cultural terms or in narrower theological categories, with neuroscience talk to make sense of religion.”. 79 It should be made clear that convergence and overlap do not constitute empirical data, something so easily disguised. Psychology is a master parasitic discourse for merging different orders of languages and carrying out reification. 80 Ashbrook and Albright are at least honest in their method, but what they are performing is no more than Augustine in making an analogy between models of the mind and the trinity. 81 Such work is theological in nature, but it is part of a wider disciplinary apparatus that seeks to explore how the

78 Ashbrook & Albright, The Humanizing Brain, p. xxi.

79 ibid.

80 See Carrette, J. R., “The Language of Archetypes: A Conspiracy in Psychological Theory.” Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies, 1994, Vol. 40, pp. 168-192.

81 Augustine, St., On the Holy Trinity, Selected Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, [c.490] 1988.

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language of psychology and religion interact. There are many dangers of distortion with such an approach and the potential for disciplinary amnesia is great. It is for this reason that we need to return to the founding texts of the discipline to recover the roots of the subject and prevent the confusion of scientific fact with scientific analogy. The appeal to “science” is a powerfully seductive move in contemporary Western society, because it holds the currency of authority and truth. Such seductions do nonetheless hide many errors of human knowledge, particularly in a subject like psychology, which makes claims beyond its philosophical scope and function. Psychology in the last hundred years has wanted to escape the politics of experience in order to find the authority of empirical truth, but human experience, with all its problems of representation, constantly escapes the analysis of the natural sciences. The return to James is a return to the category of experience with all its imprecision and insight.

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