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Did you know that things happen in a person’s brain while he is having a sense experience? Did you know that the same smart people who think that religious experience is nothing more than a brain phenomenon because things happen in a person’s brain while he is having one don’t think anything analogous about sense experience?
It seems that to be consistent with their proposed reason to reject out of hand any and all religious experiences, these people should reject out of hand any and all sense experiences. But obviously that’s to court radical skepticism, and nobody (except maybe a few contrarians who are forced to live either as practical hypocrites or as madmen) wants to do that. So, to be charitable to these apparently inconsistent religious skeptics, let’s try to find the real reason they believe religious experiences to be “all in the head.”
The real reason, I suspect, is probably better thought of as an assumption. The assumption is that the only possible way for human beings to experience external reality is through the senses. I say it is an assumption because it is typically taken for granted, not argued for. But how might the religious skeptic defend this assumption?
Well, she might say that sense experience is the only way that anybody has ever really experienced external reality, and, so, it is safe to assume that it is the only possible way to experience external reality. But that would be to beg the question in a rather obvious way: she is assuming that no one has ever really experienced reality in a non-sensory way. The mystic would beg to differ!
A better argument would be like the one offered by Michael Martin in his book Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1990), which goes like this: one way to distinguish genuine perceptions from illusory ones is to check them against each other for consistency. While reports of sense experience inevitably vary from person to person, there is almost always agreement among them at a deeper, more fundamental level. One would expect that if people are experiencing the same reality, they would report similar things about it. And, when it comes to reports about sense experience, people do report similar things. But not so with religious experience, asserts Martin. He says that, whereas reports about sense experiences include superficial dissimilarities but fundamental similarities, the exact opposite is true about religious experience. Some people report experiencing the divine as wholly other, others as identical with everything. Some people report experiencing the divine as benevolent, others as full of wrath. And so on. (Actually not “and so on.” In fact, the examples given here are mine; he doesn’t give any concrete examples of dissimilarities, rather just a few vague references to contrary religious truth claims.) So, according to Martin, since reports concerning the divine differ so radically, they are best explained as purely neuropsychological phenomena, not as experiences of divine reality.
Yet, Martin’s argument suffers from major defects. For one, he is far too quick to conclude that seemingly dissimilar religious experiences are actually fundamentally different. Mystics through the ages have been emphatic about their inability to convey the true nature of their experiences in words, and, as is to be expected when one is attempting to communicate the essentially ineffable, one is liable to fall back on basic background assumptions about the nature of ultimate reality in attempt to translate one’s experience into comprehensible language.
A fortiori, recent work by neuroscientists Eugene G. D’Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg [1] reveals that there is a common core to mystical experience.
The essential point in understanding the phenomenology of subjective religious experience involves a sense of unity of reality at least somewhat greater than the baseline perception of unity in day-to-day life (253)
Moreover, D’Aquili and Newberg highlight what they take to be “the most important mystical state, Absolute Unitary Being, or AUB.”
AUB is a state described in the mystical literature of all the world’s great religions. When people are in that state they lose all sense of discrete being, and even the difference between self and other is obliterated. There is no sense of the passing of time, and all that remains is a perfect timeless undifferentiated consciousness. When such a state is suffused with positive affect, there is a tendency to describe the experience, after the fact, as personal. Hence, such experiences often are described as a perfect union with God (the unio mystica of the Christian tradition), or else the perfect manifestation of God in the Hindu tradition. When such experiences are accompanied by neutral affect, they tend to be described, after the fact, as impersonal. This likely results in generating concepts such as the abyss of Jacob Boeme, the Void, or Nirvana, of Buddhism, or the Absolute of a number of philosophical traditions. There is no question that whether the experience is interpreted personally as God or impersonally as the Absolute, it possesses a quality of transcendent wholeness without any temporal or spatial division whatsoever (253).
It seems overwhelmingly likely, therefore, that while devotees of various religious and philosophical doctrines might describe their mystical experiences in diverse ways, their experiences are (at least very often) quite similar.
On a related note, Martin is clearly not interested in considering the notion that there might be a lot more to reality than what is sensuously detectable. How can he be so sure that people don't report experiencing different things because they are experiencing different things? Maybe some experience God whilst others experience angels or demons or some other finite but insensible things. I don’t raise this in order to suggest that this actually happens, but it does seem that Martin would do well at least to consider it. Indeed, though I might be slipping into uncharity at this point, I venture to suggest that Martin’s arguments are simply halfhearted attempts to prop up his basic assumption that non-sensory perception is impossible.
The facts, as I see them, are these: (i) any argument raised against the possibility of veridical mystical experience can be raised with equal force against the possibility of veridical sense experience, and (ii) Martin-style attempts to fault mystical experiences for being hopelessly inconsistent with each other are undermined by the empirical findings of D’Aquili and Newberg concerning the common phenomenological core of mystical experiences across cultures and metaphysical traditions.
A final point of D’Aquili and Newberg is that those who have experienced AUB – among them sophisticated, formerly materialist, scientists – are virtually certain that their AUB experiences reflect ultimate reality more faithfully or fully than their ordinary sense experience does. Granted those are just their subjective reports and perhaps we should take them with a grain of salt, but these folks do have the advantage of having experienced both AUB and “baseline reality” (that is, the world as experienced through the senses) and without hesitation insist that AUB is fundamental. “This being the case,” they continue,
it is a foolish reductionism indeed that states that, because hyperlucid unitary consciousness can be understood in terms of neuropsychological processes, it is therefore derivative from baseline reality. Indeed the reverse argument could just as well be made. Neuropsychology can give no answer to the question of which state is more real, baseline reality or hyperlucid unitary consciousness often experienced as God (256).
My conclusion, therefore, is simply that there aren’t any good reasons to rule out the notion that people actually can and do experience God - or, at least, that the common reasons that I consider above fail the task. The question of whether or not there are any good reasons to think that anybody actually has experienced God I leave for another time or, perhaps, for another person.
1. See “The Neuropsychological Basis of Religions, or Why God Won’t Go Away,” Zygon 33 (1998): 187-201. Reprinted in Louis Pojman and Michael Rea, Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology (6th Edition). Boston: Wadsworth, 2012: 247-257. Page numbers refer to the Pojman and Rea volume.
