Neuroscience and Religious Experience Part 1: The Brain

Or, why the neuroscience of religious experience tells us nothing about the reality of religious experience

You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.

The first Climbing the Rainbows essay EVER

Hello and welcome.

Now why is this so long? What I am getting into here?

This essay is the first in a sequence about the brain, neuroscience, and religious or spiritual experience. I’m going to delve into arguments from science and religion in order to answer the question of what neuroscience can teach us about things like “feeling the Spirit” or “receiving a revelation.”

In order to treat the subject properly, the sequence has four parts. This is not the kind of thing you can <tl;dr>. If you do, you won’t really appreciate the depth of the issues nor the power of the ideas that can help us resolve them.

The brain

Let’s begin by supposing someone said the following to you about their spiritual experiences:

Brain scans show that “feeling the Spirit” is just like other kinds of good feelings; the brain is doing the same thing in many different experiences. They’re all varieties of the same experience.

After we have those good feelings, our brain tries to understand what we’ve experienced. It’s constructing our reality by taking chemical, electrical, and other physical inputs and organizing them into patterns to help us survive and reproduce. Our experience depends on how our brain has learned to do this. The brain interprets similar chemical signals in similar ways and weaves them into our lived experience depending on the context in which those signals occur.

So the good feelings we get during “spiritual experiences” just tell us that, whatever we’re doing during that experience—like communing with others at church—we should keep doing it, because it’s likely that such behaviors will lead to better survival rates in the future. Knowing this, I can explain my spiritual experiences as my brain’s efforts to help me be a valuable, contributing member to an important group that has shaped my life. Those experiences aren’t, however, indicators of truth.

That’s a pretty compelling argument—we’ll come back to it soon.

Part of the reason the argument is so compelling, though, is that the brain itself is so remarkable. Not just neuroscientists think that—everyone does, from academia to outside of it. People love the brain.

When I was a graduate student, my school even had a “neurohumanities” program. They offered small grants to students to join their research group, which met once a week for lunch. I didn’t know what “neurohumanities” was, but I knew what “money” was, and “lunch,” so once a week I showed up with other graduate students for the meetings. Apparently we were supposed to talk about the relation between our fields and neuroscience. The discussions got less interesting when I realized that the group had no neuroscientists, and that no one else knew what “neurohumanities” was, either.¹

Now all these people aren’t wrong to think the brain is remarkable—in fact it’s the most amazing object I’ve ever known about. How does a three-pound chunk of human tissue make possible our whole life and every single thing we experience? It’s absolutely incredible! It really is the most astounding thing I’ve ever studied.

Unfortunately, the brain is a bit like a Little Caesar’s pizza at a kid’s birthday party: it’s white on the outside and red in the middle, everyone wants a piece, and no one knows how it’s made or what to think about it. Our interest in it outpaces our knowledge by far, and the resulting ignorance leads to some problems when we start thinking about the relation of the brain to other things—especially spiritual experiences, like in that argument above.