Neuroscience and Religious Experience Part 4: God's Communication with Humans

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.]

A request to share Climbing the Rainbows

Today we’re finishing up our first set of essays. I hope you’ve found the ideas to be worth your time and thought.

If you know someone who might be interested in these discussions about the restored gospel, I ask that you share Climbing the Rainbows with them. You’re also welcome to post about it on social media or elsewhere.

To share, you can forward the emails you receive by subscribing, post or send the link to the website (https://climbingtherainbows.substack.com), or use the share button at the end of this essay.

Thanks for your help!

The last part!

This is the fourth and last essay in a sequence on neuroscience and religious experience. In the first I introduced an argument which attempts to explain away your spiritual experiences by what we know about the brain. In the second and third essays I showed why that argument isn’t very good. Along the way I talked about the brain, framing assumptions, neuroimaging, and other topics.

I’ll be finishing by picking up on a different point I made before—that, far from being surprised that neuroscience has found what it’s found about religious experience, we should in fact expect it to make those findings. Here I’ll explain why.

This essay will serve to wrap up the sequence and to preview the next one, which will introduce the study of the principles which govern revelation.

How would God communicate?

Let’s begin by supposing that God does in fact exist. Let’s also suppose that God has a message he wants to communicate to human beings. Now ask yourself: how will he communicate it to them?