Neuroscience and Religious Experience Part 2: Framing Assumptions

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.]

Welcome back!

This is the second essay in a four-part sequence about the brain, neuroscience, and spiritual experience. I won’t do any summary other than to say, we’re considering an argument about the brain and spiritual experiences: that spiritual experiences are just the brain’s way of organizing what happens to us in order to help us survive and reproduce, and that therefore spiritual experiences don’t indicate the truth of anything.

In this essay I’ll introduce the idea of a “framing assumption,” and then I’ll apply that idea to neuroscience. These points will allow us to start making some counterarguments.

In the last essay I left you with the following thought question:

• How do we know that the brain is an organ whose purpose is to help us survive and reproduce?

We’ll get to this question soon.

[In Captain Tenneal’s voice:] LLLLET’S GO!

An introduction to framing assumptions, and some examples

In order to respond to the argument about the brain and spiritual experience, we have to understand something foundational about how neuroscience works. And in order to understand that, it’s absolutely crucial for us to grasp the notion of a “framing assumption.” I’m going to introduce that notion here and then give some examples, and we’ll apply it to neuroscience later.