The Illusion of God's Presence

[_DrW]

Downloaded the Kindle version of The Illusion of God's Presence: The Biological Origins of Spiritual Longing, by John Wathey. Best thirteen bucks I've spent in a long time.

Wathey clearly has a great command of his subject matter, as well as a passion for the science involved, yet does not make claims beyond the data he provides in support of his thesis.

While making it clear that his ideas on the subject of "the god shaped vacuum" are not necessarily new, he does a great job of weaving together observations from biology and natural history to support his case that much of what has come to constitute religion, or the religious experience, arises from the fetal and neonatal brain circuitry that humans have evolved to help ensure the survival of the newborn.

The book is clearly and concisely written, informative and entertaining, and one that even the most hard over of religionists should enjoy reading (and would clearly benefit from doing so).

[_Franktalk]

Downloaded the Kindle version of The Illusion of God's Presence: The Biological Origins of Spiritual Longing, by John Wathey. Best thirteen bucks I've spent in a long time.

Thanks for the review. I bought the hard cover from ebay.

[_DrW]

Yes, but not necessarily artificial, a study concluded that such feelings are due to suggestion.

Granqvist, Pehr, et al. "Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields." Neuroscience letters 379.1 (2005): 1-6.

DT,

The Grandqvist paper you cited above is an outlier. Their experimental setup did not allow a valid replication of the God Helmet experiment. Fact is that Persinger's work on the God Helmet has been replicated and is well accepted in the bioelectromagnetics community. I know Dr. Persinger from the 1990s, and have had colleagues who have experienced the God Helmet first hand.

If you want more information (and can forgive the unfortunate title), a credible narrative (with literature references) can be found here:
https://sacredneurology.com/2015/06/07/ ... persinger/

Several of the scientists referenced in this defense of Persinger's work (especially Joseph Kirschvink), as well as the Wiltschkos (whose work on magnetic orientation in animals is described in the book that is the subject of the OP), are researchers with whom I have interacted professionally. This included co-authorship of a peer reviewed paper demonstrating magnetic field orientation in small mammals.

[_DoubtingThomas]

Wathey clearly has a great command of his subject matter, as well as a passion for the science involved, yet does not make claims beyond the data he provides in support of his thesis.

his sequel will tackle mystical experiences

[_Physics Guy]

If anyone thinks that the quality of an experience somehow proves it must be supernatural, then I think they don't appreciate what a perfectly natural brain can do. The neuropsychology of religious experience seems to me to undermine any experiential proof of supernatural reality.

Neuropsychology certainly doesn't prove that experiences of God are illusions, however. After all, every experience is a complicated event in the brain. Ordinary vision, for example, is a highly adapted mechanism that is stunningly amazing if you think about it. We are biological radios with reception in the Petahertz band. Illusions happen; not everything we see is really there. And in fact everything we see is at best a highly filtered representation of reality. Most of the time, though, vision actually does provide a limited but genuine perception of real things.

Could the same be true of religious experiences? I don't know. But I don't see how anyone else can know, either. Understanding the neurological mechanisms of religious experience no more proves them all to be illusory than understanding the neurological mechanisms of visual perception proves that all sight is hallucination.

[_Franktalk]

Understanding the neurological mechanisms of religious experience no more proves them all to be illusory than understanding the neurological mechanisms of visual perception proves that all sight is hallucination.

That is a reasonable position to take. I think we also have to ask why the brain does what it does. What part of natural selection or survival of the fittest caused the brain to develop in this manner? If science wants the brain to be a product of a natural process then science must be able to link an advantage to the actual workings of the mind. Science needs to provide a road map of the mind and show how it developed in the evolutionary environment.

I personally feel that as we discover more and more about the mind science will be less and less able to describe a natural process to explain the mind. But I am open to be wrong. Maybe another hundred years or so things will become clearer.

[_DoubtingThomas]

I personally feel that as we discover more and more about the mind science will be less and less able to describe a natural process to explain the mind. But I am open to be wrong. Maybe another hundred years or so things will become clearer.

are you open to the possibility that gods don't exists?

[_Franktalk]

are you open to the possibility that gods don't exists?

In my belief system there is no God. But there is an extension of self beyond this mortal existence.

[_DoubtingThomas]

are you open to the possibility that gods don't exists?

In my belief system there is no God. But there is an extension of self beyond this mortal existence.

like Cryonics?

[_Physics Guy]

If science wants the brain to be a product of a natural process then science must be able to link an advantage to the actual workings of the mind.

Yes, because evolution can only follow proliferation gradients. It has no drive towards complexity for its own sake.

But evolution doesn't normally have to be super-efficient. Fitness only means being better than the competition, and when every organism is running DNA that has been kludged together under nothing more clever than F = m a, the bar can be low. I think it may be that conscious minds are a natural phenomenon like fire, which only happens under special circumstances, but takes off like crazy when those circumstances are present, regardless of whether the results are good or bad. So consciousness has to be correlated with survival advantage, but not every aspect of consciousness has to have been optimized by natural selection.