Since this thread seems to be drawing to a close, I thought I might set forth some conclusions. Thanks to all who have contributed here, especially ITR, who I feel has engaged here with admirable commitment, reading dense citations and offering interesting counter-examples in return.
If there is one strawman still standing, however, it is this: Experiments on neuropathological phenomena in mentally ill people tell us a lot about experiences those people call religious, so religious people are obviously all a bit mentally ill. I would like to burn this strawman here and now. Schizophrenics and epileptics are useful subjects in studying external voices and ‘cosmic’ epiphanies because the massive activity (or conspicuous inactivity) they show in certain areas of the brain during such an episode is so patently manifest. But the key point is that heightened activity in those same brain regions is also apparent in mentally healthy people, many of whom also attribute religious significance to these episodes even though their activity (or inactivity) is nowhere near so extreme as in their pathological counterparts.
For example, the Auditory Verbal Hallucination paper referenced experiments in which patients were asked to ‘speak’ a phrase in their head with their ‘own’ voice while their brains were scanned. Then they were asked to speak the same phrase in their head using someone else’s voice, eg. their mother’s: activity in a specific brain region was found to decrease significantly in the second case. Then their brains were scanned while they were having an episode in which they felt they were hearing external voices in their heads, and the inactivity in this same, precise region was even more conspicuous. But the reason the paper was so relevant in this thread was because of its focus on mentally healthy people, showing how activity levels in this region fluctuate in all of us, such that hearing an ‘inner voice’ is perfectly normal, whether you attribute it to an actual external source or not.
In the other example, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy is a debilitating condition in which a ‘firestorm’ of activity in certain brain regions can cause unconsciousness, after which the subject often reports a religious or mystical experience of overwhelming profundity. But what the experiment on expert vs novice meditators showed was, again, that merely heightened levels of activity in mentally healthy, non-epileptic people caused those people to report strong feelings of cosmic salience as well, whether they invoked an external source or not.
Both cases were my efforts to highlight important, pertinent experiments on religiously-interpreted experiences in mentally healthy people. One cannot simply wave away AVHs or TLE as being irrelevant to religious or mystical figures, present or past, just because they didn’t have actual seizures or schizophrenia.
It was also interesting to see the tack taken by ITR here. I was perhaps expecting him to focus on more ‘subtle’ aspects of religious experience that he himself could identify with. Instead, he surprisingly went the other way, offering very dramatic experiences from Jakob Lorber (a schoolteacher famous for his mystical writings in the 1850’s) and Alexandrina Da Costa (a Portuguese mystic who died in 1955), both of whom he felt produced credible evidence of outright miracles. While I’m always happy to discuss cases like these, someone unfamiliar with the case would always have a hard time being convinced that a miracle had occurred since anecdotal evidence can always be mistaken, innocently or otherwise. In Da Costa’s case, proving that she didn’t eat anything other than a small wafer per day would be as difficult as demonstrating that faries don’t live in your garden, but extraordinary claims of miraculous survival unfortunately require such strong evidence in order to be convincing. In Lorber’s case, well, vague prognostications can always be interpreted more specifically in hindsight, and it is conversely extremely difficult to convince someone who believes in the prognosticator how vague the claims really are, as five minutes of conversation with someone who routinely follows their horoscope will show.
Indeed, if people in the 19th and 20th centuries produced miracles, surely some of the nearly 7 billion alive today should too? An actual miracle-worker should be able to do something statistically remarkable in full view of scientists (and, more importantly, expert scam-artists), yet nobody who claims such powers ever seems prepared to subject them to controlled tests, even though a Nobel Prize and the JREF’s $1m are there for the taking. This is perhaps why even thoughtful theists like ITR are a little reluctant to point at current miracles since it is so clearly the domain of misguided woo-woos next to whom one would be uncomfortable sitting so far out on the limb. Historical miracles, on the other hand, allow one to filter out such concerns more easily because so few people at the time demanded such rigour to ensure that innocent mistakes or downright fraud were eliminated as explanations.
Ultimately, the quote from this thread I find most valuable is this one:
This is an extraordinarily brave thing to say, and I commend ITR for his courage. I at least know now that ITR considers the natural explanations I propose for religious experiences to be feasible alternatives to the supernatural explanations whose truth I myself entertain the possibility of. The exact value of “feasible” is highly debatable, of course, but it seems that my atheistic worldview and the scientific explanations on which it rests are no longer ludicrous to him, such that he is unlikely to mischaracterise my position badly in future.
To be honest, that’s all I ever wanted here. Many thanks.
and like that … pfoof …he’s gone.