I’ve been reading various articles all over the place which seem to be saying that religious/spiritaul feelings are caused by a particular part of the brain; activity has been consistently detected in the same place when the subject is experiencing something that they would describe as spritual or religious, subjects who experience damage or have abnormalities in this region are also prone to religious behaviour.
But… is it sound reasoning to infer that this part of the brain is the explanation for why people think there is a God?
For example, it’s possible to detect activity in a specific area of the brain every time the subject smells roasted chicken, but nobody would argue that the roasted chicken is produced by the brain, rather that this particular part of the brain is the bit that deals with external experiences of smell.
Now somebody will likely invoke Occam’s razor here, because, unlike roast chicken smells, personal sprituality tends to be difficult/impossible to independently corroborate, but that’s the whole point isn’t it? - by definition, spiritual things are intangible, if we are to insist on having tangible evidence for them, anything which satisfies this test disqualifies itself as spiritual in doing so.
Am I right in sayig though, that (howrever unlikely it might seem to our educated minds) we cannot entirely rule out the idea that we have merely discovered the part of the brain that deals with external spritual influence?