From the Classic Dumb Professor Vault: Is God Only an Illusion in Your Brain?

When I was a young university lad I remember debating with an atheist friend of mine about religion.  And one of his arguments against religion was that “when religious people are in Church experiencing a relationship with God, in that key moment, really what was happening is that a bunch of neurons were firing.  Therefore God does not exist.”  He was little deterred but perhaps a bit surprised by my answer: “What the thunder did you expect was happening when I was having a religious experience?  That interacting with the Creator of the universe had no impact on my neurons?  That somehow the experience happened in a vacuum?  Of course it isn’t a threat to my faith to say that my neurons are firing when I talk to God, any more than it is a threat to my faith in food to say that neurons are firing when I eat.  God made us as physical creatures to experience our world through neurons and skin and eyes and the like.  Thus, both the theistic and atheistic theories suggest that my neurons should be firing; the real question then still remains as to whether they are firing because God is real or for some other reason.  But you can’t tell by just noting something that any religious person with any sense would have told you from the beginning.” 

Now it isn’t surprising that college juniors such as my atheist friend exhibit this level of naiveté about religious belief.  In fact, this line of argument seems so foolish – so lacking in any depth whatsoever – that I had hardly planned on dealing with it on this cite.  Only it turns out to have been repackaged by people who ought to be able to think better than college juniors:  Academics at famous institutions are re-hashing another form of this argument as an attack on religion.  Only it’s funnier and more richly ironic.  For example, David C. Noelle, Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, says: 

“Modern science is beginning to understand the neurological mechanisms that give rise to the religious experiences of the believer.  Given these results, the skeptic may present the believer with a simple question:  How do you know that your religious experience is not a simple trick of your brain – the unfolding of a perfectly natural temporal lobe transient?  How can you trust such an experience when, through science, we can convincingly mimic the face of God?”   

The argument is so silly that I have a hard time taking it seriously, even from a respected professor in my own field at one of the top universities in the nation.  Suppose he had said “we have found evidence that neurons are firing when you eat food – that we can convincingly mimic certain food experiences by stimulating different parts of the brain – therefore how can you trust that your experience of eating is real?”  No one says that, of course, because it would be ridiculous: But using the brain’s “God module” as an argument against religion is no less logically ridiculous.  Again, it is hardly news to us Christians that our brains are hard-wired to have religious experiences.  In fact, though our faith is hardly dependent upon the demonstration, that is exactly what we would expect.  The Bible says that “God set eternity in the hearts of men.”  So we are not surprised to find that our metaphorical heart (which is of course literally found in the brain) has this kind of thing “built in” to it.  That is more or less what the Christian theory of humanity would predict.  It is as if they have gone to a peach-lovers conference and said “I’ve got hard evidence that peaches are among the world’s best-liked and healthiest fruits: You should (therefore) of course abandon your peach-loving organization!”  You cannot simply give us the evidence we expect and imagine that we will bother about it.     
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So how are we, exactly, to answer the question Noelle posed?  “How do you know that your religious experience is not a simple trick of your brain – the unfolding of a perfectly natural temporal lobe transient?”  I would first answer with a question of my own: “How do you know that your eating experience isn’t just a trick of your brain?”  Since all of our experiences are based on neuronal firings, how do we know that they all aren’t just tricks of the brain?  And of course the sensible person will answer (as I would): Well, you fool, I can see the food; I can taste the food; I can experience the food.  I feel hunger and then when I eat the food I feel hunger no longer.  Surely this is something?  There isn’t just one experience; there are hundreds of things that seem to converge that the food is real.”  And I would agree to a point (although it is worth noting that none of these arguments gets us out of our potential well of neuronal skepticism).  But that is our answer:  “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”  We, too, believe our experience isn’t a “trick of our mind” because of multiple and complex sources of experience.  Because reason, and nature, and emotion, and visions, and dreams, and longings, and violin music, and sunsets, and hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of things compel us.  It is not a valid argument intended to convince the skeptic.  But in this case the skeptic is on shakier ground to begin with, and cannot be convinced if she starts with a weak-minded assumption that “neurons firing equals unreal.”  It is, instead, simply a statement of why we feel confident in God’s existence – why we still treat our experiences as real – even though it can be traced to a “module in our brain.” 

The skeptic would be right to point out that food is in a different category of things than God, in the sense that our experiences of food are a little less controversial and our experiences of God a little harder to define.  I agree.  I am not here attempting to say we can be as confident of our belief in food as of God; it is a not-insignificant (though implicit) part of my creed that God is a more mysterious and deeper part of life than food.  I bring up the food example for precisely that reason, because I am trying to show the logical parallel to a case where the attack levied against us makes no sense.  I am not here trying to convince anyone of anything except that saying we have a “God module” in our heads is not exactly stern stuff to defeat Christianity (or any religion) with.  I realize that people may have differing opinions about where the module came from, and that logically the atheistic explanation may be right.  But I do end with the legitimate issue that C.S. Lewis raised for the skeptic; and I, too, knowing that the issue isn’t definitive, yet ask the skeptic to seriously think for 10 minutes on it:

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

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8 Responses to From the Classic Dumb Professor Vault: Is God Only an Illusion in Your Brain?

  1. Jack Shifflett says:

    Regarding the C.S. Lewis quotation, I question Mr. Lewis’ logic. It seems to me that, if he finds in himself “a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,” then the logical conclusion isn’t that he “was made for another world,” but that he wasn’t born with that desire; rather, it was bred/inculcated into him, over time, through culture and through his own experiences, including his exposure to various religious beliefs. Applying Ockham’s Razor here: we know of the existence of culture and religious belief that could account for Mr. Lewis’ unfulfillable desires, so we have no need to invent or speculate about “another world” in which those desires could be satisfied. Which doesn’t disprove Mr. Lewis’ faith, of course; it just scotches, I think, that particular argument.

  2. Ead says:

    I am enjoying this blog, and I hope that you continue to write more interesting articles here for myself and others to ponder about.

    Upon this one I have a contention to raise, this argument of the ‘brain-made’ God being simply to say neurons function in particular structures to endow us with sensation of the divine.

    I’ve never heard the argument made as simply that by someone, for the thinking atheist will add on to it the critical idea that the sensation of God is self-generated, not outside observed due to such creative structures.

    But you get at that by questioning a very physical thing such as food with the metaphysical concept of God, which I don’t believe quite works. Questioning the reality of food can be done – I may be tricked to believe I am eating food when actually I am dining at the Food Zoo, but obviously it is a farce! My brain registers being fed, but I am not truly eating. Do I have no evidence that the food was real or not? Actually, yes, evidence in the physical world outside of mental experience – i.e. If I only thought I ate food but did not in reality, I would starve from the lack of real energy. Many could point to me and say, “He said he was eating, but I never saw him eat anything. Obviously he was simply thinking he was eating.”

    You cannot equate that particular example to the concept of God, as there is a lacking of evidence for its effect outside of the personal experience. Sure, one who believes or does not believe may emotionally react differently, even develop more or different brain structures, but this is not empirical evidence of an outside-generated experience. No one is physically altered by an outside influence known as the divine.

    The question then remains whether the experience of God is self-generated, as are our dreams and works of imagination, or outside-observed that have an observable effect (either from being experienced or not). From the atheist’s perspective, the universe and human life operates exactly the same with or without the belief in a God, and thus without evidence for the contrary tend to the non-theistic standpoint. To them, it has not been proven beyond reasonable doubt that the mythology or claims of any religion are beyond the realm of ingenious human conjuration. While you do a good job at questioning this particular ‘dumb professor point’, you have not yet provided positive evidence for your side, as counter-questioning the validity of food doesn’t quite satisfy the argument entirely.

  3. The Apologetic Professor says:

    Good points all, and very fair arguments. I’ll start with Jack’s: I see your point, and in one way I think you are right. There is certainly no way to tell directly between the “culture put it there after I was born” theory and the “it is built into me” theory. (Though I see no reason to assume, as you do, that logic would argue more for the former than the latter). I would add two points here; though I would emphasize that I don’t think these points are definitive arguments, but only fodder to think about:

    (1) In a sense, I’m not sure you are so much answering Lewis’ implied question as you are putting it farther back. It may be true that the culture puts the desire there after I was born, but if so, where did the culture get it? Why does the thing exist at all in any form? And why does every culture on earth seem to pump the same desire into almost everyone? I mean, this isn’t like some isolated pocket of culture – such as “love for the Green Bay Packers,” which exists only in one locale at one small period of history – this is more like the rule of reciprocity (“if someone helps you, you should help them back”), which is a norm pretty much held in some form by every culture everywhere. There are atheist and Christian answers (among others) to why this is so, all plausible explanations in my view, but I think it is a fair question to ask: Even if it is culturally instantiated, why is it instantiated everywhere? And this pervasiveness does suggest it isn’t some arbitrary norm like wearing cheese on one’s head at a football game, but rather is something that is inside of us, being expressed in various ways across time and culture. The culture shapes its direction, yes, but the drive that makes the norms necessary is inside of us. That is only one possible explanation, of course, but I think that’s kind of what Lewis was saying when he argued it was the more probable one.

    (2) Frankly, though, I think the desires in question – at least as I experience them personally — are highly unlikely to be “cultural” in the sense that you discuss. I experience a deep longing, sometimes, when I see a beautiful sunset (say). I think it likely that the culture taught me specifically what to believe about the longing – how to interpret it. But the fact still seems to me that it exists, independent of that interpretation. Saying that the “culture taught me to believe that the longing I feel is religious” may be totally true but would hardly be intellectually satisfying — because I still have the longing itself. I am still trying to explain away the longing. I recognize that there are multiple explanations for the longing, but claiming that one of them is wrong (even if the accusation holds true) does not really explain why I have it. The question still remains: Well, where did it come from? What is it, exactly? Even if I had no language to express it in – even if I could not think coherent thoughts about it – I imagine (rightly or wrongly) that it would still be there.

    One of the many (though not necessarily the most important) reasons I am a Christian is that all the atheist philosophy in the world has not been able to convincingly explain my experience of sunsets and lonely violins away. Don’t get me wrong – I recognize that the atheist explanations are possible at an abstract level. But then so are the Christian ones – only the Christian ones are ever so much more personally satisfying.

  4. The Apologetic Professor says:

    EAD, thanks very much for your kind words and for your thoughtful response. Actually, I think for the most part I agree with you. You are correct in that I did not make a positive case for Christianity. You are also correct in your assumption that I did appear to try and make one, at least implicitly, with the Lewis quote. (I have to say that I’m starting to regret putting that Lewis quote in! More on this in a second). So I agree with you so far. (And nice Food Zoo example — very clever).

    About your fair critique of the food analogy: I used it very loosely, and perhaps too sloppily. In terms of my original intent, the only purpose for the analogy was to illustrate a logical principle (which I still think is accurate): That just because you can show something can be reproduced in the brain artificially, that doesn’t mean the thing itself is completely an illusion in all other cases. That’s all. And that seems true to me, in as much as anything can be clearly true. There are hundreds of examples where we could poke someone’s brain and make them experience all sorts of things as illusions…but those “artificial” experiences would not invalidate the reality, writ large, of their experiences of those things in other contexts.

    Of course, as you correctly point out, it would not VALIDATE those experiences either. I may be misunderstanding you (and if so, please correct me), but I think basically we agree here. You stated that I had made a good negative case (that is, questioning the professor’s argument) but not a good positive one. It turns out that the negative case was actually the main one I intended to make. I was mostly trying to respond to the argument that “because we can replicate the experience of God artificially, therefore God doesn’t exist.” I actually wasn’t trying (or at least, not trying very hard) to make an intellectually-satisfying positive case that says “because we can replicate the experience of God artificially, therefore God DOES exist.”

    Frankly, if I may, I take the blame here, since I spoke a little sloppily about the issue in my original article, and I kinda threw on this Lewis quote which claims to make a positive argument more like the second statement above – and then I never cogently defended it. As hinted in the article, I think there is a bit of a positive argument to be made in this regard (“the argument from desire,” as it is often called), but it isn’t nearly as definitive as the negative case I was mostly trying to make. It turns out it is easier to tear down (sigh) than to build up! In this article, I had mostly intended to just level the playing field and not to make any actual ground. (Now try and make sense of that mixed metaphor for a minute).

    Anyway, thanks very much for your thoughtful response, and keep those critiques coming!

  5. Luke: I concede your point that every proposed explanation just moves the discussion back a step–in this case, as you say, to “Well, where did the culture get [that notion] from?” If we’re talking about ultimate things, God and human origins and human destiny and so forth, any “answer” that falls short of explaining all of that can be challenged; that’s why people still talk about all this despite centuries of “answers”.
    A believer can certainly up the ante (or move the goalpost) in such a conversation by repeatedly asking, “Even so, where did ___come from?” Until we get, presumably, to God, at which point the believer decides that the question has become either unanswerable or impertinent, and consigns (as did Augustine) further questioners to a special corner of hell. (Not that I’m suggesting that you’ve told me to go to hell).

    For what it’s worth, though, I can take a brief stab at where the notion of, and desire for, eternal life came from: human beings are living, self-aware creatures who don’t want to die. Belief in heaven assures us (without any proof and despite all the evidence to the contrary) that we don’t actually have to die (Death, where is they sting?); it also serves the purpose of motivating people toward virtue (once heaven becomes a place to which you earn entry by following God’s rules) and satisfying people’s desire for justice (and revenge–nothing is more satisfying than imagining your enemies roasting in hell forever, or at least being excluded from God’s eternal feast). The prospect of eternal life has also provided (and still provides) consolation for people whose life in this mortal coil leaves something to be desired. The belief in God follows from the desire for eternal life (at least the traditional Christian kind, in which God is both guarantor of immortality and dispenser of ultimate justice), though it obviously can and does arise independently for a variety of reasons–among them, as an answer to the nagging question, “But where did it all come from…?”

    To summarize: I believe that the desires in question (for God and for immortality) are, at bottom, perfectly explicable human desires (which isn’t the same, by the way, as saying that we are born with them) to keep living, to get a better deal or a second chance in another life, to be rewarded for good behavior, and to see the scales of justice balanced. Each culture, as you say, channels and directs those desires to its own end(s).

    Finally–the last thing I would ever try to do is “explain away” your (or anyone’s) ineffable or awe-struck responses to sunsets or to lonely violins–why would I want to do that, and if I did, then what would I do with my own responses to mountains or to Gillian Welch’s voice? I can tell you from my own experience that atheism doesn’t stop anyone (well, it hasn’t stopped me, is what I mean) from admiring beauty or from experiencing a sense of transcendence and awe. Whether God intended us to feel such things, or whether it’s simply part of what it is to be human: on this subject, I always quote Dostoevsky, “Beauty will save the world.”

  6. The Apologetic Professor says:

    Jack: Agreed. Never been a fan myself of what Christian apologist Francis Collins calls “the God of the gaps” approach, whereby one says “we can’t explain X, therefore X must be God.” Whatever else I was trying to say, it wasn’t that.

    I think the issue here is somewhat different. I’m not saying (for example) “we can’t explain the origins of life itself scientifically, therefore God must exist.” Rather, I’m saying “I have a hard time explaining my own experiences of the supernatural using atheist philosophy.” There is a world of difference between those two things. The first case uses a lack of knowledge of anything and infers the existence of something. The second case starts with knowledge of something and tries to figure out why it exists. It is the difference between arguing that your neighbor stole the gas from your car because you have never heard of a gas leak, and watching your neighbor actually steal the gas and trying to figure out why he stole. The first starts from ignorance (God of the gaps), the second starts with knowledge from direct experience and merely tries to find an explanation for it.

    Well, that’s what I meant by my comment about atheist explanations – this isn’t like starting from some non-God-related phenomenon and trying to argue that God exists; this is starting from my own direct perception of the supernatural and wondering why it exists.

    And when you say these human desires are “perfectly explicable” from an atheist point of view, I think you are right. Darwinistic atheism, like Christianity, can potentially explain everything. Darwinistic atheism is based on chance mutation – and chance mutation, almost by definition, could have produced pretty much everything we are. Or not. But to me that’s beside the point. The point is not “can atheism explain everything we are?” (it can) or “can Christianity explain everything we are?” (it can), but which of the two explanations is more plausible?

    As you correctly note (with wonderful panache, I thought, if you don’t mind me saying so), there is no perfect intellectual answer to that argument on either side that I can tell – I don’t think God works like that. If He wanted perfect certainty in His existence, He would hardly need an “intellectual argument” for that purpose. But I would like to whimsically note (going back to your first post, Jack) in passing that I think Ockham’s razor can be used as much in favor of the Christian argument as against it…for example, logically speaking, the simplest and most parsimonious explanation for why I perceive that God exists is the same explanation for why I perceive that my wife exists. Namely, that they both…exist. (Aaaaaand William of Ockham, the Christian monk who is credited with the idea of parsimony, turns over in his grave at my butchering of the subtle nuances of his philosophy. All the same, I should note that I think parsimony is a stupid standard mostly. Truth is generally more complex than simple. I only mention it because you introduced that standard in your first post. Using that standard, I think that probably the outcome would likely be a draw at best for atheism).

    BTW, have you read Terror Management Theory? It is a psychological theory from my own field of Social Psychology that says exactly (more or less) what you say about the origins of religion and other cultural norms – if you haven’t read it, you might check it out. It’s very interesting stuff! I’m always plugging it in my Social Psychology class (even though, naturally, I’m inclined to think it’s mostly wrong).

    For the record, I wasn’t in any way saying that you or atheism or any atheist was trying to explain away my longings or faith (though many atheists no doubt might do that), only trying to say that, to me personally, atheism is not a satisfying explanation for my own personal experience. Prima facie, I experience something like God, and therefore I wonder if atheism can provide a compelling case that my experience of God is an illusion. To me, it can’t (or hasn’t yet). That’s all.

    And I certainly wasn’t trying to discredit your own (or any atheists’) experience of awe. I apologize if my remarks came off that way!

    Thanks for all the thoughtful and excellent remarks – keep those comments coming!

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