Post by eckadimmock on May 31, 2009 9:28:10 GMT
This article argues that the mind is not just brain chemistry, as neuroscience seems to suggest (and we are looking forward to Sam Harris on the subject).
It intrigues me because I see so many people arguing that religious experience is some kind of mental aberration(though given its frequency perhaps atheism should be the aberration). This line of argument seems to be a form of nothing buttery: God, love, or any other emotion, are nothing more than brain chemicals, and NDEs, the sense of the divine and other phenomena can be reproduced by drugs or electrical stimuli.
However, I don't see how a lab could distinguish whether a spiritual experience is produced by the brain or mediated by it. Seeing or hearing are likewise reproducible by artificial means or mental illness, but that is no reason to suppose that all sight or hearing is wrong.
It intrigues me because I see so many people arguing that religious experience is some kind of mental aberration(though given its frequency perhaps atheism should be the aberration). This line of argument seems to be a form of nothing buttery: God, love, or any other emotion, are nothing more than brain chemicals, and NDEs, the sense of the divine and other phenomena can be reproduced by drugs or electrical stimuli.
However, I don't see how a lab could distinguish whether a spiritual experience is produced by the brain or mediated by it. Seeing or hearing are likewise reproducible by artificial means or mental illness, but that is no reason to suppose that all sight or hearing is wrong.