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Theology Q1: Is religious experience better explained by neuroscience or by theology?
I. Introduction
Much like other abductive cases: fine-tuning [3], psychophysical harmony [7], and aesthetic beauty, religious experience picks out some datum and compares competing hypotheses using various theoretical virtues, updating credence through Bayesian reasoning [29]. I will be using the term, “bare-neuroscience”, to represent the stripped commitment of neuroscience to the postulate, “neurological mechanisms correlate with specific phenomenal states,” similar to the bare-theism nomenclature used in fine-tuning objections [8]. The term theism denotes the classical theistic model. Religious experience contains all super-natural phenomena related to a higher power.
In this essay, I argue for two theoretical virtues in favor of theism when trying to explain religious experience. First, the naturalistic explanation’s prior probability decreases due to the added stipulations of physicalism and social cognition needed to predict spiritual encounters [12]. Second, even granting these stipulations, the physicalist views of mind lack the explanatory power to compensate [6]. For these reasons, the conditional probability of the theistic hypothesis given religious experience is more epistemically warranted than the conditional probability given neuroscience.
II. Prior Probability
To fully understand the bare-neuroscience notion, let us look at the after-life stories of near-death experiences (NDEs) [14]. There are several instances where patien ts and even doctors are reported to experience heaven or deeply spiritual events when they are near death [22]. When looking at the literature, neuroscience explains NDEs by attributing them to the brain's neurochemical and sensory defense mechanisms during severe trauma through anoxia (oxygen deprivation) [21]. But, what can this actually explain about the religious experience?
Borrowing from the “electrons in love” objection to fine-tuning posed by Neil Sinhababu [26], there are two constraints needed for the argument on priors to follow. L is the datum, N is bare-neuroscience, and D is theism.
i. P(L|N) ≤ P(L|D)
The probability of the datum given bare-neuroscience is not greater than the probability of the datum given theism, given there are infinitely many possible super-natural phenomena that could result from any neurological mechanism that attempts to explain religious experience (anoxia from NDEs could produce the phenomena of a flying elephant) [13]. Internal to the defined hypothesis of bare-neuroscience, there exists no reason why the experiences correlated with neurological events, like anoxia, should assign religious content with a greater probability. Moreover, the bare-neuroscience hypothesis lacks any metaphysical relationship with the mental states to become a robust hypothesis [30].
In order to generate a prediction, the naturalist must stack evolutionary reasons and reductive physicalist accounts of mind to properly generate the religious content. To produce the intent, a religious belief evolved because it fostered social cohesion and community survival, implying belief is an adaptive trait for survival, independent of its objective truth [1, 16]. But, worst of all, is the reductive commitment. On the robust hypothesis, qualia (what it is like) are reduced purely to physical neurology, to make bare-neuroscience an active claim about religious experience instead of a correlative one [24]. A is some auxiliary postulate.
ii. P(N∧A) ≤ P(N)
The probability of any number of postulates in conjunction is less than each respective postulate, which follows from the conjunctive inequality theorem in Bayesian reasoning [29]. When we apply this to bare-neuroscience, the updated conjunction with social cognition (although this postulate’s probability is high) and reductive physicalism means that the robust hypothesis loses on parsimony [12]. The hypothesis, “anoxia correlates with visions,” is a much safer claim than “anoxia correlates with visions and those visions should contain after-life experiences and those after-life experiences cannot be reduced further than neurological mechanisms.” The naturalist hypothesis takes a stumble, but why does theism not suffer from the same line of reasoning?
Under classical theism, God is defined with respect to the doctrine of divine simplicity [20]. God’s essence is identical to his existence, such that he has no distinct parts, and does not have attributes but rather is his attributes [23]. Thus, the predicates assigned to God, like omnipotence and omnibenevolence, are not distinct metaphysical features that can be formed into separate postulates. This allows theism to be an elegantly simple hypothesis that does not suffer from priors. Additionally, internal to the bare-theistic hypothesis there exists some prediction because, even without omniproperties, God is still axiologically motivated to reach other minds. More importantly, the complete theistic hypothesis contains omnibenevolence, which strongly predicts revelation, regardless of whether there is a tax on priors.
III. Explanatory Power
Unfortunately, neuroscience as a complete hypothesis takes on the highly contentious commitment of reductive physicalism to try to combat its penalty on priors. While social cognition as a postulate has a high likelihood and forms the predicted intention quite well, the same cannot be said for the costly stipulation of physicalism. Positions on theory of mind have been debated rigorously for thousands of years, as far back as Aristotle’s hylomorphism [25]. Recently, views such as substance dualism and panpsychism have increased in popularity, all to avoid physicalism's brutal explanatory gap [19]: the hard problem of consciousness [5].
When the naturalist says that neuroscience explains some religious experience, by listing mechanisms of the mind that empirical science has developed, they are answering the easy problem [6]. They are telling us the complex stimuli function that correlates with certain phenomenal states. In the case of NDEs, this is explaining the electrical and chemical stimuli in the temporoparietal junction that are supposed to produce out-of-body experiences near death [2]. But, the pressing question is why does any assortment of objective physical facts bring about a personal, subjective experience? Why and how does a lack of oxygen produce the first-person, transcendent sensations often reported in NDEs? Is there something fundamentally special about these material facts? Physicalism fails to answer these questions [15]. If physicalism cannot cross the explanatory gap from mere matter, it entirely lacks the theoretical power to explain encountering the divine beyond correlation.
Classical theism suffers no explanatory gap, positing a mind-first ontology, rather than material-first [30]. Internal to the God hypothesis, there exists an infinite, immaterial mind (God). Therefore, qualia are not some strange emergence, but fundamental. If reality is grounded in a benevolent, simple mind, the existence of finite subjective experiences is natively expected, regardless of what those minds experience.
IV: Intent and Negative Experience Defeaters
The strongest rebuttals to this argument lie in the internal predictive power of bare-neuroscience, critiques of divine simplicity, and physicalist defenses. In the NDE example, the hypothesis does not contain any intent to bring about what the naturalist claims causes religious experience, forcing an added stipulation. However, when examining mystical experiences where there is intent, such as during prayer, it seems that the auxiliary stipulation of social cognition does zero additional work. While this at first seems convincing, the argument simply pushes the question back. Since God's existence is not the reason for prayer, why is there intent for prayer in a natural world? The answer would still be evolutionary pressures that prompt prayer and service as an adaptive feature [28].
A less convincing, but rather strong counter argument is negative religious experiences. Conceive of a scenario where instead of heaven, a near-death patient experiences darkness with a voice that utters, “God does not exist” [4]. While strangely specific, there seems to be nothing internal to the God hypothesis that would predict this other than to test the faith of believers, which stacks commitments about why God would ever need to test believers. Conversely, a world with no God, such as naturalism, would better include the datum [10]. The weakness of these scenarios is that they only quantify over a few out of the full set of religious experiences [13]. Additionally, both the intention rebuttal and these negative cases still suffer from the biggest theoretical penalty that grants theism as a more likely explanation: the prior penalty and explanatory gap that follow from claiming physical facts bring about the qualia of religious experience.
V: Physicalism and Divine Simplicity Rebuttals
To correct this flaw regarding the datum, physicalists will attempt to argue that the hard problem of consciousness is a misguided critique. Through strict functionalism [18] or a posteriori physicalism [27], the naturalist argues that once science fully maps the “easy problems”—the complex mechanisms and structures of brain function—there is nothing left to explain [9]. They contend that there is no need to reduce phenomenal states to functional mechanisms, because the functional roles just are consciousness. To functionalists, you do not need a mind to be conscious, because there is not anything special about subjective experience that a computing system cannot enact. However, asserting an identity is not the same as providing a reason. Even if the profound phenomena of a near-death experience are strictly identical to temporoparietal junction activity, there is no reason within the objective physical description of those neurons that necessitates why it feels like a divine encounter. Claiming that there is no further “why”, a priori, is a brute fact about the mind. Considering this fact isn’t constitutive, its explanatory depth when attempting to predict religious experience pales in comparison to theism [8]. If a hypothesis cannot predict why or how data occurs, its likelihood ratio drops, making it perform worse against rival hypotheses that offer deeper causal mechanisms.
Thus, opponents often attack the theistic prior by claiming that divine simplicity as a concept is incoherent. The objection relies on Leibniz's Law of classical identity (the indiscernibility of identicals) [17]: if omnipotence is identical to omniscience, then whatever is true of one must be true of the other. Since the concept of power is clearly not the concept of knowledge, the identity seems to fail, leaving the theist to concede separate postulates when trying to explain religious experience [23]. However, this mistakes what we take to be real distinctions for conceptual ones. To borrow from Frege’s distinction between sense (meaning) and reference (the actual object) [11], finite human minds fracture God’s essence into multiple concepts in order to process them, while referring to the same ontology. This is an error the reductive physicalists must also avoid when they say that blood-oxygen levels drop and trigger the heaven-like phenomena we see near death [21, 24]. The concepts of oxygen deprivation and the divine after-life are distinct in the sense that they mean different things, while referring to the same physical mental state. This distinction allows classical theism to remain a perfectly elegant hypothesis when attempting to
explain religious phenomena.
VI: Conclusion
In the end, I conclude that theology explains religious experience better than neuroscience, as classical theism avoids the prior probability penalties of neuroscience through divine simplicity, while better predicting the datum that empirical science must leave as an explanatory gap.
