Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.

[Mister Agenda]

Which doesn't automatically make them ungenuine, if God were real and touching people's brains, it seems plausible that it would cause an altered brain state.

Except that Occam's razor rules out superfluous causes.  If God isn't needed in non-religious epileptic fits, he isn't needed in religious ones.

There's a difference between not needed and ruled out. I'm fully familiar with Occam's Razor and made no claims subject to that guideline.

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Which doesn't automatically make them ungenuine, if God were real and touching people's brains, it seems plausible that it would cause an altered brain state.

Your multiplying explanations beyond that which is necessary.  I could just as well appeal to the ISM, and to his/her/its grace when my lost bootee is found.

It's not an explanation, it's an observation that we are not omniscient.

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Authenticity has nothing to do with it.  Either they are induced or they are not.  I think you're using authenticity as a substitute for unobservables despite the claim of observables.

Exactly, either they are induced or they are not. It sets up a simple heuristic:

Induced experiences are clearly inauthentic because they do not follow from prior brain-states.
Experiences that follow from prior brain-states may be authentic (We still don't know. Prior relation [psychosemantically?] is a necessary condition but not sufficient.)

And, yes, authenticity has everything to do with it. Lots of things are like that. In pool, who hits the ball into a pocket is observable fact and affects the significance the sinking a ball into a pocket has. My belief that Nun Anne's experience would be authentic would be based on the observable character of her life. Lots of the historic saints, mystics, and heretic visionaries have, experiences that IMO deserve to be reckoned with on their own terms and not casually dismissed just because one's metaphysics doesn't have a place for them. Those of Thomas Aquinas, Terresa of Avila and Swedenborg come to mind as curious. And I am not opposed to giving spiritual significance to uncanny events of a more mundane sort such as bizarre coincidences and fortuitous outcomes...you just have to be cautious and not take things too seriously.

So in the absence of a deafeter, I have no reason, given my own predisposition to believe such things, to suppose that Nun Anne's visionary experience was not what she claimed it was. In the case of Matrix Jane, there is an observable defeater, i.e. the head-set induction.

So Saul's experience on the Road to Damascus would be inauthentic because he wasn't looking for it?