Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.

[vulcanlogician]

William of Ockham taught that we ought "not multiply entities beyond necessity" in trying to explain the World around us.  While the Invisible Sock Monster may be real to explain the loss of one and one sock from countless dryers across our planet, much more prosaic and plausible explanations exist.  For the varieties of religious experience, we need look no farther than the following:

Temporal lobe epilepsy is kind of a catch-all hypothesis. You can do this to almost any historical figure, all you need is a few accounts of someone falling to the ground and a lot of imagination, when, in reality, epilepsy can only be diagnosed with electroencephalography(EEG).  Since we have no access to the brain activity of any major religious figure, it's all speculation. 

And we have good reasons to reject this diagnosis altogether, in the case of Muhammad PBUH, we know that he made the utterances of the Qur'an after he had the episodes of revelation. A typical epileptic cannot form coherent thoughts in the postictal phase of the seizure, let alone come up with the Qur'an.

There are plenty of biological causes for altered states of consciousness. That's something that wasn't widely considered when the Qur'an was being authored. Epilepsy wasn't even in the wheelhouse of things most might have considered when analyzing the source of prophecy. In contemporary times, this has changed.

That's not to say either side can prove anything one way or another. But we have centuries of speculation that did not consider physiological causes, and now it's time for the pendulum to swing the other way.

It's not just temporal lobe epilepsy. There are a host of psychological conditions that have been shown to produce "prophecy." Schizophrenia, for instance.

All Jehenne is doing is applying Occam's razor to such ancient visions and seeing what conclusions emerge.

One more thing, even if one attributes the fits of revelation or any other religious experience to an altered mental state, this doesn't explain away God's intervention along the causal chain, nor does it undermine the moral message of the prophets.

I think this is the best way for you to proceed if you want to defend mystical experiences. If I understand you correctly, even if such visions have physiological causes, that doesn't fully undermine their validity. But to claim that God obviously had a hand in making these visions transpire, that's a tough one to argue to an unbiased, undecided party.