Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.

[R00tKiT]

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.

Schizophrenia is even more problematic, i guess.. It's not plausible to say the prophet had the so-called negative symptoms, a social reformer like Muhammad PBUH withdraws socially......? lacks motivation.. ? has disorganized speech..? The only thing you can argue for here is that the content of the purported revelations was a delusion of his mind.. delusion and hallucinations being other symptoms of schizophrenia. But again, that a schizophrenic managed to start a new religious movement, withstand prosecution and death threats for more than a decade, unite arabia under one flag, conduct wars, convince thousands of people to die for his religion, etc. is not plausible to me.

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.

Yes, that's exactly what I am saying. Any experience corresponds to a mental state, after all. If we reject the prophet's claim of divine origin just because his experiences seem to be pathological, then there is a huge problem: by definition, we consider any mental state that diverges from the ordinary to be pathological, but again, a mental state of someone purportedly having a supernatural experience is definitely expected to be abnormal.

None of this shows by itself that the prophet's experience is veridical. But the disturbing question is (for anyone who doesn't take any mystical experience at face value) : how can you possibly tell that an experience is coming from God?

I think the most rational stance is that we should accept anyone's claim that they have an experience from God, and only dismiss them when we are presented with a good reason to do so. A skeptic still has the door open to say that there are indeed good reasons: say, an internal inconsistency in the claim, a claim that simply doesn't agree with known facts about the world, etc. With regards to unfalsifiable claims, it's not clear to me that all unfalsifiable claims are false or useless.