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Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.
#61
RE: Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.
(March 11, 2022 at 6:54 pm)Klorophyll Wrote:
(September 1, 2021 at 9:33 am)Jehanne Wrote: 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.

Quote: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.
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#62
RE: Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.
Huh, didn't know we had a neurologist on board.  Please tell me more.
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#63
RE: Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.
Did someone cite a fact that only a neurologist has the expertise to understand?

I mean, PSYCH 101 and Abnormal Psych are both low-level courses that explain that hallucinatory experiences and visions of grandeur have a causal link to schizophrenia, for example. But one needn't even to have taken such courses to learn these things. It's fairly common knowledge.
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#64
RE: Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.
Temporal lobe epilepsy catch all and so on.  Carry on.
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#65
RE: Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.
(March 11, 2022 at 7:12 pm)Belacqua Wrote:
(September 1, 2021 at 11:14 am)Jehanne Wrote: At best your observation is that religion is useful, which, of course, does not make it true.

Many Internet atheists give the appearance of having mild autism, or Asperger's. 

A need for complete literalism, for example. An inability to empathetically understand the feelings of people who believe differently from themselves, so they attribute it to a purely chemical cause. 

This doesn't mean that atheism is the incorrect position, only that in some people it may originate in atypical cognitive differences.

Honestly, I don't think that your observation rises to the level of a poor caricature. I cannot begin to describe the hell that I go through after seeing the bodies of dead children; it's why I stopped watching the news many years ago.

Please, please do not describe (or infer) me as being unsympathetic. I weep (sometimes literally) for religious belief and faith.

(March 11, 2022 at 8:39 pm)Ranjr Wrote: Temporal lobe epilepsy catch all and so on.  Carry on.

It's just one psychological explanation with social consequences.
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#66
RE: Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.
(March 11, 2022 at 7:44 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: 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.

(March 11, 2022 at 7:44 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: 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.
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#67
RE: Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.
(March 11, 2022 at 7:44 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: 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.

One issue I'd have with this approach. We could say people used to think a god, Neptune, caused waves and water events. We now know how these things occur under physical laws, but that doesn't mean that Neptune *isn't* still involved in these events. The problem is that a used-to-be supernatural or divine event is now explained, but theists are still trying to insert a deity by simply saying that it is still involved in the events. We would *have* to have examples of identical events, one with deity influence and one without, so we can tell the difference, but they never offer or explain that.
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#68
RE: Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.
There are different levels of religious experience, Jehanne. In the OP, you seem to be suggesting that they are all due to TLE? Even the experiences of the sort that are deemed remarkable aren't necessarily due to that. Just because some correlation exists between X and Y in a way that implies that X could be due to Y doesn't mean X cannot also be due to Z in other scenarios.

(March 11, 2022 at 8:56 pm)Jehanne Wrote:
(March 11, 2022 at 8:39 pm)Ranjr Wrote: Temporal lobe epilepsy catch all and so on.  Carry on.

It's just one psychological explanation with social consequences.

I think you need to be careful with the conclusions you personally derive from one study, especially when it comes to human psychology.

People need to be trained to analyze the outcomes of these studies. You don't just willy-nilly come up with your own interpretation that suits what you already believe to be true.

(March 11, 2022 at 8:56 pm)Jehanne Wrote: Please, please do not describe (or infer) me as being unsympathetic.  I weep (sometimes literally) for religious belief and faith.

How is weeping for beliefs sympathy?
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#69
RE: Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.
(March 12, 2022 at 1:06 am)GrandizerII Wrote: There are different levels of religious experience, Jehanne. In the OP, you seem to be suggesting that they are all due to TLE? Even the experiences of the sort that are deemed remarkable aren't necessarily due to that. Just because some correlation exists between X and Y in a way that implies that X could be due to Y doesn't mean X cannot also be due to Z in other scenarios.

(March 11, 2022 at 8:56 pm)Jehanne Wrote: It's just one psychological explanation with social consequences.

I think you need to be careful with the conclusions you personally derive from one study, especially when it comes to human psychology.

People need to be trained to analyze the outcomes of these studies. You don't just willy-nilly come up with your own interpretation that suits what you already believe to be true.

(March 11, 2022 at 8:56 pm)Jehanne Wrote: Please, please do not describe (or infer) me as being unsympathetic.  I weep (sometimes literally) for religious belief and faith.

How is weeping for beliefs sympathy?

Last item, first.  I sometimes cry, when I am sad, and sometimes the suffering in our World is too much to bear, and I succumb to my emotions and sob.  I do feel pity on children who die before their time, because, I know to a scientific certainty that they are gone, forever, and that absolutely nothing remains of their conscious experience, that which made them adorable little children.  I blame religion, more often than not, for its belief in a God and an afterlife, that posits the false notion that aspects of a human being's identity survives the death of that individual's brain.  If people understood, as do I, that the physical death of an individual (especially, a child) means that individual's annihilation, never to return, I believe that the war in Ukraine would not be occurring right now, and, overall, that there would be much less violence in the World today.  (Just my two cents.)  I weep, albeit distantly, with the parents who have lost their child, and have empathy for their need to believe that their little one has gone to Heaven, and that they will be reunited with their dead child someday, and I am not about to tell them otherwise, unless, of course, they come here of their own free will, in which case, we owe them the truth.

As for the first item, I am not a psychologist, anthropologist, archeologist, neurologist or sociologist, but, the evolution and psychology of religious belief has been well studied.  From our distant H. Sapiens ancestors some 75,000 years ago who worshiped the carved figure of a giant snake right up to the present, religious faith and belief serve individual, societal and political purposes.  We all can and should empathize with that; but, at the same time, religious faith and belief can be destructive, too destructive, in my opinion.  As such, belief in God needs to go, in my opinion, not only for the individual, but, especially, for the survival of our species.
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#70
RE: Temporal lobe epilepsy & religious experience.
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