Is God Just a Biological Product of the Brain?

Is God Just a Biological Product of

the Brain?

Last Updated: May 26, 2006

Would a Biological Connection Prove God is the Product of the Brain?

Some materialists have argued that God and religious experiences are mere products of the human brain. Matthew Alper, for example, argued the following in his book entitled The "God" Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God:

"Only once the human animal comes to terms with the fact that it has been born into a mental matrix-a neurological web of deceit-will we have a chance of offsetting this potentially destructive impulse in us" (GPB:182).

However, both non-Christian and Christian scholars alike have observed numerous flaws in the reasoning leading to the conclusion that God is the product of neurological processes. Eve LaPlante mentions some of these flaws in her book about Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) and religious experiences Seized:

"...the psychologist William James mentioned the saint (Paul) in arguing that religious states are in no way diminished by an association with abnormal mental states. 'Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius,' James wrote, 'religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility...liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological...To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind...in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary' because it implies that 'none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of the possessor's body at the time...Saint Paul certainly had once an epileptoid [epilepsylike], if not an epileptic seizure' (natural explanations for Paul's conversion experience are addressed here); but 'how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide...on their spiritual signficance?...There is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition'" (S:122).

William James makes two good points above:

1. It is possible that some sort of psychical visitations have occurred in history, implying it is possible that something truly spiritual is perceived during religious experiences. Thus genuine spiritual visitations cannot be rejected apriori.

2. If one argues that the information acquired in a religious state of mind is invalid if it is caused by organic processes, then one must ultimately conclude that none of humanity's thoughts and feelings, including both scientific thoughts and even thoughts of disbelief are valid since every thought and feeling "flows from the state of the possessor's body at the time"(S:122).

*Neuroscientists, in general, hold to the position that the mere presence of a spiritual function in the brain cannot prove nor disprove the existence of God.