THE USE AND MISUSES OF NEUROTHEOLOGY

The experience of being inside one's own body is not as self-evident as one might think.

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Below, a piece about religious experience and neurotheology.

Life is shit, enjoy!

Back in January 2018, it was reported that lawmakers in Egypt were seriously considering passing a law that would make atheism illegal. Blasphemy is already illegal in Egypt, and people are frequently arrested for insulting or defaming religion under the country’s strict laws. How do they justify this extreme measure? Here is how Khaled Salah, in his column “The Atheists are Coming,” argues;

“The dangers of terrorism are known, but not many know that atheism and terror are equally destructive. Atheism, also, weakens one's identity and calls into questions established beliefs in history, canons, religious symbols, the Prophet's companions and followers, and ultimately leads to the collapse of the foundations of entire nations and of their sacred beliefs.”[1]

So it’s not religious fundamentalism but atheism which is to blame for terror, even if it is done in the name of religion.  This line of argumentation brings to mind the reaction of the American Catholic Church to the wave of paedophilia among its priests: they evoked some dubious research which put the blame on the secular-hedonist culture which infected the priests… The sad thing is that, in the last decade, atheism with an islamophobic twist established itself as a respectable choice in the US public space (atheism of the Harris/Pinker/Hitchens kind, of course), it became fashionable in some “radical” Leftists circles to downplay the critique of religion since it may “serve the enemy”.

The newly proposed rule would make it illegal for people not to believe in God, “even if they don’t talk about it”[2]. A question immediately arises here: how will authorities establish if someone is an atheist if he doesn't even talk about it? Modern science provides a solution: one could scan the suspect's brain with the devices used by neurotheologists trying to determine if there are traces of religious experiences in his neurons.

Neurotheology represents an extreme reductionist approach to studying religion: its formula “(our experience of) God is (the product of neuronal processes in) our brain”. This clearly echoes Hegel’s formula of phrenology: “Spirit is a bone.” Hegel calls this coincidence of the highest and the lowest the “infinite judgment” which asserts the identity of the highest and the lowest, and no wonder that neurotheology is often dismissed as a new version of phrenology - more refined, for sure, but basically advocating the same correlation between the processes or shapes in our head and psychic processes… The limitations of this approach are obvious, and the lines of attacking it clearly predictable:

It has no real scientific explanatory power since it is based on a vague parallel between events in our brain measured by apparatuses and the subject’s report on his/her religious (mystical, etc.) experiences, with no idea how, precisely, the first can cause the second (or vice versa); in this way, it opens itself up to David Chalmer’s classic line of attack; even if we knew every last detail about the physics of the universe – the configuration, causation, and evolution among all the fields and particles in the spatiotemporal manifold – that information would not lead us to postulate the existence of conscious experience,“[3] In short, we cannot ever make the jump from “blind” objective neuronal processes to the fact of self-awareness which magically emerges out of them, so some form of consciousness or awareness has to be a primordial and irreducible feature of matter.

Furthermore, even if we reject this outright Cartesian dualism, there remains a more complex line of attack deployed, among others, by Francisco Varela: religion (as every thought process) cannot be simply located into our brain since it is a product of social-symbolic practices in which biological processes and symbolic interaction, inner and outer life, organism and its life-world, are inextricably interwoven.

And, of course, there are also (rare, true) attempts to the results of neurotheology a religious twist: what if the causal works the other way round and the parallel between neuronal processes and religious experiences indicated how God intervened in our bodies and made us receptive to his message?

In spite of all these constraints, one has to concede that some scientific experiments lead to results which cannot simply be dismissed as irrelevant. A recent experiment conducted by Karolinska Institutet in Sweden demonstrated that the experience of being inside one’s own body is not as self-evident as one might think: neuroscientists “created an out-of-body illusion in participants placed inside a brain scanner. They then used the illusion to perceptually ‘teleport’ the participants to different locations in a room and show that the perceived location of the bodily self can be decoded from activity patterns in specific brain regions.” The sense of “owning one’s body” is therefore not to be taken for granted: it is “an enormously complex task that requires continuous integration of information from our different senses in order to maintain an accurate sense of where the body is located with respect to the external world.”[4]

The significance of such experiments is double. First, they provide a clear argument against the spiritualist reading of the out-of-body experiences as a proof that our soul is not irreducibly located in our body since it can freely float outside it: if one can generate the out-of-body experience through technological manipulation of our body, then our “inner” self-experience is strictly immanent to our body. Second, they also render problematic the notion that we are irreducibly “embedded,” that our self-experience as constrained to the standpoint of our (mortal) body is the ultimate horizon of our entire experience: the experiment indicates that our self-experience as “embodied” is the result of complex neuronal processes which can also go wrong.

While these critical reactions to neurotheology have certain (some higher, others lower) weight, they nonetheless ultimately stumble upon a hard rock: if it can be proven that, by manipulating a subject’s neurons, one can effectively give rise in the subject some kind of mystical state, and that, in this way, one can experimentally induce a religious experience, does this not indicate that our religious experience is in some sense caused by neuronal processes in our brain? The specific form of this experience, of course, depends on its cultural contexture and on the thick web of socio-symbolic practices, and the precise causality, of course, remains obscure, but – as Jacques Lacan would have put it – we do encounter here a bit of the real which remains the same in all symbolic universes.

So it is difficult to decide what is more dangerous: direct prohibition of atheism or direct neuronal control and manipulation of our religious experiences. One thing is sure: the two can co-exist and join forces.   

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[1] https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/2/40633/OPINION-The-atheists-are-coming.

[2] http://www.newsweek.com/egypt-atheism-illegal-crackdown-non-believers-religion-islam-772471.

[3] David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, New York: Oxford University Press 1997, p. 101.

[4] Quoted from http://ki.se/en/news/brain-scan-reveals-out-of-body-illusion.