Alex O'Connor on The argument from religious experience
O'Connor argues that the diversity and mutual incompatibility of religious experiences undermine their evidential value.
O'Connor takes religious experience seriously as a psychological phenomenon while denying its value as evidence for any particular God. His central observation is that religious experiences are radically diverse and mutually contradictory — Christians experience Jesus, Hindus experience Vishnu, Muslims experience Allah — yet the phenomenology is remarkably similar across traditions. This pattern is exactly what we would expect if the experiences are generated by the human brain rather than by contact with an external divine reality.
In his discussions with theologians, O'Connor has pressed the point that religious experience cannot serve as evidence for Christianity specifically unless one can explain why the same cognitive processes produce equally vivid experiences in adherents of incompatible religions. If a Hindu's experience of Brahman is a delusion but a Christian's experience of the Holy Spirit is genuine, one needs an independent criterion to distinguish them — and no such criterion has been provided.
O'Connor also draws on neuroscience, noting that religious experiences can be reliably induced by temporal lobe stimulation, psychoactive substances, meditation, and extreme stress. These findings do not prove that God does not exist, but they do show that the experiences can be produced without God — which dramatically reduces their evidential weight.
“If religious experience were a reliable guide to truth, all religions would converge. They don't — which tells us something important about the source of the experience.”