Christopher Hitchens on The argument from religious experience
Hitchens dismissed religious experiences as neurological events given theological interpretations, noting their mutual incompatibility across religions.
Hitchens treated the argument from religious experience with the same prosecutorial scepticism he applied to all religious claims. His core point was simple: every religion in human history has produced adherents who report powerful, life-changing encounters with the divine — and they cannot all be right. The Muslim mystic, the Hindu sadhu, the Pentecostal speaking in tongues, and the Buddhist meditator all report experiences of comparable intensity and conviction, yet their experiences confirm mutually exclusive theological claims.
This pattern, Hitchens argued, demonstrates that religious experiences are products of the human nervous system operating under particular conditions — emotional arousal, social pressure, fasting, meditation, or the expectation of the supernatural — not encounters with an external divine reality. The experiences are real as experiences, but they carry no evidential weight about the nature of the cosmos.
Hitchens also pointed to the advances in neuroscience that allow religious experiences to be replicated through temporal lobe stimulation, psychoactive substances, and other physical interventions. If God can be generated in a laboratory, the simplest explanation is that God was always generated in the brain.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
“Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.”