Daniel Dennett on The argument from religious experience
Dennett argued that religious experiences are natural phenomena to be studied scientifically, not evidence for the supernatural.
In Breaking the Spell, Dennett proposed treating religion itself as a natural phenomenon — a product of evolutionary and cultural forces that can and should be studied scientifically. Religious experiences, on this view, are real psychological events but not evidence for the supernatural, just as dreams are real experiences but not evidence for dream worlds.
Dennett identified several cognitive mechanisms that produce religious experiences: hyperactive agency detection (attributing events to intentional agents), theory of mind (attributing beliefs and desires to unseen beings), and the capacity for trance states and altered consciousness. These are normal features of human cognition, not portals to another realm.
He was particularly interested in the social and institutional structures that amplify and sustain religious experiences — rituals, music, communal worship, and the social reinforcement of belief. These structures create the conditions under which religious experiences are most likely to occur, which suggests they are products of context rather than encounters with the divine.
“The spell that I say must be broken is the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.”