Julia Sweeney on The argument from religious experience
Sweeney describes how her own religious experiences dissolved once she examined them critically.
In Letting Go of God, Sweeney recounts the religious experiences that sustained her Catholic faith — the sense of God's presence during prayer, the feeling of being watched over, the comfort of believing in a cosmic plan. She then describes how these experiences changed once she began examining them critically.
The experiences did not stop immediately. What changed was her interpretation of them. Once she understood the psychology of belief — how the brain generates feelings of presence, how confirmation bias sustains the illusion of answered prayer — the experiences lost their evidential force. They were still real experiences, but they were no longer evidence for God.
Sweeney's account is valuable because it demonstrates that religious experiences are not self-interpreting. The same subjective state can be interpreted as an encounter with God or as a natural product of brain chemistry, depending on one's framework. The experience alone cannot determine which interpretation is correct.
“I realised that the deepest feeling I had called 'God' was actually the feeling of being alive and conscious — and that didn't require God at all.”