Lawrence Krauss on The argument from religious experience
Krauss dismisses religious experience as a product of neurology and psychology, not evidence for anything beyond the brain.
Lawrence Krauss is dismissive of the argument from religious experience, regarding it as an appeal to subjective states that have well-understood natural explanations. Neuroscience has shown that religious experiences — feelings of divine presence, mystical unity, transcendence — can be reliably produced by temporal lobe stimulation, psychedelic substances, meditation, and various pathological conditions. The fact that the brain can generate these experiences without any external divine input strongly suggests that no such input is needed.
Krauss is particularly critical of the inferential leap from 'I had a powerful experience' to 'therefore God exists.' He points out that people have powerful experiences of alien abduction, past-life memories, and communication with the dead — and no one treats these as evidence for the reality of what was experienced. Religious experiences, Krauss argues, deserve exactly the same sceptical treatment.
His broader point is that human subjective experience is unreliable as a guide to objective reality. The entire history of science is a story of discovering that things are not as they appear — that the earth is not flat, that the sun does not orbit the earth, that solid objects are mostly empty space. Religious experience is simply another case where subjective impression diverges from objective fact.
“The fact that you can feel God's presence doesn't mean God is present. It means your brain is doing something interesting.”