Michael Shermer on The argument from religious experience
Shermer explains religious experiences as products of cognitive biases — patternicity and agenticity — not encounters with the divine.
Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society and longtime columnist for Scientific American, has made the psychology of belief his life's work. His treatment of the argument from religious experience draws on cognitive science to explain why people have experiences they interpret as encounters with God — without any God being involved.
Shermer identifies two key cognitive tendencies: 'patternicity' (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in noise) and 'agenticity' (the tendency to attribute events to intentional agents). These evolved because the cost of a false positive (seeing a predator that isn't there) was much lower than a false negative (missing a predator that is). The result is a brain that is wired to detect agency and purpose everywhere, even where none exists.
Religious experiences — feelings of presence, moments of transcendence, visions, and answered prayers — are, on Shermer's account, the predictable output of these cognitive systems operating in emotionally charged contexts. They feel real and profound to the experiencer, but they carry no more evidential weight than a dream or an optical illusion.
“Humans are pattern-seeking, story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether or not they are real.”
“We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons, and then we look for confirming evidence to support them. This is why smart people believe weird things.”