Stephen Fry on The argument from religious experience

Fry has spoken and written about religious experience with genuine empathy — he understands the longing for transcendence and has experienced profound emotional states through music, literature, and the natural world. But he draws a sharp line between the experience and the interpretation. The feeling of awe, the sense of presence, the overwhelming emotion of a cathedral or a symphony — these are real and valuable, but they are products of the human mind, not messages from God.

As someone who has been open about his struggles with bipolar disorder, Fry brings a distinctive perspective to the question. He knows from personal experience that the brain can produce states of extraordinary vividness and conviction — manic episodes in which everything seems imbued with cosmic significance — that correspond to nothing outside the mind. This does not make the experiences less real to the experiencer, but it should make us cautious about treating subjective intensity as evidence for objective truth.

Fry has noted that the arts produce experiences indistinguishable from religious ones — the transport of a Bach cantata, the awe of standing before a great painting, the sense of meaning that wells up when reading great literature. If these experiences do not require God as their explanation, neither do the structurally identical experiences that occur in churches and temples.