Visions and Apparitions

1. Visions and Apparitions

2. The Pinocchio Effect • Perceptual illusions • Touches and strokes on nose. • "Pinocchio" effect, imagining his own nose to be two feet long, or else his arm to be in two places at once. • Experience ‘Maya’ or illusion because of the signals from the body to the brain is passed.

3. Neuroreligion:Some Implications for Spirituality

4. Questions • What do these experiments imply? • Do we have a God spot in our brain? • Do all people with temporal lobe epilepsy experience God?

5. Questions • But does this syndrome imply that our brains contain some sort of circuitry that is actually specialized for religious experience? • Is there a “God module” in our heads? • And if such a circuit exists, where did it come from? • Could it be a product of natural selection, a human trait as natural in the biological sense as language or stereoscope vision? • Or is there a deeper mystery at play, as a philosopher might argue?

6. Religious Experience Vs Brain Disorder • Not everyone with a brain disorder has unusual spiritual and religious experiences. • Only a small percentage of people with disorders such as temporal lobe epilepsy have unusual experiences. • There are people who have only one unusual experience in their entire life and never have another. This is in contrast to most people with brain disorders, who have repeated problems such as multiple recurrent seizures. • Too many people have religious experiences to believe that all of these people have some sort of disorder. • Many of these experiences result in dramatic changes in a person's perspective on life, death, and relationships. Such a radical change in perspective has never been consistently documented in people with brain disorders.

7. Can we (dis)prove God’s existence through Neuroscience? • At this point --- No. • Atheistic Interpretations (TLE, Moses, Paul) • Construction or Perception? • Process without Reality? • Road without Destiny? • Sufficient Reason • Organic Grounds of Religiosity • Supernatural with the Natural

8. Can we (dis)prove God’s existence through Neuroscience? • But we can understand how God affects us. • We can use science to determine the effect of God on our brain and body. • Science can tell us how God—as an image, feeling, thought, or fact—is interpreted, reacted to, and turned into a perception that feels meaningful and real. • God as a construct of the Brain! – New Vision of God!

9. 2. Proximity Between Aesthetics and Spirituality The neuropsychology underlying both aesthetics and religious experience is very much the same. The evidence is suggestive that positive aesthetics represents the beginning of the Aesthetic-Religious Continuum along which various spiritual and mystical experiences are placed, culminating in either the experience of God or of the Buddhist Void. Hence, the nature mysticism of saints or the cosmic spirituality of the scientists.

10. 2. Proximity Between Spirituality and Sexuality • The Same Neural correlates for Sexuality and Spirituality • Bliss Phantom Limb

11. 2. Neuroscience and Celibacy Phantom Limb

12. 3. Spirituality Implies Different Epistemic Phases: • “Baseline reality,” - the reality that comprises our everyday perceptions and behaviors. • “Multiple discrete reality,” - regular relationships suffused with positive affect, Cosmic Consciousness. • The third primary epistemic state involving multiple discrete reality and regular relationships is suffused by negative affect. (Weltschmerz.)

13. 4. The Evolutionary Mechanism in Spirituality • The Ascent of Matter from Simplicity to Complexity. • The Matter-Spirit Correlation (Stoeger) • The Matter-Consciousness Correlation (Quantum Physics, Chardin) • The Cosmic Milieu of Spirituality (US Experimental Reports.)

14. The Simplest Life The most Complex Life

15. 5. The Interface of Philosophy and Spirituality • Cosmic Consciousness or the Goodness of the world are no longer mere philosophical substrates.

16. 6. Metatheology • Neurotheology is a kind of “metatheology”—a biologically based approach to theology that underlies the world’s various religions. • It gives rise to a theology that focuses upon mystical states and transcendent experience, supported by ritual and giving rise to myth. This genre of theological work has a long and distinguished history in more than one tradition; d’Aquili and Newberg carry it further and buttress it creatively with psychiatric and neuroscientific research and theories. Thus, they make a distinguished contribution to the lineage of which they form a part.

17. 7. Revisioning Soul • Rediscovering Nephesh = soul, neck, throat, self, appetite or person. The pair of words in Hebrew often placed in opposition to each other, are flesh (basar) and spirit (ruach). • basar can mean material and spiritual realities. It means meat, animal, living being as well as human being. Human is considered as endowed with the spirit (ruach) of God.

18. Critical Remarks 1. Does the brain really cause these experiences or perceive a spiritual reality? 2. Neurotheology confuses spiritual experiences with religion. 3.To suggest that brain is the only source of our experiences would be reductionist, ignoring the influence of environment, will, grace, etc.

19. Critical Remarks 4. Focuses upon a narrow spectrum of religious life, especially ritual, myth, and mystical experience. • The role of interpersonal relationships in religion or individual spiritual growth through time? • NDE: It would be nearly impossible to gather observational data to support their speculations about near-death experiences.

20. Critical Remarks 7. Operators: Operators are derived inductively, not experimentally. Neuroscintific observations in support of their schema date from the 1960s and 1970s, but newer studies in support might well be located. And so, finally, like other theories, the theory of operators must be evaluated in light of how well it fits the data and can advance the project. Whether any pre-wired operator can force us to think in a predetermined way. Can we not choose to leave the first cause of the cosmos an open question or to think in categories more numerous than two? Must we think dualistically about good and evil, objective and subjective?

22. Is God created by the brain, or the brain by God? Answer 1: • If external reality (including the brain itself ) is primary, then “the concept and experience of God, and all religious phenomenology, are generated by the brain and nervous system.” Answer 2: • If subjective consciousness is primary, then “God (absolute unitary being or pure consciousness) generates the world (including the brain) and subjective experience itself.” Synthesis: • “both conclusions about God (AUB) are in a profound and fundamental sense true—namely that God is created by the world (the brain and the rest of the central nervous system) and that the world is created by God.”

23. Conclusion Atheists: “Anyone with half a brain should realize there is no God.” Neuroscience: ‘One half of the brain’ (or a portion thereof) is wired for spiritual experiences. “… science and religion will be explored in a complementary manner in order to develop a coherent analysis of the world. But, as we will see, our model goes one step further in that science and religion are not only brought together but are essentially considered to be one and the same thing without either being reduced to the other. . . . Thus, we would suggest that one cannot understand religion without understanding the mind and brain and that one cannot understand the mind and brain without understanding religion.” - Newberg and Aquili