#155 – “Is it all just in my head?”

A retrospective journey through four years of episode releases had us asking this fundamental question. The short answer: of course it is!

A few of the most recently released episodes prompted us to think back to about a dozen other episodes we’ve released in the past that focused on the cognitive machinery in our heads, and got us asking: are spiritual/religious experiences a figment of our imaginations?

This retrospective line of thinking began with the pair of episodes released a couple weeks back, looking at the emotion of awe (#151 and #152): a uniquely human emotion which always accompanies a spiritual experience (animals seem to experience other emotions like joy, rage, surprise, sadness … but not awe, because they don’t exhibit the other physiological changes in breathing, heart rate or goosebumps that accompany awe). 

One of those guest experts had already talked to us a couple years ago about two other forms of software in our head which also contribute to a spiritual or religious experience: the “hypersensitive agency detector” and the “promiscuous teleology detector” (#78).  Those two detectors are behind the human tendency to think there’s a reason or explanation for things that happen and an intention or will or agent behind it (“why did that family have to die in that tornado?”).  This reminded us of three episodes we did a while back that looked at the neurobiology — the “wiring” — behind a spiritual or religious experience, one that can be hijacked by hallucinogenic drugs (#43, #44, and #45), as well as the machinery and molecules that seem to contribute to our sense of having a soul (#8, #9, #10, and #75) and consciousness (#16). I’ve outlined all of this and more in a lot more detail in my third book: Soul-searching: the evolution of JudeoChristian thinking on the soul and the afterlife.

That collection of cognitive machinery explains a number of other religious/spiritual phenomena that we looked at in other episodes: humans feeling a special connection to another unseen dimension or being (#147); the “personal relationship” with the Divine (#42); speaking in tongues (#100); prayer (#99); the belief in divine inspiration of scripture (#57, #81, #101) and divine revelation (#115); the evolution of a religious streak and morality in humans (#76, #77).  In fact, it would also contribute to the output of the entire brain in general, and so we might also list the dozens of episodes we’ve done looking at this-or-that aspect of philosophy, theology and science.

So again, this integrative retrospective at that string of episodes over the past four years had us asking: “are spiritual/religious experiences all in our head?”  We went back and forth on the topics of: solipsism; the circular logic of Descartes’ famous line: “I think, therefore I am”; where and what is the soul; Artificial Intelligence developing consciousness and becoming sentient; our own reality being a computer simulation (like Neo in the Matrix); the nature of the soul, Alzheimer’s disease and Phineas Gage. 

And then we tried to pull all these thoughts together into some kind of conclusion, which kept weaving back and forth between yes and no:

• of course it’s all in our head … but so are all our other experiences.  I interact with my wife using the same machinery; in fact, I experience everything around me (a mosquito on my arm) or inside me (that bowl of bean and lentil soup that’s stirring things up inside me) using that same machinery.  We don’t negate the existence of any of those … nor should we feel compelled to negate the reality of our spiritual/religious experiences. 
• what about the fact that we can measure all those other things using science and scientific tools, but we can’t [yet] measure the spiritual realm?  Well, there was a time when science couldn’t measure ultraviolet light, atoms, or radioactivity either…
• does that mean we have to be sheeple, and superstitiously embrace every claim out there?  No, we’re allowed to question things (something that religion finds to be prohibitively dangerous … the dreaded “slippery slope”).

For four years, this podcast has been questioning and testing theological claims.  And at this point, we find that accepting the reality of a God, a creative life force, or even just a Universal Consciousness helps put certain things — like the exquisite fine tuning of the physical constants of the universe, beauty, and life itself — into a framework that makes better sense of our reality.  As CS Lewis said: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

We ended the episode off with the question of why we humans have this cognitive machinery in the first place.  Did it evolve, or were we given it?  Was it an accident … an evolutionary “spandrel”? Does it confer some kind of selective advantage?  Or is it a toy that some higher being(s) gave humans to play with?  Or did the Divine intend some kind of divine-human relationship, for the same reason that we might get a pet?  Or all of the above?

Let us know how you might answer those questions by email, our by leaving comments at the podcast’s WordPress site, my public Facebook page, or at our private Facebook Discussion Group.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy …. well … any of the ones we linked you to in the text above! Or some of the other ones listed at our theme page entitled “Religious experiences, spiritual encounters“

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