Issues in Interdisciplinarity 2019-20/Evidence in Religious Experience

Religious experiences can range from ineffable out of body sensations to interactions with the divine as if through the use of our normal bodily senses. This chapter considers an interdisciplinary approach to understanding these experiences, and how this is challenged by the variances in methodologies and forms of evidence across numerous disciplines.

There is no set circumstance for an individual to have a religious experience (partly due to different practices across world faiths) thereby leading to conflicts between disciplines in how evidence of religious experiences are collected since there is much scope for contention. There is also a paradox underlying an interdisciplinary approach: scientists seek empirical evidence for religious experiences, yet to others the experiences themselves constitute evidence — evidence for the existence of a higher power. This therefore exacerbates the issue of evidence and perpetuates the age-old divide between religion and science that prevents researchers from understanding the root causes of religious experience.

Interpretivist Evidence

Interpretivism centres around a contextualised, in-depth insight into respondents’ lives, their different understandings of objective reality and individual motivations. In this way, religious experiences aren’t homogenous but dynamically shaped by culture. In the fields of theology and the social sciences, interpretivist evidence is used and this approach avoids imposing pre-conceived understandings upon evidence, instead examining experiences in isolation.

Theology

Theologists focus on the recount of personal experiences, believing that evidence from this is self-explanatory and non-refutable. They argue that due to the large quantity of religious experiences recorded throughout history, it would be unreasonable to suggest that they were all false. Hence, to an extent, the existence of religious experiences can be seen as evidence of some kind of God. The common phrase used when describing religious experience of ‘seeing God’ itself is linguistically suggestive of an evidential occurrence as to see is an objective action. They propose that although emotions or feelings dominate religious experiences, there must be elements of judgement and perception for the witness to view the experience as a true event. Since there is no test that can be done to prove someone’s account as true, often the quantity of people reporting similar experiences is used as a way to measure its reliability as evidence.

Social sciences

Eminent cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz termed the study of human life "not an experimental science in search of laws but an interpretive one in search of meaning”. Historically, anthropologists and sociologists have used a mix of quantitative (closed-ended surveys and statistical methods) and qualitative (open-ended surveys or interviews) evidence when studying religious experience. However focus has recently shifted towards examining how meaning is created retrospectively through the construction of narratives, how events given a moral ordering according to overarching themes drawn from culture. Since the objective existence of religious experiences are only fleeting, the memory, interpretation, linguistification, recounting, emplotment and narrativization is the “data” which sociologists must study.

Positivist Evidence

Positivist evidence elucidates religious experience in terms of observable, measurable and empirical factors. This approach attempts to uncover generalisable laws of nature and human behaviour that can explain religious experience, often trying to express the inexpressible. Theories formed in the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience which use positivist evidence ultimately rely on hard evidence collected.

Psychology

Psychologists have examined the cognitive structures of individuals who have encountered religious experiences. Subjects who reported religious experiences had higher scores on the Repression-Sensitization scale, which measures one's openness to unusual, reality-threatening aspects of experience. There is a relation between religious experiences and schizotypy, which is also about openness to non-logical aspects of experience. Physiological explanations for this finding is due to the activation of the right brain hemisphere. Intense arousal produced by ecstatic dancing and singing could also lead to religious experiences. Additionally, it was found that individuals were often in a state of stress or despair before their experiences.

Neuroscience

Laboratory studies have concluded that religious experiences are linked to the biological construct of human brains. The brain was studied during significant spiritual experiences, such as observing the grey matter of praying Franciscan nuns and meditating Tibetan monks. Images showed increased activity in the frontal lobes, the attention area, and decreased activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe. This area of the brain primarily orients us in space, helping us to generate an awareness of the physical limits of the self. The decrease in activity in the area could mean that the individual fails to find the borderline between the self and the outside world, and hence such a distinction does not exist. Thus, the brain perceives that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses, giving an unquestionably real feeling of spiritual transcendence.

Tensions and conflicts

Different forms of evidence create friction between disciplines. When quantitative fields gather evidence to support their research, this gives rise to the problem of determining the subjective state of the individual being tested. Measuring spiritual states empirically while not disturbing such states is almost impossible. An interpretivist approach would challenge this methodology given the idiosyncratic nature of religious experiences. Many instead believe that the study of religious experiences should primarily focus on individual accounts, rather than biological, psychological or sociological explanations which may diminish their importance.

However, empirical researchers would disagree with the above given that testimonies differ so greatly it becomes difficult to reach a common understanding. The variation in intensity, duration, and multiple influences one's surroundings may have on the experience, will undeniably give rise to unique religious experiences. Coupled with the differences in the way each individual perceives such experiences, recounts of incidents will differ vastly. Primary data gathered in interpretivist studies therefore cannot be generalised or replicated, perhaps lessening its validity. Other weaknesses of interpretivism include the untrustworthiness of those retelling these accounts and bias on behalf of the researcher, whose cultural background and religious beliefs might skew how the qualitative evidence is gathered, interpreted and presented. Lastly the use of religious language amongst evidence presents an issue. Since positivism restricts assertible reality to the realm of sense experience, religious language such as ‘holy spirit’ is deemed meaningless as it’s not moored in our experience of the physical world.

Synthesising approaches

Positivist and interpretivist evidence addresses fundamentally different questions: one seeks to quantify, summarise and generalise whereas the other offers meaning and perspective. To fully understand the complexity of religious experiences, there should be a synthesis of positivist and interpretivist evidence. Rather than presenting religion as a neurological illusion and product of biology, science can play a supportive role to theology, thereby providing a more comprehensive understanding of religious experiences. This has led to the emergence of neurotheology, which seeks to understand the relationship between brain science and religion. Certain numbers are emphasized in religious traditions, such as 40 in the Bible (40 days and nights of the flood; the Jews wandered the desert for 40 years) and multiples of five in the Quran (Five Pillars of Islam and Ten Ancillaries of the Faith). The quantitative processes of the brain strengthen one's belief in the message associated with the numbers. Hence, it is evident how a more holistic understanding of religious experiences can be achieved by incorporating findings from seemingly contrasting fields.