Naturalism, theism, and the neurological basis of religious experience

Thesis

The two primary aims of this thesis are constructive and defensive. The constructive aim is to articulate a positive account of religious experience which captures both direct and mediated experiences of God, and provides a model of divine action in religious experience which harmonizes the claim that religious experiences have sufficient neural causes with the Thomistic view that God supernaturally elevates the person by grace in religious experience. The defensive aim is to respond to naturalistic objections derived from recent research into the sciences of the mind. The chapters proceed as follows. In Chapter one I argue that the deductive version of the naturalistic objection fails. In Chapter two I articulate and defend a Thomistic account of divine action—the Divine Assistance Model—utilizing new criteria of adequacy for theories of divine action drawn from the theology of grace. In Chapter three I argue that, depending on how the evidence from religious experience is individuated, either the inductive version of the naturalistic objection narrowly supports naturalism or moderately supports theism. Chapter four examines two naturalistic objections featuring recent data in the anthropology and psychology of religion —a debunking argument and the recognitional challenge to perceiving God; in this chapter I argue that both arguments fail. Chapter five develops a perceptual framework for mediated experiences, generally, and then applies this framework to musical religious experiences, specifically. Chapter six defends the possibility of a “conjunctive" account of mental disorder and religious experience from recent objections. Chapter seven argues that the veridicality and epistemic safety of psychedelic-induced religious experiences depends on the underlying metaphysic: while psychedelic-induced Christian theistic experiences appears to produce unsafe beliefs, some Buddhist non-theistic and Hindu pantheistic experiences can be epistemically safe.

Authors: Skolits, W

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-g7r0xbbne
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: religious experience; perception; mental disorder; divine action; neural correlates of religious experience; Thomistic divine action
• Subjects: Hallucinogenic drugs and religious experience; Experience (Religion)