warned in trying to discern the great question of whether God exists neuroscience suddenly inserts itself into this question because there are discoveries about the brain that seemed to affect religious belief so atheists say see it's just a biological phenomena and has no existence in the real world theists on the other hand would say see God put it there so we could believe in God so as a neuroscientist and as a believer what's this God module all about well the god module was a a terminology that came really from vs Ramachandran who is a neurologist and
neuroscientist who was looking at persons with temporal lobe epilepsy and looking at the history of temporal lobe epilepsy there are some persons with that disorder not all but some for whom the aura and the experience around the seizure event is experienced as deeply religious as lights and wonder and one patient said something about the bright Sun and the image of God and these were so deeply that impacting that they were considered to be deep and important religious experiences Dostoevsky had epilepsy and Dostoevsky writes in the idiot about Prince Myshkin having seizures and a wonderful several
pages of describing these seizures as wonderfully religious or the experience around the seizures as wonderfully religious and Michigan says so what if it is sickness one would give one's whole life for this experience well you can take that and and say well we have some neural structures in our brain that fire off and when these fire off that is a religious experience and as nothing but that a couple of thoughts about that one is that not everybody that gets the same sort of relate of epileptic seizure and the same sort of subjective experience interprets it
religiously so some people will have that experience and for them it won't be interpreted religiously and I think whether or not it's interpreted religiously has a lot to do with the nature of the person their experience in the past how they what they think these sorts of things actually mean in the world which comes prior to the Osito created by the seizure so to call the temporal lobe areas that get active in these things of God module I think it's kind of an over interpretation I think they when those areas are active we do interpret
things as very deeply significant and impersonal but any kind of interpretation can be overlaid on that so I don't think it's necessarily a god module how about some of the other ways that that religious experience can be elicited with psychoactive drugs do they affect the same area how do how do they work yeah somewhat the same system I mean the drugs are operating more broadly than one would then the focus of the epileptic seizure and temporal lobe epilepsy the problem with seizures is once they get going they spread to a whole lot of areas so
in both cases you probably have a lot of brain involved so but these subjective epi kind of acceptance they're working in are the systems that cause us to feel things to be meaningful interpret our personal experiences as more meaningful so whatever experience I'm having at that point if the temporal lobe is going off or if I have LSD those are much more important and more meaningful experiences than if that wasn't true in New York well meaningfulness is important as humans not just in a religious experience but but all sorts of negotiating through life and succeeding
in society and survival meaningfulness is important so don't expect something yeah brain to resonate with them so in terms of understanding human mental activity and human experience it's a really important phenomenon really important studies both the drug study or drug experiences and drug studies and the studies a person through a temporal lobe epilepsy when stimulation or brain cell relations yeah those are transcranial magnetic stimulation yeah that can put a little magnets here and you get activity in a brain and then you may be experienced at us religious but I think whether or not a person
interprets those as religious it has a due to the nature of the person and the context in which it occurs and something about those two cause a similar kind of experience to in one person be called religious and another person cause knowledge which means there's it's not a god module it's a significance module it's not a god much yeah now if I were coming at this and I am wondering about whether God exists I have my entire life and as everyone Massillon its it oscillates from one from one to the other that that would that
would sort of indicate that I can explain the entirety of religious experience if not the entirety of religious interest based upon a certain brain structure and chemistry and does that does that remove some of the the ultimate potential significance of what religion is if we can explain it completely I don't need God or anything supernatural to explain everything you just told me that would be true if if you presume that that God and religiousness is something inside coming out but if God is outside there and as something to which I respond then I respond with
my whole self and at times that would include systems of significance and involved with the temporal lobe involved in those systems that become active with so the fact that I might have an experience and interpret it as religious doesn't have any theological or a rational impact on whether God exists out there or not God could exist or God could not exist and I have or have not these same experiences so I think those are two sort of disjunct concepts whether or not God exists and whether or not I experience God in certain ways sometimes triggered
by or influenced by a unusual experience in my brain the second thing I want to say is that two to narrow religiousness to those kind of abnormal experiences you get in temporal lobe epilepsy and drug experiences is two incredibly compress religious life for which is not true most people those kind of experiences are not normative for people's religiousness people's religiousness is a wider range of sorts of things and it's not just those sorts of the deaths
