David Williams: Conceiving God

Here are some good stuff which I will highlight.


First off, I must say that I love the fact that there is quite a bit of neuroscience!

Preachers of today emphasize the uniqueness of Christianity. There is, however, little in it that was new. Christianity absorbed the 'best in the religions of the time: it was an amalgam. Virgin births, descendants of Gods, rising from the dead were not unique. I argue that Islam is the same and it bridged on the rising tide of the Abrahamic faith and added progressions in ethics (though this was still provincial in its considerations and not perfect as how a truly malevolent and omnipotent God would/could want it to be) and the much touted falsification tests in order to add to its validity.

Williams argues that religion originated independently of the functions that it is frequently said to perform. The functions developed after or as religion came into being for other reasons. These functions that people commonly think religions perform include: fostering group unity, providing peace of mind and explaining puzzling aspects of life.

He goes on to state that religions' unity is divisive of mankind. Any religious entity is created vis-a-vis "others" who exist outside the fold that makes a religious social entity meaningful. if there were no 'others', there could be no recognisable religious group. When people argue that religion holds society together, they mean that it holds their section of society together and then only in specific circumstances. Wide social unity is intrinsically impossible because religion is founded on supposedly revealed knowledge of supernatural realms and beings not on empirically verifiable observations. Thus (and I agree strongly) unity brought by religion is not inclusive in nature and indeed counterproductive to the unity of mankind in general.

Williams has three objections against the 'comfort' that religions accord to its believers in which one I will go into detail here. He denies the positive nature of this 'comfort' that religion can bring is that it can and has been used to shore up oppressive regimes.

Then he puts forth interesting questions: why did God not reveal the absolutely fundamental virtue of compassion, even towards enemies, right at the beginning? Can later ‘revelations’ be said to 'supersede’ earlier ones when they flatly contradict them? In any event, why was progressive revelation necessary?

Now comes the sexy neuroscience bits when Williams goes into explaining religious experiences. Unknown to most of us, human consciousness is constantly shifting and consists of a normal, daily trajectory and an intensified trajectory that leads to overwhelming hallucinations. In medieval times, some methods were intentionally combined to trigger hallucinatory episodes. Such episodes were moulded and accepted by sufferers and religious authorities as messages from God. 6 frequently repeated entoptic forms can be identified (even found in San rock paintings) and are related to altered states of consciousness and such ubiquity among many religious believers of various faith suggests that they are not culturally determined but are wired into our neurology. Believers of all times and faiths have also found ‘proof’ from their dreams, experience vortexes (striate cortex) and flight.