A brief discussion on Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and religious experiences.

I was reading an article on Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE), a condition that can cause those afflicted with it to have religious experiences – a feeling of oneness with the universe, sensing a divine presence, etc. Because it appeared to happen often with TLE patients, the concept even inspired a new field of medicine: neurotheology. Of course, many have jumped on this phenomena to show that there is no God. Since this phenomena can be recreated in the lab using virtually any type of person (believer or not) the argument goes, this proves that God doesn’t exist. The fact of the matter is however, that just because the sense of being one with the universe or seeing God can be created by stimulating a certain part of the brain does not negate the existence of God. William James said it best: "Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensitivity liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features have helped to give them their religious authority and influence. To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value is quite illogical and arbitrary. [Because if that were the case], none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of the possessor’s body at the time. Saint Paul certainly once had an epileptoid, if not an epileptic, seizure, but there is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic processes as its condition." Perhaps what has been proven is not that God exists only because of stimulating a portion of the brain, but that there is a portion of the brain that is sensitive to the energy that is God.