Paul Clark

It was in the late 19^th century that people first attempted to study religious experiences scientifically. One book that drew on some of this research is still in print today, more than 120 years later: William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. James was sympathetic to religious experiences and believed that they could offer real insights into the divine.

James and others have attempted to categorise religious experiences. This blog post will examine a number of different overlapping kinds:

• Mystical experiences – a sense of union with God or the cosmos
• Sudden conversion experiences – sometimes referred to as being born again
• Revelation – the receipt of a message, often accompanied by a visual or auditory experience of God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary etc.
• Charismatic group ecstatic experiences including speaking in tongues
• Near-death experiences

PROFOUND EXPERIENCES

What all these different experiences have in common is their numinous nature. They are often accompanied by a profound sense of awe and wonder, and they are frequently life-changing.

NOT UNIQUE TO CHRISTIANITY

Sudden conversion experiences are found in both Christianity and Islam.[iii] In non-proselytising religions such as Hinduism, sudden conversion experiences are rarer, but some Hindus do experience a sudden and deep spiritual transformation that causes them to devote themselves to their religion.[iv]

According to Islamic tradition, it was a revelatory visitation that turned Muhammad from merchant to prophet, and visions are a significant part of Taoism and some Native American religions.[v] Speaking in tongues is found in other religions as far apart as Native Americans in the Pacific northwest, Sudanese shamans, Eskimos, Australian Aborigines and Tibetan Buddhists.[vi]

THREE POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS

There are three possible explanations of the prevalence of numinous experiences across so many different religions:

1. Those experienced by members of my religion offer genuine insights into the divine. Those experienced by others do not (and may be positively demonic).
2. All of these experiences offer genuine insights into the divine, which means that all religions can act as a path to God/an understanding of our place in the cosmos.
3. None of these experiences offer genuine insights into the divine. They all have a physiological, psychological or sociological explanation.

I would suggest that the first explanation gets us nowhere unless it can be shown that the experiences of people in one religion are qualitatively different from the experiences of people who belong to other religious traditions. To my knowledge, this has never been demonstrated.

PHYSICALLY INDUCED

What has been demonstrated is the fact that numinous experiences can be induced physically. Aldous Huxley believed that mescaline and LSD could act as short cuts to mystical experience.[vii] A strong dose of ketamine will produce an out-of-body experience,[viii] as can temporal lobe epilepsy.[ix] Fighter pilots who pass out due to lack of oxygen in the brain during extreme acceleration report experiences very similar to near-death experiences of emerging from a tunnel into a bright light.[x]

CONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS

Hallucinations can happen without any need for drugs or oxygen deprivation. It is widely accepted that we don’t perceive reality directly. Instead, evolution has given us a user interface[xi] that shows us what we need to know about our environment. For neuroscientist Anil Seth, what we perceive as reality is in fact a controlled hallucination.[xii]

In my novel The Omega Course, a philosophy student explains controlled hallucination thus: “I’ll give you an example: when I’m cycling, I really hate it when dogs chase me…So sometimes, I’m riding my bike, minding my own business, and then I’ll see something out of the corner of my eye. And because I’m wary of dogs when I’m cycling, I’ll see it as a dog. That’s a hallucination, right. But it’s controlled because I look at it again, and it’s just a plastic bag being blown about by the wind…So, everything we see or hear or feel is a controlled hallucination. And managing that, keeping it properly controlled is a learned skill. We learn it in infancy. And like any skill, sometimes we screw up and it goes all uncontrolled.”

UNCONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS

In this view, uncontrolled hallucinations are a natural part of being human. They occur when our ability to distinguish between internal and external stimuli breaks down (internal stimuli: thoughts, dreams, memory and imagination; external stimuli: sights, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations).[xiii]

Psychologists have also examined the phenomenon of trances, which often lead to hallucinations. And how do you induce a trance? Music, chanting, dance, prayer, focused attention, meditation. These things are all part of the everyday practice of organised religion, so can it be a surprise that so many hallucinations happen during prayer and religious services?[xiv]

INTERPRETING OUR EXPERIENCES

When people have hallucinations, they have to interpret them, and in doing so, their brains will find a narrative that explains them satisfactorily.

Let me explain what I mean with the example of the hypnic jerk. Most of us have had the experience when drifting off to sleep that we dream we are walking along a path and trip over. Our leg jerks and we wake up. But scientists who have studied the hypnic jerk, as this is known, have concluded that we don’t actually dream about tripping over. Our leg jerks for purely physiological reasons and then our brains invent the dream in order to fit this muscular spasm into a narrative we can understand.[xv]

Similarly, when we encounter feelings or hallucinations we cannot understand, our brains invent a narrative explanation for them. So somebody who has been thinking about religious conversion for some time may experience a numinous hallucination as a conversion experience. A monk who has been meditating in order to get closer to God may experience a similar phenomenon as direct contact with God.

HYPNOTISM

As well as physiological and psychological causes, religious experiences can be deliberately induced via hypnotism. In a remarkable TV broadcast in 2005, using stage hypnotism, British illusionist Derren Brown converted members of a sceptical audience to a position where they were open to a belief in God.[xvi]

Some preachers inadvertently use techniques that mimic stage hypnotism, thereby inducing religious experiences in their audience. They also utilise the extraordinary power of crowds and the desire most of us have when we find ourselves in a crowd to conform with whatever it is that other members of that crowd are doing.[xvii] This explains the astonishing hysteria that can grip congregations in revivalist services.[xviii]

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

One example of such behaviour is speaking in tongues, where believers spout nonsensical syllables (supposedly the tongues of angels). This phenomenon hasn’t been studied extensively, but we know that when speaking in tongues, people only use sounds found in their native language, and what they say lacks linguistic structure. It tends to put believers into a dissociative psychological state – they know what they are doing but don’t feel in control, and it is a learned behaviour that only happens in social settings where it is considered appropriate.[xix]

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

In conclusion, I would say that there is a considerable body of evidence that can explain religious experiences without resort to God, supernatural forces or any kind of cosmic consciousness. They can happen for physiological or psychological reasons and can be induced by hypnotism (deliberate or inadvertent) and social pressure to conform. Though people may interpret these events as among the most profound and life-changing experiences they have ever known, they are evidence of the extraordinarily complex nature of the human mind rather than evidence for the existence of God.

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[i] Huxley, Aldous: The Perennial Philosophy, Chatto and Windus, 1947, pp. 7-24.

[ii] Ferguson, Marilyn: The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s, Paladin, 1981, pp. 397-425.

[iii] See, for example, Yusuf’s account in https://www.leedsnewmuslims.org.uk/personal-stories (accessed 21/09/2025).

[iv] See https://www.karmaweather.com/well-being/chakra/seven-states-divine-experience (accessed 21/09/2025).

[v] Butler, Edward P: The Way of the Gods: Polytheism(s) Around the World, Indica, 2022; pp. 189, 303.

[vi] See https://emersongreenblog.wordpress.com/2021/07/05/a-naturalistic-explanation-of-glossolalia-speaking-in-tongues/ (accessed 21/09/2025).

[vii] Ferguson, Marilyn: The Aquarian Conspiracy, pp. 411-412. Huxley believed meditation and mysticism were a better path than drugs.

[viii] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4KWHQGC3J3hFnCDDdzBcYHM/ketamine (accessed 15/07/2015).  

[ix] French, Chris: The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal, MIT Press, 2024, p. 199; Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Headline Book Publishing, London 1997, p. 105.

[x] French, Chris: The Science of Weird Shit, p. 198.

[xi] The phrase is Donald Hoffman’s: see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSrzlkfA0jk (accessed 21/09/2025).

[xii] See https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality (accessed 21/09/2025).

[xiii] Dennett, Daniel C: Consciousness Explained. Penguin Books, London 1993, pp. 3-16; Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Headline Book Publishing, London 1997, pp. 93-107, 144; Frankel, Joseph: Hallucinations are Everywhere. The Atlantic 2 October 2018.

[xiv] https://www.britannica.com/science/hallucination (accessed 21/09/2025). See also Butler, Edward P: The Way of the Gods, pp. 198, 303.

[xv] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10078162/ (accessed 21/09/2025).

[xvi] You can watch the whole broadcast at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wpkbDA9Pgw (accessed 21/09/2025). For an analysis of how Brown used stage hypnotism see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHz4BA8zJZ8 (accessed 21/09/2025).

[xvii] Sutherland, Stuart: Irrationality. Pinter and Martin, London 2007, pp. 38-40.

[xviii] For a rather disturbing example, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VF0oIW-5LE (accessed 21/09/2025).

[xix] See https://makingnoiseandhearingthings.com/2013/11/07/the-science-of-speaking-in-tongues/ (accessed 21/09/2025).