The evidence is real. Stimulation of certain brain regions — particularly the temporal lobes — can produce experiences that subjects describe in religious terms: a sense of presence, of light, of profound meaning, of contact with something vast and personal. Wilder Penfield, one of the pioneers of neurosurgery, documented this in the 1950s. Michael Persinger’s “God helmet” used magnetic field stimulation to induce religious feelings in laboratory subjects. Near-death experiences — the tunnel of light, the life review, the meeting with deceased relatives — correlate strongly with specific neurological events including reduced blood flow to the brain and release of endogenous DMT.
Critics argue this shows that religious experience is a product of brain states and nothing more — that the “God” encountered in prayer, meditation, or mystical experience is a neurological event, not a genuine encounter with an external reality.
The inference problem
The argument from neuroscience to the unreality of religious experience makes an inference that the evidence does not support. The finding that religious experiences correlate with brain states does not establish that those experiences are only brain states with no external referent.
All experience correlates with brain states. Visual perception of a real chair correlates with neural activity in the visual cortex. Love correlates with oxytocin release and activity in the prefrontal cortex. The fact that an experience has a neural correlate does not mean the experience has no external referent — it means the brain is involved in processing it, which is true of all experience without exception.
To argue from “religious experience has neural correlates” to “religious experience is only a neural event with no external referent” is to apply a standard to religious experience that would, applied consistently, eliminate all experience as a guide to external reality.
What the neuroscience actually shows
The neuroscience of religious experience shows that certain types of experience — including experiences of presence, unity, and profound meaning — are associated with specific patterns of neural activity, and that these patterns can be induced by electrical stimulation, magnetic fields, psychedelic substances, and extreme physiological states like cardiac arrest.
This tells us about the neural mechanism by which such experiences are processed. It says nothing about whether those experiences are tracking anything real. The question of whether the consistent cross-cultural experience of divine presence — reported across centuries, cultures, and contemplative traditions — is a pure neurological artifact or a genuine contact with transcendent reality is not settled by identifying its neural correlate.
Near-death experiences
Near-death experiences are a specific case worth examining. They consistently report features that are difficult to explain as pure neurological artifacts: accounts of events during cardiac arrest that are later verified as accurate, cases of congenitally blind people reporting visual experiences during NDEs, the extreme vividness and life-altering quality of experiences that occur when brain activity is at its lowest measured level.
These features do not prove that NDEs are genuine encounters with an afterlife. But they are genuinely puzzling on a pure materialist account, and they add to the cumulative evidence — alongside consciousness, fine-tuning, and the cosmological argument — that the materialist picture of reality may be missing something.