Religion and Psychobiology

[Greg Crawford]

Have you “met Jesus” or “had “an encounter with the Holy Spirit”? I’m sure that question is a prominent one in many Christian communities and that some people are under pressure to have such an experience.   I am also sure that many people are extremely stressed by life today and are seeking some form of relief from the tension. That is evident in the appeal of alcohol and other stress relieving “remedies”. (In saying this, I am not advocating alcohol as a stress reliever – it may cause more problems than it cures.)   In seeking to have a religious experience and at the same time relieve their stress, many people may have an “experience”, but does it have anything to do with divine reality? In recent decades we have become aware of the role of chemicals in the brain. The synapses between our nerves communicate signals chemically. By fiddling with the chemicals we can change our mental experience. Slow down the re-uptake of serotonin, for example, to make a person less depressed. Engage in all sorts of activity – from sex to long distance running – to release endorphins into the bodily system. Ah! Such relief! Such release! Such … encounter with God?   I am wondering whether much modern religious experience is in reality a chemical outburst caused by particular activities which seek a divine religious experience and relief from tension, all in one hit. In saying this, I would argue that such experiences need to be distinguished from genuine religious experiences. The latter, it seems to me, are characterised by the communication of some content. St Paul, on the Damascus Road for example, unwraps a revelation with great theological implications. However, much contemporary religious experience seems to have no content. It is just cathartic, exhaustive, orgasmic … chemical?   If such psycho-biological experiences are in fact a masking themselves as encounters with the divine, how could one identify them? Is the absence of content a clear indicator, or might that just be a symptom of a person’s inability to articulate what they have encountered?   Greg