The “God Helmet” and the Realism of Religious Experience

Among the issues confronting religious and mystical experiences is the question of their veridicality, a matter which has been further problematized with the emergence of new theories in neurotheology. One prominent view in this area is that of Michael Persinger, who holds that religious experiences have a neurological origin and can be controlled and replicated through advanced technologies. This hypothesis has served as a pretext for atheistic and skeptical currents opposing the realism of religious experience. Considering the importance of rationally and logically defending religious experiences and beliefs against emerging challenges, the present study aims to examine the scientific validity of Persinger’s view and its relation to
the realism of religious experience. Michael Persinger, an American-Canadian psychologist, considers the human brain to be the locus of all experiences and associates religious experiences with specific patterns of brain activity. In his view, mystical and religious experiences are triggered by micro-electric waves flowing within the deep structures of the brain’s temporal lobe. He holds that such experiences can be externally controlled and replicated, and in this regard, he employed the so-called “God Helmet” to study religious experiences and the effects of subtle stimulation of the temporal lobe. According to Persinger’s reports, many experimental subjects who wore the God Helmet reported mystical experiences and altered states of consciousness. On this basis, he proposed the hypothesis of electrical brain stimulation to induce mystical and religious experiences and regarded the temporal lobe as their source. Consequently, mystical experiences— which for centuries had been considered the primary foundation of religious beliefs and various socio-religious systems and had been attributed to cosmic origins—are, according to this view, the result of magnetic fields influencing the human brain. Based on this hypothesis, prophetic revelations and divine inspiration received by God’s messengers are not exempt, and the states experienced by prophets during the reception of revelation can be interpreted as symptoms of certain conditions such as epilepsy or cerebral seizures. This raises the question: in the face of such claims, what room remains for the credibility and value of religious experiences, for fundamental religious beliefs such as theism, and for divine revelation as the greatest and most important source of religious knowledge—in short, for religious realism itself? The method of this study is descriptive-analytical, and its findings reveal several problems in Persinger’s claims: first, the failure to replicate his results and the inability of other researchers to reproduce the claimed experiences, with even some indirect experiments yielding contrary results; second, methodological flaws in Persinger’s experiments, including the absence of essential conditions such as double-blind procedures; third, the weakness and inadequacy of the magnetic fields generated by the God Helmet, and the ineffectiveness of weak magnetic fields in reproducing the expected experiences in laboratory settings; fourth, the complexity and multi-factorial nature of religious experiences, such that—even assuming the positive results of Persinger’s experiments—they are influenced by diverse motivational, cognitive, and contextual factors and cannot be equated with easily definable neurophysiological states; fifth, from an epistemological-theological perspective, the atheistic approach regards religious and mystical experiences as nothing more than mental imagery produced by neural processes and the normal or pathological behavior of brain cells, and thus denies that they are genuine experiences pointing to realities beyond themselves. In critique of this hypothesis, it is shown that, first, the neurological basis of an experience does not constitute valid evidence against its veridicality,
for if the mere neural locus of an experience were sufficient to deny its realism, all human experiences would be discredited, leading to a universal skepticism; second, the conclusion that an experience is non-veridical presupposes the prior denial of its connection to external reality, something that Persinger’s studies do not establish; third, the denial of the realism of religious experience rests upon certain metaphysical presuppositions, and its adoption in the name of science results from conflating natural and physical explanation with philosophical physicalism and naturalism, as well as from the fallacy of taking part of a cause for the whole cause; fourth, even if the neurological basis and laboratory induction of religious experience were established, this would not entail a skeptical stance, for in terms of epistemic implication it is entirely non-committal; and fifth, the default assumption is the veridicality of the human cognitive system. Therefore, as with other common human experiences, the default assumption is the realism of religious experiences—unless proven otherwise.