Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…Absolutely. It seems to me that neuroscience needs to have some theory of how normal human consciousness operates before it can have a coherent theory of how abnormal human consciousness operates. Look, if the religious world picture is correct, again, broadly speaking, then whatever the self is, whatever the soul is, it obviously exists in some sort of dynamic relationship to its body, its brain, its chemistry, its bloodstream, all of that, right? But the fact that you’re more likely to have a supernatural experience when you shake up that material substrate, I don’t think, tells you anything about the actual nature of what you’re encountering. If you think of, first of all, hermits in the desert who go out into the desert and mortify their flesh, or Native Americans on a spirit quest, and so on — these are traditional religious practices that, even absent psychedelic drugs, have always taken as a given that the default experience of the world is natural and material. If you want to have a supernatural experience, you need to shake up the natural substrate a little bit. I don’t think that ingesting drugs that shake up how your brain works is necessarily any different. Again, I understand that this seems like an outlandish conception. I think in the end, it is the religious conception. The religious conception is that your mind’s coexistence with your brain effectively reduces your mind’s capacities to enable it to operate normally in physical reality, and that shaking up the brain — there’s no necessary reason why that wouldn’t open the mind’s capacities a little bit more. Monkeys can’t do this in your view, but do monkeys have a soul? Tree shrews?…

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