The Vagaries of Religious Experience (1) by Daniel Gilbert

From The Edge.

Some religious people regard scientists as foul heathens, which is terribly unfair. We aren't all that foul. On the other hand, we do tend to be heathens. The most fundamental principle of science is that beliefs must be predicated on empirical evidence — things that everyone can see, touch, taste, and measure — and in more than two thousand years of recorded history, no one has yet produced a shred of empirical evidence for the existence of God. That hasn't kept most people from believing. For as long as pollsters have been asking the question, roughly 90% of Americans have been claiming to believe in God, and a sizeable majority believes that God takes a personal interest in their lives and intervenes to help them.

America is an unusually religious nation, but even in the world's least religious nations the majority of people claim to believe in God. Scientists understand all this piety and faith by assuming that belief in God is one of the many primitive superstitions that human beings are in the process of shedding. God is a myth that has been handed down from one generation of innocents to the next, and science is slowly teaching them to cultivate their scepticism and shed their credulity. As Albert Einstein wrote:

"(I had) a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies. It was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a sceptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment — an attitude which has never again left me." (Autobiographical Notes, 1949)

Einstein's orgy of freethinking forever changed our understanding of space and time, and the phrase "Religion for Dummies" became, in the view of many scientists, a redundancy. But this conceptualization of religious belief misses an important point, namely, that people don't believe in God simply because they are told to by their elders, but because they are compelled to by their own experience. William James understood that religious belief grows out of human experience, and he urged scientists to investigate the experiences that spawned it:

"I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer (whose)... religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct." (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902)

If belief in God is compelled by experience, then what sorts of experiences compel it?