Hallucinating God? The Cognitive Neuropsychiatry of Religious Belief and Experience

At least since M ARX and F REUD , there has existed a conceptualization of religious belief as pathological. 1 According to this view, religious beliefs result from, and are indicative of, some kind of intellectual flaw or deficiency (P LANTINGA 2000). We might say that religious beliefs are here construed as reflecting doxastic dysfunction (from the Greek word “doxa”, meaning “opinion” or “belief”)—something has gone awry in the mechanisms by which religious people form and evaluate beliefs. The advent of cognitive neuropsychiatry (D AVID /H ALLIGAN 1996) has heralded a new approach to theorizing about such pathologies of belief, or delusions . Cognitive neuropsychiatry aims to develop a model of the processes underlying normal belief generation and evaluation, and to explain delusions in terms of damage to processes implicated in this model of normal functioning. Cognitive neuropsychiatry is thus a branch of cognitive neuropsych ology , a field which investigates disordered cognition as a means of learning more about normal cognition (C OLTHEART 2002). Can religious beliefs, however, properly be conceived of as delusional? The pathological nature of some seems quite unequivocal (in psychiatric circles at least). S AVER and R ABIN (1997), for example, cite the World Health Organisation’s finding that religious delusions occur in 3.2% of unselected schizophrenic patients. S AVER and R ABIN also note, however, that making diagnostic distinctions between culturally sanctioned religious beliefs and religious delusions is both a clinical challenge and a challenge to established psychiatric nosology. J ACKSON (1997) made a psychometric comparison between individuals reporting spiritual Ryan McKay