FREUD VS RAMACHANDRAN

1. Challenges
L.O.
To consider Freud and Ramachandran’s
views of religious experiences.

2. Starter
• Odd one out:
• Noetic
• Transcient
• Knowledge
• Ultimate Truths

3. Freud
• People are completely material i.e. no such
thing as a soul
• If we could understand everything there is to
understand about the physical/biological side
of life, we would fully understand human
beings.
• The urge that some people felt towards
religion was no more than a psychological
obsession

4. Clues as to what led to Freud’s
approach:
• His experiences of anti-Semitism as a Jew
• His experiences of the Catholic rituals he
observed as a child, when taken by his
guardian to church
• Most particularly, the emphasis placed on the
material nature of human existence during his
education and early professional career.

5. Freud
• Saw religious experiences as, essentially, illusions.
• They were projections of the ultimate, oldest and most
profound ideas that people had.
• E.g. A person who has the mystical experience of being
‘on the cross’ with Jesus does so because they are
projecting his or her ultimate beliefs about suffering,
helplessness and separation, along with salvation,
hope and desire to be re-united with one’s parent (in
this case portrayed as God).
• So he rejected religious experiences as objective
evidence for the existence of an ultimate creator and
sustainer.

6. Ramachandran
• Carried out extensive research related to
temporal lobe epilepsy from which he
concluded that there is important evidence
linking the temporal lobes to religious
experiences.

7. Ramachandran’s experiment
• Set up an experiment to compare the brains of
people with and without temporal lobe epilepsy.
• Measured how much patients sweated when
they looked at different types of imagery.
Professor R discovered that when the temporal
lobe patients were shown any type of religious
imagery, their bodies produced a dramatic
change in their skin resistance, much greater than
people not suffering from the condition.

8. Ramachandran’s experiment
• The professor has concluded from his research
that famous religious figures such as St Paul
could also have been people who had the
condition.

9. Ramachandran
• “What is beyond doubt is that the origins of
religion are even more complex than had been
thought. The science of neurotheology has
revealed that it is too simplistic to see religion as
either spiritually inspired or the result of social
conditioning. What it shows is that for some
reason our brains have developed specific
structures that help us believe in God.
Remarkably it seems whether God exists or not,
the way our brains have developed, we will go on
believing. “

10. Freud and Ramachandran
• Which theory presents the greatest challenge
to people who believe that RE are evidence of
God’s existence? Explain why…