Your Brain on God Part 1: Lectures by William James

Who was William James

Psychologist, philosopher, and a founder of American pragmatism, William James taught at Harvard and wrote The Principles of Psychology (1890).

In his late twenties he had a mental breakdown that nearly killed him. He wrote about it anonymously in Varieties as the "French correspondent." While locked away in an asylum he remembered an epileptic patient he had seen and thought to himself, "That shape am I, I felt, potentially." The experience terrified him and he said he could only get it to subside by reading scriptures vehemently.

At 59 he had a serious heart condition when he gave the Gifford Lectures, and he wrote his most famous lectures while recovering in Europe.

The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

His most famous book comes from a collection of 20 Gifford Lectures he gave in Edinburgh in 1901–02. The Giffords were researchers of "natural theology," meaning what can be known of God without revelation. His book is a psychology of religion itself, but doesn't ask whether religious claims are true or false. Instead James asks, what does religious experience look like from the inside, and what effect does it have on a person's life. He defined religion loosely as:

"the feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine."

Lecture by Lecture

Part 1: Clearing the ground (Lectures 1–3)

Lecture 1, "Religion and Neurology." In his first few lectures, William defends religion against "medical materialism" or the idea that most religious claims are the result of psychological episodes. For example, the idea that the Apostle Paul's conversion is invalid if it was induced by a seizure or he was having some sort of mental breakdown on the road to Damascus. This was a view held by many of James' colleagues in the intellectual world. However, he argued that every mental state has a bodily cause, including the atheist's skepticism, so where an experience came from can't settle its worth. Instead he argues that we should judge experiences byimmediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness. This is the fruits, not roots principle, and it runs through all of his lectures. The idea that the origin of something matters less than its outcome.

Lecture 2, "Circumscription of the Topic." James sets aside churches and theology to focus on individual experience, intending to separate religion from morality in order to strip it down to the core. Most peoples morality creates a perception of the world and sometimes requires them to grit their teeth out of a sense of moral duty. However, the religious person accepts that moral basis gladly, with a new reach of freedom. Religion makes "easy and graceful what in any case is necessary, if not at time naive."

Lecture 3, "The Reality of the Unseen." James states the obvious that people live as if an unseen order is real, and they feel it as a presence more than they argue against it. In this lecture he argues that intuition comes first and reasoning follows as "the unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition."

So far we've seen James clear the ground in three moves. First, an experience can’t be dismissed because of where it came from, since every mental state has a bodily cause, the skeptic’s included. Second, the subject is the solitary individual, not the church or its theology. Third, belief starts as a felt presence before it becomes an argument. Together these change the question. It is no longer whether Paul’s road to Damascus was a seizure. It is what the experience did to Paul and to everyone it reached afterward. With the method in place, his next series of lectures turns to the people themselves, the “healthy-minded,” who never doubt the world is good, and the “sick souls,” who can’t stop seeing that it isn’t.