Starter quiz
- A ______ experience is a personal feeling or moment when someone believes they connect with a higher power or God.
- 'religious' ✓
- Logic is a tool used in ______ to evaluate arguments and assess conclusions about religious experience.
- 'philosophy' ✓
- What methods did William James use to investigate religious experiences?
- He conducted experiments to replicate religious experiences.
- He studied religious experiences through case studies. ✓
- He dismissed them as irrelevant.
- He analysed brain scans of those who claimed to have had religious experiences.
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- What is neuroscience?
- the study of how the brain and nervous system work ✓
- the study of ancient philosophical ideas
- the study of human behaviour in social groups
- the study of the universe and its origins
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- The temporal lobe is part of the ______.
- 'brain' ✓
- How could religious experiences be used to support the existence of God?
- they provide evidence of the divine through personal encounters ✓
- they can be explained by psychological or neurological factors
- they always occur during religious rituals or ceremonies
- they are always shared by large groups of people
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Exit quiz
- What does scepticism encourage us to do?
- to accept things without questioning them
- to doubt things and ask for evidence before accepting them as true ✓
- to believe in supernatural explanations
- to always follow the opinions of experts
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- How did Michael Persinger approach the study of religious experiences?
- by conducting interviews with people who claimed to have had them
- by stimulating the brain to study its effects on religious feelings ✓
- by interpreting religious texts to understand the nature of divine encounters
- by dismissing religious experiences as purely imaginary and unworthy of study
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- The God Helmet experiment used ______ lobe stimulation to create religious-like experiences.
- 'temporal' ✓
- Which of the following does Persinger’s experiment suggest about religious experiences?
- that they are proof of God’s existence
- that they are universally experienced by all people
- that they can be artificially induced by brain stimulation ✓
- that they are only linked to religious individuals
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- Why might some argue that Persinger's experiment does not disprove the existence of God?
- it doesn’t explain why humans have the capacity for spiritual experiences ✓
- it shows that brain activity is unrelated to religious experiences
- it proves that religious experiences are just a trick of the mind
- it only shows how God might use the brain to communicate with humans
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- Which of the following is a key criticism of Persinger's God helmet experiment?
- the experiment was only conducted on religious people
- the findings are unreliable due to the difficulty of replicating the results ✓
- the experiment did not take the participants’ expectations into account
- the experiment did not include a diverse range of participants.
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Worksheet
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Lesson Details
Key learning points
- The God helmet is an experiment designed to see if feelings of religious experience can be induced.
- In the experiment, the temporal lobe is stimulated based on testimony of those with temporal lobe epilepsy.
- The stimulation brought about effects similar to those of people claiming a religious experience.
- Some claim this experiment proves God does not exist, or at least that religious experience is not genuine.
- Others argue that a creator God designed the human brain to include the temporal lobe as a channel of communication.
Common misconception
The God helmet experiment has been reliably replicated and proves that religious experiences are just caused by brain stimulation.
In reality, the experiment has not been consistently replicated, and the results have been debated.
Keywords
Evidence - facts or information that supports an idea
God helmet - a device that stimulates the temporal lobes with electromagnetic fields to induce religious experiences
Michael persinger - a neuroscientist known for developing the God helmet to study the brain's role in religious experiences
Scepticism - a philosophical tool that encourages questioning and doubting things to ensure we have good evidence before believing them
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