Within Reason - #37 T.M. Luhrmann - How Does God Become Real?

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is an American psychological anthropologist known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and studies of how culture shapes psychotic, dissociative, and related experiences. She is the author of How God Becomes Real, which asks what it means to say that a person 'believes' in gods, how and why this kind of belief is so different from mundane beliefs about the normal world, and how these gods become vividly real to some people. Find Within Reason on YouTube. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor. Tanya Marie Lerman is an American anthropologist known for her studies of modern-day witches and charismatic Christians. She's also the author of How God Becomes Real, a book about what it really means for a person to say that they believe in God or supernatural agents, and why these kinds of beliefs are different from the mundane beliefs that we have about the normal world around us. And this episode of Within Reason is brought to you by bart-ehrman.com forward slash Alex. Bart Ehrman is one of the world's most famous New Testament scholars. I recently had him on my podcast and it was one of my favorite episodes to date.

Dr. Ehrman offers a wide variety of courses from an agnostic perspective in the New Testament with courses including did the resurrection of Jesus really happen? Did Jesus think he was God? And unknown gospels, which is a scholarly look at the gospels. Who wrote them? How can we know? When were they written? Are they accurate?

So if you're interested in learning about New Testament scholarship from an agnostic perspective from one of the world's leading experts, and going to barturman.com forward slash Alex, or let them know that I've sent you and help out the channel if you do decide to purchase any of their courses. With that said, I hope you enjoy the following conversation with T.M. Lerman. T.M. Lerman, thank you so much for being here. Well, thanks for having me. You're an anthropologist who has studied a number of religious communities, beginning. the earliest referenced in your book, at least, is your doctoral dissertation looking at witches and druids and people who practice magic in middle class England.

You've also spent some time with evangelicals in America trying to understand their religious beliefs and what it means to have religious belief. My first question that I wanted to ask you is, how do you go about establishing trust and rapport with the people that you're essentially investigating? especially given the sensitivity of a subject like religious belief. People who are people of faith, people who are religious, are actually often very comfortable talking with people who want to understand their experience. They know themselves that their experiences are different in kind

than the ordinary sort of matter-of-fact world of tables and chairs. And so they themselves often have thought deeply about why they take gods and spirits seriously. And so, in fact, I've found that people are very comfortable talking with me. You mentioned a second ago that people understand a difference between, different sort of kinds of belief. And you talk in the book, which is how God becomes real, which I'll make sure is linked in the description and show notes, of course, about the difference between people's religious beliefs,

and I think what you call their mundane beliefs, that is, beliefs about the existence of a table or the existence of a microphone's had in front of me, as opposed to belief in the existence of a God or of spiritual beings. Why is it that people make these distinctions? And if they do, does this in some way speak to the recognition, even within the believer, that there's something less concretely real about the gods that they profess to believe in versus, say, you know, the table that they're sat in front of?

I think so. I mean, at least people recognize that there's a difference that they kind of, they mark. And you can show that in many, many different settings, people mark a difference between and the realness of gods and spirits, invisible beings, and mundane, ordinary things that they expect to be true about the world. And there are a lot of things we expect to be true about the world that we don't even think about, like the idea that you walk out your front door and you're not going to be swallowed by a giant hole in the path in front of you.

You don't even think about it. You take it for granted. You take it for granted that you put a cup on the table and it doesn't disappear. You take for granted that, you know, the sun will rise and the sun will set. And there are all sorts of things about the everyday world. And people of faith are, you know, so there's two things I could observe. One is that people who are involved in some kind of spiritual or religious pursuit, You know, they themselves often talk as if they don't take their own gods and spirits seriously enough.

So people may tell you that, say, you know, Jesus is still alive. God loves me absolutely. You know, I believe in God the way I believe that the son will come up. I mean, you know, they'll tell you these things. but in fact people often talk to me about the fact that they don't believe even though they're committed to these beliefs they don't really believe enough they want to take god seriously all the time and they don't take god seriously when they're washing the dishes they don't think about god when they're making a ham sandwich they don't you know there's something that's different and you can see that that people don't, in fact, behave as if, particularly when you're talking about omnipotent omniscient gods, all powerful gods, and behave as of God that God can do everything. You know, they don't ask God to feed the dog.

They don't ask God to write a term paper. They tend to reach out to that being in limited kinds of ways. and they can be very clear about the real reality of that God, but they don't really behave as if that God is doing all that they say is true of that God. And so it's like there's something different in the way that they hold that cognitive commitment, that epistemic claim, that sense that God or spirit is real. And I just think that's a pretty basic, once you start to pay attention, attention to that, it becomes pretty basic. I began to think about, you know, going to a church

or a ceremony as something people did to persuade themselves that these spirits really mattered, but they were still there, that you really should pay attention, that you really should be like the person that you, you know, your faith commitment would ask you to be. Yeah, and at the beginning of the book, you say, is my puzzle. People talk as if the gods are straightforwardly real, but they don't act that way. And I was wondering what you think it means for somebody to say that they do believe in God. They believe that God is real. Your book is called How God Becomes Real. Given the difference in the kind of reality that we're talking about here, what does it mean to say that God is real?

So I think that when people enter a faith practice, their commitment in that practice is that the world can be different than the everyday world. The world can be more just, more kind, people can be better behaved. And so part of the commitment to themselves in entering this different world is to make the world a different world a different. different place. And so you have to, as a person of faith, you have to kind of hold simultaneously this kind of set of ideas about your practice. And the everyday acknowledgement that the world is often pretty different. So that's true in evangelical practice. People are, you know, they commit to the view that justice is eternal, that God is, is, is, you know, they commit to the view that justice, is kind and good, but there are many things that don't feel like that in the world around them.

In a magical commitment, in a magical practice, people commit to the idea that magic flows through their bodies and can be directed by their minds, but it often doesn't work quite like that. And so they're trying to, so they've got these two kind of competing sets of observations so that the challenge for the person in a faith pursuit is to kind of get those differences closer together and of course the goal is that you come to experience your world more like the world of the faith commitment than or the faith frame i sometimes i call it in the book than the ordinary world you want that you know sense of of God as in his heaven, sort of ordering the world, do you want that to feel as if it's

really true for you? So that's the challenge. How can somebody do that? It's a challenge it's well recognized in faith communities. It's well recognized in the magical community, well-recognizing community of people who practice Santeria. It's, you know, so it's, that's a recognizable challenge. And I saw that my challenge was to describe, in effect, what people could do to help that happen. Yeah, I'm sort of imagining a criticism that could be put forward of religious belief here from an atheist, like myself. I'm an atheist and I spend a lot of time, uh, discussing. but also debating religious ideas with people.

And I think that in the context of that kind of discussion, if we were to be talking about the idea that religious people will self-admittedly have to essentially train themselves into recognizing God in the world around them. And you talk about training in the book. You talk about meditative practices that people will use to have a more sort of have a better conception of the spiritual world or ability to picture mental images. You talk about people praying as a way

to help them to make God real in the world. I can imagine having that kind of conversation, but it would surely be in the context of saying, doesn't this in some way challenge the validity of religious belief if the believer themselves will recognize that they have to essentially effort to make this real in a way that they don't need to effort to make the coffee table real in front of them? Right. That is a critique. that people have and so the you know so sometimes people will say oh well you know I really liked your book except that I don't like the title because God is real and and so that's a critique people have but it's also true of many people of faith that in fact what they are doing

is trying to persuade themselves that this thing that they are saying that they believe in is really true. I mean, my experience talking to Christians, so Christians have a, evangelical Christians have a particularly you might say demanding cognitive commitment. So they have this idea

that there is this completely powerful God who knows everything, who is always present, and, you know, who really loves them. And there are a lot of reasons

to think that that contradicts everybody's ordinary experience. So Christians, evangelical Christians are a particularly interesting group because they make these assertions that are particularly hard to believe, that you are always beloved, that there's a sense in which God expects you to act properly, but God just loves you as you are, completely and utterly loves you. or that, you know, and that God is, you know, looking out for you, God will sort of take complete authority for, you know, the unfolding of your life. But that, you know, that doesn't really describe people's experience. And so what you see in a church is that people will, you know, people in.

enact that contradiction. They say, you know, they got up in front of the church and they say, look, this is, you know, my testimony. I'm really having a hard time believing that, you know, I just got fired. I'm having a hard time believing that I can just trust God to get me a job because they go for months without a job. And then that's really hard. And, you know, that people have a hard time trusting God to be God when somebody dear to them falls ill. And they can be asserting that God will take care of things. But there's this kind of pretty obdurate challenge. And so this chalice kind of contradiction, this tension, is something that, you know, just pops up all the time.

in a believer's experience. It pops up all the time in the Psalms, right? I mean, the Psalms are, you know, sometimes there are psalms that are full of praising of the Lord, you know, shout for the Lord. But there are an awful lot of Psalms that talk about God forsaking the Psalmist, the person who's speaking, you know.

Yeah. And so that's just part of what it is to be a person of faith. it's why they call it faith it's it doesn't it's not it's there's something unordinary about it yes and i think the most interesting thing is that this is something the believer themselves will recognize i mean my my listeners might have heard this like i say as a criticism but like you say that the idea that that god is something to be struggled with to be made real in many ways uh is something recognized within the scriptural tradition long before there are only sort of new atheists transforming it into some kind of critical takedown of religious belief.

Of course, we're talking quite generally here about the idea of living in a world that seems unjust, but believing in a just omnipotent deity. And there are ways that people have of getting over this kind of what may seem like a contradiction to many. However, there also seem to be instances where people are confronted with quite specific negations of their beliefs. You reference the book when prophecy fails. And you also talk, I think, about near the beginning of the book, about there was a, if I'm remembering this rightly, there's a group who thought that a particular rabbi was going to live forever.

And this was sort of a foundational belief of this particular religious group. And then, of course, the rabbi dies. Can you tell me about that group and what happened there? So this is the followers of Monakum Schneersen, I believe. And they're sometimes called Lubavichers or sometimes Habad. So these are people who became very involved with the idea that a particular rabbi who was then living in New York. was in fact the Messiah, that he was going to come and redeem the Jews, and he was going to change the world. He was going to be recognized. He would be immortal, and he would change the world.

And this is described, vividly described by one of my colleagues called Yorin Bilu, who lives in Jerusalem and is an academic. And what happened was, you know, Schneerson died. And there, and it took, it was really hard for people to wrap their minds around this. One of the things that was so interesting for Beulhu, and for me, is that people began to re-experience the rabbi as if you were still alive. So they began to, they would behave, at his temple in New York, in Cran Heights. They would assemble for services,

and they would part, the congregation would part to let him walk through to the Bina, to the place from which he would read the Torah. They would consult. He'd written many, many letters to people. And they began to consult those letters to answer current concerns, they would take out, forgotten exactly how they did it, but they would sort of do what many people do in different faith traditions.

They would sort of ask a question of the current rabbi, and then they would stick a letter opener into the collection of letters, and they would find his answers. And, you know, most of the problems of humans are pretty basic. We have troubles in work. We have troubles in love. And so many general answers are available. They began to, what I found was fascinating.

They began to hear him and to see him, sort of in the ways that the disciples heard and thought Jesus after his death. And what I found so fascinating about that is that there's a very human pattern in this experience. So people don't say, you know, Jesus was there and he behaved exactly like a normal person and I was seeing him all the time. I mean, the Bible, it's a little elaborated, or I assume that the text is a little elaborated. But mostly people have rare experiences. They hear the rabbi once, maybe twice, where they see him and then they write it up and they share it with their friends.

And in the Gospels, you know, Jesus shows up and people see him and then he goes away. Or you see, he shows up and, you know, Mary can't touch him and he goes away. Or he shows up to one person and then, you know, another person, you know, sees him and he goes away. Or he shows up and he has lunch and then he disappears. And people realize that in retrospect that it was Jesus. But there are a lot of, you know, little, small, infrequent sensory experiences that come to mean a lot to people, but they don't happen very often. They're rare. And so this suggests to me, and I know something about those experiences, they're more common when people are emotionally.

invested or aroused. They are more common when people haven't slept or the area between sleep and awareness. They're more common when people are stressed. But they are pretty rare. It's only when people are ill that these sensory experiences happen very, very frequently across the course of a day.

And so that was very interesting to me, that these were, these experiences of the rabbi were kind of like the experiences reported by the disciples and the Gospels. People, a whole handful of people have a handful of experiences. Yes. I mean, you talked about people literally parting to allow a man to pass through them who was in fact at the time dead. Yes. What do you think is going on in the mind of a person who's doing that,

who's stepping out of the way, you know, sorry to get in your way, rabbi, please go past? Surely not really seeing a physical man in front of them pass by. I mean, what's happening in the mind there? So I think what people are doing is they're, in effect, playing. But they're playing in a serious way. So when you play, you, you effect, create a second frame. And the person who first described, this was an anthropologist called Gregory Bateson.

He said that you, you know, look at dogs, he said. Dogs like do a little play crouch. And then they can tear at each other. They sort of know that they're not going to actually bite. They sound ferocious, but they're not really doing damage. And when, you know, humans play, they, you know, kids, they play at giving Teddy a bath. This was described by a psychologist called Paul Harris, who wrote a wonderful book about this. You know, the kid will take Teddy and will take an imagine, you know, it would put Teddy in an imaginary tub of water.

And we'll pull out Teddy and take an imaginary blanket and kind of white teddy dry, you know, white teddy dry. But the kid is not confused about whether there's actually water on the floor. The kid is, and the kid will tell you that as well. And adults do that as well. They sort of, they're playing at in a serious way. They're not considering this as mere play. But they're sort of pretending or taking, you know, trying to experience another reality. And I think that faith works best for people when they share what I would call a paracosum,

kind of a shared imaginary world. It doesn't mean that it's mere imagination. But, you know, the text of these books, these old books, you know, you're not seeing disciples. you're not to seeing there are these there are a bunch of stories that are being told what's happening

in a faith practice is that people are have a shared set of stories that are different from the everyday world they see in front of them I mean my magicians would you know

people practicing magic they'd have books they'd have books that you know they took you know they're gods were modeled after the Greek gods, the Celtic gods, the Nordic gods. And they'd all these books, and they would read the books, and they would talk about the books with each other, and they would tell each other stories about the books, and they would

write practices, they'd write what they called pathworkings, in which, you know, they would remember a pathworking in which, you know, you've got a group of people in the room. This ritual is done by, you know, people are sitting in the room. turn down the lights people shut their eyes and somebody tells a story and like one of the stories I remember best was about this Egyptian lion-headed goddess called Sechmet and this person who's telling the story is telling a story about how we we want the courage and the power of a segment we want the presence of a lion within each of us and she told us to in our mind to walk across this pit of fire to this to this lion-headed goddess and the goddess

gave us something and then we walked back those kinds of stories work best when you know a lot about segment you know a lot about the other Egyptian gods you know about the you know about the sort of the resonances between this Egyptian god and you know that Greek goddess and that Celtic god and sort of you're sort of living in these stories where there are their constraints on the stories have you know a segment can't be anyone she's got to have a lion's head on her head that was just she she has a lion's head on her body um but you can infuse that story with your own personal meaning and the more you know and the more you share with your community the richer and more powerful that story becomes.

And so these folks in this, you know, temple and this shul in Crown Heights, when they're there together, they remember so much about their rabbi. And when they behave together as if their rabbi is really present, it can help them kind of capture that sense that he still really is alive. And it's not, you know, and it's not, people are able to hold many complicated ideas together. I don't think they thought he was present in the flesh. But if they're all behaving as if he's kind of present in spirit and as if that spirit has flesh, then they are able to kind of feel a little bit more vividly.

as if he's really there. Yeah, the comparison to play is an interesting one. And I think a potentially offensive one to some religious listeners, of course, when a child is playing, you know, if a child is making like Play-Doh food, you know, like fake burgers or something to play around with, if an adult comes into the room and picks it up

and tries to eat it, the child is surprised because although they're playing that this is a this is a burger they know that it's not really i wonder if the the people in a room making room for a dead rabbi how they would react if somebody from outside wandered in by mistake and looked over there and said oh excuse me rabbi don't let me get in your way i i can only imagine that they'd have a similar reaction of acting actually quite surprised even though they're all in that room essentially pretending as though this this rabbi are still alive but i imagine that you'll want to say that people who are engaging in religious practices are doing something a bit more than than playing they're doing that

it's sort of a uh you described it as a sort of adult version but surely a sort of deeper and slightly truer kind of belief than the child who's making a burger out of plato but is that essentially what's what's going on here are we talking about something between a child playing and an adult interacting with another physical human being in front of them? Is it somewhere in the sort of middle between those that you think this kind of religious experience lies? Or is it closer to one or the other? I think that's true. I think it's a little different. So there's this kind of behavior and this emotional and people are moving around, but they're also thinking and feeling and they've got images in their head. But they're

they have this little cognitive tag or an epistemic tag that says that this is real. So a kid with an imaginary friend behaves can sometimes annoy her parents because she insists that the imaginary friend has to have a plate at the dinner table or there has to be room saved in the car for the imaginary friend. But that kid will also at some point just like sit on the imaginary friend and he's dead. Or the kid will just, you know, won't really expect an actual burger to be given to be put on the plate for the imaginary friend. So the kid and often the kid will say to the researcher, well, of course, this is my imaginary friend. It's only my imagination. So religious people don't do that.

They don't say, you know, we all know that the rabbi, you know, is imaginary. You know, they don't say that we're making Jesus up. But they do, so that they're saying something different. They're having some kind of different emotional commitment, emotional, cognitive commitment. But they also do recognize that there's, you know, Jesus is not there in an ordinary way. And so I used to hang out with these evangelicals who would say things like, you know, to help yourself pray, pour a second cup of coffee for God. So you have your cup of coffee, a real cup of coffee, and a real ceramic cup.

And now pour another real ceramic, you know, real ceramic cup full of real hot coffee and put it down on the table and talk to God. But they didn't, nobody ever expected that, you know, the liquid to perceptibly fall. Right? They might do a kind of, you know, little Elijah thing. Oh, you know, maybe I see it going down a bit. But they, you know, the Passover thing, you know, where, you know, pour a cup of water for Elijah or a cup of wine. And you, you know, get Elijah to take a sip.

And then you show that there's a sip by pouring a little bit more wine in. But it's, you know, they're not really behaving as if God is there in an ordinary way. And I think that that's, so that's what makes faith to me so interesting. It's a kind of, it's a commitment, it's a, it's a real commitment. People are really trying to change their world. They usually have a set of pretty articulated ideas about how this realness can really be real. You know, there's this, you know, this, what's God is the thing that's really real. this material world is just superficial. It's going to disappear. We are eventually going to be

part of this real, really real supernatural world, other world, that people often don't like the word supernatural, but this other word world. People have a lot of ideas about that. But and it is inherently complicated because it's inherently contradictory right so it's you know the world doesn't behave as if

you know what you think is true about it will always what you want to believe is true about it will always unfold and people get quite startled if you know if somebody said you know Jesus has told me not to get another job because he's going to provide funds in another way yeah the pastors might get a little worried about that yeah I mean

I think some people listening will want to say look are you accusing religious people at least in at least the kind of religious practices that we've been talking about so far of essentially just playing around right like some people will want to say well of course i don't think that jesus can drink my coffee because i believe that jesus is in some kind of spiritual form he's not physically present like he was two thousand years ago but that i think it's just a historical fact that a man called jesus was walking around performing real miracles and i believe in those miracles i believe that the water turned to wine, just like I believe that, you know, the table in front of me existed, you know, last week to sort of historical claim, but it's one that I think is actually

true. I'm not, I'm not play acting here. There's nobody's going to be able to walk in and sort of shatter that illusion where I say, well, you know, of course I'm sort of talking about it in a different sense. No, like the fundamental tenets, the resurrection, the death on the cross, this kind of thing. I really believe that this happened. I'm not just playing around. And where other people might be doing that, I'm certainly not. Oh, and there, when you're talking about stuff that happened in the past, you don't need to do anything complicated, right? I mean, what's more complicated for that person now

is, say, believing that God really loves them. So it's, I was most struck when talking with people that sometimes, often people would be talking about the experience of God and there would come a moment in the interview when they'd cry and that crying was a description of that moment when they really got it that God loved them just as they were and then the moment would go and I think that that is true for many people of faith that there are moments when they really get that, you know, the world is a good, just place, and then it goes. But it's, I think it's really meaningful when people have that kind of commitment.

And if you think about it, we require these semi-fictive commitments to run a good society. we believe that other people are reasonable that this is the basis of democracy that the people will make a reasonable judgment the majority people will make a reasonable judgment in choosing their leader we believe we have laws to protect us from the worst of our neighbors but we also believe that they are decent people with our best shared interests in mind and these semi-fictive beliefs I think actually change our experience so if you for example I mean you have these semi-fictive beliefs that your parents are you know love you and are decent people who are you have your best interest in mind and parents are usually complicated people with conflicting intentions who do not always behave

as they have their children's best interest in mind but it is also true that the way that we treat each other and the way based on our beliefs about each other does change each other's behavior and so I think there's something sort of valuable and, you know, within people, again, within limits, people are complicated. But to me, one of the great values of a faith commitment or faith practice is that people are reminding each other that the world can be a better place and that they can help each other to get

there. And that's the sort of, you know, redeeming promise. I mean, that's, you know, when it was Charlottesville where there was that horrible mass shooting when these man went into a church that was largely black and began shooting people and Obama came down and and they said they sang amazing grace together so that that was very moving because it's that's in some sense a false assertion but it is a semi-fictive assertion that we can expect more of each other. So that's what I think, what religion delivers to people when it works for people. Yeah, I think that's Charleston. I was just checking if we got that right. You've spoken about semi-fictive. qualities of religious belief. You've talked about inventing paracosms in which these religious

stories can take place. You've talked about analogies between religious belief and playing. When I listened to one of your talks, a TEDx talk, that you gave on your previous book about, well, when God's talk back, or when God talks back about evangelical Christianity, Near the end of that talk, you say, I actually don't think that we learn anything about the real nature of God from these observations. I don't think that social science can answer that question, implying that for all the anthropological research that you do and are engaged in, it doesn't tell us about the nature of God or whether God exists or anything of this kind. But the kind of language that you've used consistently throughout this podcast, can you understand why people would be confused to hear you say that after describing religious just believe with words like fictive and paracosom and playing.

Well, I think it's, I mean, I do see why people can be confused. But I also find that people also sometimes welcome my description of how God becomes real to them because they also experience themselves as struggling at moments and sometimes for more than at moments. And I think it's humans who commit, it's humans who are making these commitments to whatever they take God to be. I actually have a lot of respect for the varieties of the ways that people use the word God in any setting. And I used to begin doing this anthropological research in different faith settings. And I knew, I mean, I did some of this work amongst Orthodox Jews. And I was sharply aware that Orthodox Jews can have very different

sort of meanings for that word God. But I was really, I think I really began hanging out with evangelicals, you know, to spend a lot of time in like Bible studies. It's like once a week, you've got a group of people who know each other well, and they're sitting around, they're talking to each other about how God has interacted with them that week. And it took me some time to realize that there were, I don't think that people in the room knew how differently other people in the room used that word and how hard it was for many people in the room to give a definition to that word. And I think that, you know, I do think.

that the world is a pretty complicated place. So I don't, you know, myself, I don't have a vivid belief in the presence of the supernatural. But I do think that the world's pretty complicated. So there are a lot, you know, there are gravitational waves. Who knew about that? I mean, what else is going on up there? So there, I have friends who, who who are pretty committed to another parallel universe, which is full of goodness and joy and justice and equality. I have friends who are committed to the view that, you know, there's no God, but the mind is extended, that we are limited in understanding the extension, the way in which the mind is extended. And I have friends who think that all that is hogwash.

And I just don't see my job as trying to settle the argument. I do think that I can say something about the human side of the way that a community will work together to help a God come to be real for people. And social science tells us a lot about the useful dimensions of that God. History tells us a lot about the unuseful dimensions about that God, right? So terrible things have been done in the name of religion. But we also know

that on average, you know, people who go to a religious event once a week have healthier bodies. They probably live longer. Exercise also makes you live longer. There's something about this, you know, this social presence or this common presence or we don't really understand what it is but there's clearly something that powerfully

changes people's sense of who they are that is probably good for their bodies i mean that's one of the reasons why this the whole business of religion is such so enduring and also such an enduring puzzle for thoughtful people who try to understand what's going on because You know, on the face of it, like, just take the Hebrew Bible, you know, talking snakes, you know, a guy who is supposedly all loving, who kicks his humans out of the garden. It's like the story of the way God treats his human worshippers. It's not always an edifying story. So how do we make sense? So the fact that people seem to engage with this, they engage with it resiliently, it seems to be

good for their bodies, it does some positive things for their societies. How do we understand this? It's not just the walk to the church every week, you think, that makes church goes, have a healthier body, perhaps? You think there's something about actually just getting together in a room with people who will believe a similar spiritual thing has some kind of knock-on effect that causes them to do other things that make them healthier? Or is there something about that experience that just makes people healthier? I think is a really good question. So you could have the hypothesis that

it's the orange juice at church. You drink more orange juice. You could say, and it's the walk to the church. You could say it's the presence of other people in your life. But there is some suggestion that it might also be another, you know, people, again, multiple causes, people are complicated, you know, people who are able to make God real for them, if they're lucky, you know, have another social relationship that's, and that the brain behaves as if it's a social relationship at any rate, I mean, if you show, put people into fMRI machines and into magnets, and the brain had them talk out loud to God and people's brains behaved as if it was a social relationship.

So it probably makes people less lonely, probably makes them a richer sense of purpose. One of the things that is so powerful about, you know, Rick Warren wrote a book called a purpose-driven life and which basically is a very widely read book teaches people how to you read the Bible, you take it seriously, you have a richer sense of purpose.

So God wants you to be doing what you're doing. That probably plays a role. There are a lot of things we don't yet understand, but something is making a difference. Yeah, there's something called the the widowhood effect which is the increase in the probability of a person dying in according to Wikipedia a relatively short period after a long-term spouse has died that is if somebody's husband dies they're more likely to die sooner just on account of that there seems to

be something about what can only be described as a mental effect that is the effect of the effect of losing a loved one, doesn't seem to ostensibly have any effect on your physical body, but it does actually affect your physical health. And I think there's a lot more research that needs to be done into that kind of thing, especially in the debate about whether religion is a force for good in the world, as it were. Yeah. And the other effect of widowhood is that people have sensory experiences of their spouses, much as the way that, you know, the disciples seem to have experienced Christ after his death. Yeah.

But I also find utterly fascinating. Well, you talk yourself in the book about some experiences of your own. You talk about what seems to be described as essentially a spiritual experience that you had on a train once, as well as a more lucid physical experience of seeing the sort of physical appearance of some druids outside of your window, I think. Could you run us through those and tell us how you interpret? interpreted them? So this was, these are the experiences that really became for me the rabbit that I've been running after for all these decades. So I was a young anthropologist. I was spending, I had chosen to do this fieldwork in London with middle class people who practice magic. And I was really interested in, um, in belief. How is it possible for apparently rational people to believe in apparently irrational beliefs? And so these are people who have a of ideas about power or force in the world and you can use your mind to manipulate it and

directed in particular ways and they usually are also really involved with what you would call the worship of the great goddess understood through you know through different guises and different world views and they so they'd worship the great goddess as caridwin or as Demeter or as Isis or in some form. And then the great goddess has a consort and they have a lot of ideas about how you can use your mind and use these ideas to change the world. So I was interested in ideas. People have this idea that magic worked. I was pretty persuaded that magic didn't work.

At least you could, you would not have the, experience of magic working on a frequent basis. And so I started, so I decided to hang out with these groups and try to understand how to make sense of this puzzle. And one of the things that I learned early on is that people said, if you want to understand this, you've got to do the practices. Some people are going to be better at these practices than others. And if you do the practices, you'll change, and you'll feel the magic. And that was true. I mean, I did the practices, and I felt magical power running through my body. One of the first experience of this was actually early on, I was going off to meet this, this mage, this very important guy.

an adept in that world. And I was reading a book called The Experience of Inner Worlds, which he'd written, a guy called Gareth Knight. And he was, the argument of the book was that the inner world is not just immaterial and ephemeral that's deeper and more powerful and whatever. Anyways, I was in Cambridge, I got on a bike, I rode to the train station, locked the bike up and I took off the bike lights

which at the time you would take off your bike lights because if you didn't somebody would steal them and there was these big battery powered bike lights and I put them in my bag. I think that's still very much the case in London. Oh, is that true? So I took up my bed and there were pretty substantial batteries

you know, a fist-sized batteries well you could hold them in your fist and I got on to the train and I was reading this book and I was really trying to wrap my mind about how he was talking about and I was really focusing and I began to feel really good. I began to feel like there was this electrical current going through me and I felt completely alert and awake. I felt fantastic and as if all of my senses were on fire and the thing I never could understand

is that there was a little bit of smoke coming out of my bag and I opened it up and one of the batteries was melting the battery was actually melting so I never quite understood that but I had that experience and I would go to these events, and not all the time,

but sometimes I would really feel magic running through the group. I would feel it in my body, this kind of sense of the force. I woke, I was reading this book on written by somebody involved in this world called The Miss of Avalon about druids. And I woke up one morning, and I saw six dreams, would standing by the window. So it turns out that's not so uncommon to have a hypnipompic experience or you have a sensory experience that sort of continues the dream that you've been having, but you've experienced it as a ridicule in the world. But I was really taken that I had the

experience. That was the first time that it ever happened so vividly to me. And people talked about those kinds of experiences. They talked about magic shooting through their body. they talked about seeing things that other people wouldn't see or hearing things that other people wouldn't hear. And so one of the things I've become quite fascinated by is these vivid experiences. And they're really important because their first person evidence for somebody that spirit is there. That's something supernatural is real. And you can explain it non-supernaturally, but it's usually if somebody is prepared to have this experience, it can be quite powerful for them.

And, you know, we've been able to show that the more, that it's true, that there's some people who are more likely to have these experiences than other people. And if you practice, you're more likely to have these experiences. And there's, you know, there's a pattern. There's a story to tell about, you know, these experiences. and we know that for some people they just are really powerful. And some of these experiences really are amazingly powerful.

I mean, so I've never had what William James called a mystical experience. But I've talked to people who have had these moments. And these are moments where my experience, somebody's having a contradictory thought. Somebody once said to me, well, you know, I wondered whether, you know, I looked up the stars and I wondered whether these were just molecules in some giant's body. And inside each of my, the molecules in my body, there are many universes. Kind of a weird, contradictory thought. And he took a step. And all of a sudden, he felt suspended in space and time, more himself than he ever had.

been. He felt with absolute conviction that he, whatever he was, was immortal. Experience lasted at maybe 90 seconds. And, you know, in his experience, this confirmed to him the goodness of the world, the immortality of the world, the value of his faith practice, that he was really involved in something that mattered. So, yeah, these experiences can be pretty powerful. Why are some people more susceptible to having religious experiences? Do we have an idea of the kind of person that's more likely to be religious? Well, those are two different questions. So there are, in some blunt sense, there are two pieces of religion. There's dogma and there's experience. So in my work, I find that people who are more likely to have

experiences are people who are more likely to get absorbed in their experience. So they're the people who have vivid inner worlds. They love those inner worlds. They like to go for walking to they like to walk in the forest. They like to get absorbed in nature. They like watching, you know, plays and movies and they feel like it's more, you know, it feels like it's kind of real when it's happening. There are probably two dimensions of that proclivity. One is that they are more likely to have or to value vivid experiences. And the other is that they are more able or more willing to do something like suspend disbelief or accept the, to take the idea seriously that this play might actually be a little bit more than a play.

And to the other question, I mean, you said there's sort of two questions there. The other question being about the kind of person that's going to be more religious, rather than just having a religious experience, the kind of person that's more likely to profess religious belief Do we know much about that? So that I know less about, or I feel that we know less about it. And I think that my gut would be that that has a little bit more to do with the social community. So if you are in a social community that is committed, you know, what it means to be a good member of the community is that you go to this religious gathering, you profess certain beliefs, you're more likely to do that. And there is, my dim memory is that the people who are more likely to do that are a little bit more likely to be responsive to external authority.

We also know that women secularize more slowly than men. So is that because they feel the need they're drawn to the community of church? Is that because they're more responsive to the authority? of the pastor, it's, it's not clear. Interesting. What do you think explains the fact that people who are more likely to be absorbed into, you know, music or films? I think, you know, in the various sort of tests for this kind of thing, like this absorption test that you reference in the book, I forget who it was that created that test. Okay, Telegan. That's right. It's co-author Atkinson, I think it's Richard Atkinson. And they're trying to,

to find out the, I don't know what the word would be, like how susceptible to absorption a person is. And they ask things like, do you find that when you read a novel or watch a film, that when it's over, you feel slightly unfamiliar with the real world for a little bit, this kind of thing. And they're trying to get an idea of who's more absorbed into that world.

Why do you think, I mean, I can kind of understand why that would make somebody more maybe interested in religious narratives and this kind of thing, because it's another world to lose yourself in. But what do you think explains the fact that these people are actually more likely to have experiences, spiritual experiences of something, you know,

beyond the natural? That is a very deep question. So, I mean, so it's a religion. I mean, I'm still trying to fret about this. So to be a person of faith, you have to commit to this faith frame. You've got to be able to commit to another reality, another frame, you know,

with the presence of something, not materially present. But why do people with high absorption, why do they have these unusual sensory experiences? Well, I think that it may be, I'm not quite sure. I think that they are a little bit more likely to treat thought, as being more substantial maybe, as being more external to them, as being more worthy of attention.

I don't quite know. I think there are two answers to that question. One of them is what is going on when somebody has a spiritual experience? We have no idea. I mean, I say this, knowing that people have had much to say about this, but it's not clear whether people are paying attention in a different way or whether they allow their attention shape something about the way that their body behaves. So if you look, for example, just hearing a voice. So what is that? People have an experience that something has spoken to them. Someone has spoken to them and it didn't come from them didn't come from inside their mind um so is that because they use so we think so this is one argument called reality monitoring that when you

examine that you're constantly examining your your thoughts and that if your thoughts are more vivid, then you're more likely to judge your thought as coming from the outside as being a memory of something that happened rather than an effortful thing that you had to do. You had to think about that. You had to write that paper. You had to make a plan for the day. So if somebody has a more vivid internal world, maybe they make those, maybe they monitor their reality a little differently, occasionally. And they take a thought as having come from the outside. And then because they expected to come from the outside, they actually have a sensory experience. That's one kind of explanation. Another kind of explanation would be, well, that they, there's something that

When they get very absorbed, maybe there's this opportunity that there's, this minus, that we feel that our thoughts are there, are ours. Maybe when we get very caught up in our imaginations, that sense of mindness changes. So we know when people, when you have a vivid daydream, the sense of minus begins to change. right so you get um really absorbed you get so this is something that you you all all your listeners know you get really caught up in a daydream and it doesn't feel like you're generating the daydream it feels like the daydream is generating itself so absorption predicts to use that language whether somebody can have a vivid daydream so maybe the daydream so maybe the daydream is just, you know, one step along this continuum.

I don't know. It's, it's, I still, I'm fretting about this. But the relationship's pretty robust. Yeah. So we know that the relationship exists, but precisely why that's the case remains an open question for further future investigation. Yeah. Well, T.M. Lerman.

The book is How God Becomes Real. As I say, I'll make sure, that that's linked down below along with other places that people can find you. Thank you so much for taking the time and thanks for coming on the podcast. Well, thanks for having me. Good luck.