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The New Frontier of Religion and Science
Also by John Hick and published by Palgrave Macmillan
BETWEEN FAITH AND DOUBT
EVIL AND THE GOD OF LOVE
DIALOGUES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE
ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
GOD AND THE UNIVERSE OF FAITHS
DEATH AND ETERNAL LIFE
GOD HAS MANY NAMES
FAITH AND THE PHILOSOPHERS (editor)
THE MANY-FACED ARGUMENT (editor with A. C. McGill)
PROBLEMS OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
AN INTERPRETATION OF RELIGION
THREE FAITHS – ONE GOD (editor with Edmund Meltzer)
GANDHI’S SIGNIFICANCE FOR TODAY (editor with Lamont C. Hempel)
The New Frontier of
Religion and Science
Religious Experience, Neuroscience and
the Transcendent

John Hick
© John Hick 2006, 2010
Foreword © Beverley Clack 2010
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified
as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2006
Reissued with new Preface and Foreword 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN 978-0-230-25280-6 ISBN 978-0-230-27760-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9780230277601
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hick, John.
The new frontier of religion and science : religious experience,
neuroscience, and the transcendent / John Hick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Psychology, Religious. 2. Religion and science. 3. Religion.
4. Religions. 5. Experience (Religion) 6. Neurosciences.
7. Transcendence (Philosophy) I. Title.
BL53.H53 2007
201 .65“dc22 2006051363
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
 For my grandchildren
Jonathan, Emily, Rhiannon,
Alexander, Ellie, and Phoebe
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Preface xi
Preface to the 2010 Reissue xiii
Foreword xvi

Part I
1 Religion as Human Institutions 3
Pre-axial religion 3
The axial age 4
The new axial insights 6
Religion as institution and religion as spirituality/mysticism 7
The institutional balance sheet 8
The ‘scientific’ study of religion 11

2 Spirituality and Mysticism 14

‘Spirituality’ and spirituality 14
Spirituality/mysticism 19
Unitive mysticism 21
3 What Is Religious Experience? 27
What do we mean by religious experience? 27
The kinds of religious experience 28
A transformed world 29
The sense of presence 31
Visions and auditions 33
Some rarer forms of religious experience 35
The relation between the inner and outer aspects of religion 36
4 ‘By Their Fruits You Will Know Them’ 39
From the sublime to the ridiculous 39
Within the monotheisms 41
Within Buddhism 43
Individual and social fruits 45

vii
viii Contents

Part II
5 The Neurosciences’ Challenge to Religious
Experience 55
The contemporary naturalistic world-view 55
Religious materialism? 57
Brain to consciousness causality 58
God and the limbic system 62
Meditation and the brain 63

6 Caveats and Questions 67

Religious experience as mental aberration 67
Religious experience and epilepsy 70
Meditation and the brain 75
Drugs and religious experience 76
Pure consciousness 78

7 Mind/Brain Identity? 81
Identifying the questions 82
The correlation = identity fallacy 82
Begging the question 83
The identity theory 85
The mystery of consciousness 89
8 Current Naturalistic Theories 92
Epiphenomenalism 92
The Libet experiments 92
Consciousness as a social product 94
Consciousness and evolution 97
Consciousness as an emergent property 99
Biological naturalism 103

9 The Alternative Possibility 106

The plasticity of the brain 106
Brain plasticity observed in Buddhist
meditation 108
10 Free Will? 112
Compatibilist and non-compatibilist
freedom 112
Experimental evidence 115
Quantum indeterminacy 118
The problem of self-reference 119
 Contents ix

Part III
11 The Epistemological Problem 127
Our epistemic situation 127
The principle of critical trust 129
Critical trust and religious experience 130
Differences and contradictions 133
12 The Epistemological Solution 137
Experiencing as interpreting 137
Levels of meaning 140
Cognitive freedom 142
13 Any Particular Religion? 146
Which religion? 146
Salvation 149
Responses to religious diversity 150
14 Responses to Religious Diversity 154
Multiple aspect pluralism 154
Polycentric pluralism 156
15 A Philosophy of Religious Pluralism 162
The Transcendent 162
The premises 162
The basic distinction 163
The Transcendent as beyond human description 164
The problem 166
The solution 167
16 Pluralism and the Religions 172
The problem 172
But is pluralism compatible with existing religious
practice? 175
The existing religions 176
17 Spirituality for Today 181
Cosmic optimism 181
Inspiration from the saints 182
Prayer 184
Meditation 186
18 After Death? 191
The origin of after-life beliefs 191
Heaven and hell in the Christian tradition 192
x Contents

Reincarnation 194
Where? 197
Many lives in many worlds 197
Concluding Summary 201
Religion as institutions and as spirituality 201
The primacy of religious experience 202
Religion and neuroscience 204
Epistemology and religious experience 205

Notes 207
Reference Bibliography 214
Index 225
Preface

The science/religion debate is active on several fronts. There is the

strident argument, particularly in the USA, of Creationism or Intelligent
Design versus Evolution – a debate which should have finished over a
century ago! A more substantial current issue is whether the big bang of
some thirteen billion years ago itself required a creator, and if so whether
this must be the God of religion or might be an impersonal creative
force. This connects with the claim that the universe’s initial ‘fine-
tuned’ state was so improbable as to require purposeful divine action
to have brought about the stars, planets and life as we know it. This is
countered by the multiverse theory, advocated today by a number of
scientists, which reduces that improbability to near zero by seeing our
universe as one of perhaps billions of universes, among which it is not
at all improbable that there should be one, or indeed a number, that
happen to have produced intelligent life. But the entire creation debate,
although widely pursued, now seems to be repeating itself without any
substantial progress.
Behind these issues, religion’s fundamental debate is with materialism,
or physicalism, which is incompatible with the existence of any ultimate
transcendent reality such as the religions point to in their different
ways. And today the frontier of this debate is in the human brain. The
inescapable new question is whether the advance of the neurosciences
have shown mind to be at most a mysterious temporary by-product of
the functioning of the brain. If so, religious experience is not, in any of
its forms, an authentic awareness of a reality transcending the material
universe – for according to materialism there can be no such reality – but
merely a reflection of physical events in the brain within the seamless
causal continuity of the natural world.
The issue is vital because, as I shall try to show, the living heart
of religion is to be found in religious experience, rather than in the
religious institutions, with their creeds and hierarchical priesthoods. The
latter are an inevitable development, but they have brought with them
significant dangers as well as benefits. Religious experience also has its
dangers, and criteria of authenticity are essential. But, given all this, the
challenge of the modern neurosciences is to religious experience.

xi
xii Preface

In discussing this, any unavoidable technical terms are explained, and

the book throughout is intended to be fully accessible to the interested
general reader. (When words in ancient languages are used in brackets
after their English equivalent, I have omitted the diacritical marks – thus
. a is printed as nirvana).
nirvãn
I am grateful to numerous specialists in the neurosciences who have
responded to requests for help. But above all I want to thank Dr Timothy
Musgrove in Silicon Valley, California, whose philosophical training
combined with expertise in the field of cognitive science have saved me
from a number of errors. He has also provided new information and
pointed out new arguments that have greatly strengthened several of
the neuroscience chapters. I am much indebted to him.

John Hick
Preface to the 2010 Reissue

All three aspects of the subjects discussed in this book – religious exper-
ience, neuroscience, and religious pluralism – continue today to be
debated, as they have been for many years.
The empirical study of religious experience has now been expanded
from Europe and North America to the Far East, with a programme of
ground-level research in China. And those doing this research would
like in the future to extend it much further, into Russia, South America,
Turkey, and other countries. But it is also necessary to revise the earlier
results of research which showed that about one third of people in
Britain and the United States report some form of ‘peak’ experience. For
these results came mainly from responses to newspaper advertisements.
But we have to remember that not everyone reads a newspaper, and
of those who do, not everyone looks at the advertisements, and again
of those who do, not everyone who has had a remarkable spiritual
experience wants to talk about it. So probably a much larger proportion
than a third of people do in fact sometimes experience exceptional and
uplifting states of mind. All the questions that this raises remain, but
they become more pressing and of wider significance.
In particular, the question whether it is rational to trust such exper-
iences becomes more urgent. Should we dismiss them as aberrations
of no significance, like momentarily mistaking a leaf on the tree for a
bird sitting there, or should we accept them as what they seem to be,
occasional fortunate glimpses of a reality beyond the physical? This is
the question discussed in Chapters 11 and 12. I still maintain that the
principle by which we live all the time is to accept what appears to be
so, as being indeed so, unless we have some positive reason to doubt it.
This is the principle of critical trust which is implicit in all our dealings
with our environment. I hold that this principle implies impartially to
all our experiences, not only sensory but equally religious. They both
face the same test: do we have some positive reason to distrust them?
The discussion now focuses on the differences between sensory and
religious experience. These are principally that sense experience is
compulsory, religious experience not; sense experience is universal,
religious experience not; and sense experience is uniform around the

xiii
xiv Preface to the 2010 Reissue

world, religious experience not. It is these that I examine at length in

Chapter 11, concluding that these differences are appropriately related
to differences in the objects of the experience. In the end, the only
reason we have for distrusting religious experience, when winnowed
by our wider experience, is the naturalistic assumption of our culture.
And this is only an assumption, peculiar to our modern industrialised
societies.
Part of this discussion, the non-uniformity of religious experience
within different cultures and religions, raises the whole disputed ques-
tion of the relation between the religions, with their different and often
incompatible sets of beliefs. Here I suggest the pluralistic hypothesis
that I have developed and defended at length in An Interpretation of
Religion (1989, 2nd edn 2004) and elsewhere. This starts from the observ-
able fact that although the belief-systems of the religions are often very
different, and indeed mutually contradictory, the moral and spiritual
quality of the lives within them is, so far as we can tell, more or less
equal. How can we account for this? Not by the traditional belief of
each religion – affirmed more strongly in some than in others, and more
strongly in some periods than in others – that it alone is the one true
faith, uniquely superior to all the others. This does not account for the
facts on the ground. We have instead, I suggest, to postulate an ultimate
transcendent Reality, whose nature is beyond understanding in human
terms (transcategorial), and which is being humanly apprehended and
responded to within different cultural contexts as the various world
religions. This suggestion, in so far as it is accepted, requires develop-
ment within each tradition in gradually filtering out those doctrines
that entail its claim to unique superiority. But it has the advantage of
being true to the observable facts of human life.
The other main challenge to the cognitive character of religious exper-
ience comes from modern neuroscience. Most neuroscientists (like most
other scientists) share the naturalistic assumption of our culture. They
are therefore materialists, believing that nothing exists but matter –
including of course the matter constituting human brains. Materialism
is implicit in our Western, and beyond, cultural assumption, and is
explicit among scientists. It follows from this that there is not, because
there cannot be, any supranatural environment enclosing and interpen-
etrating our natural environment, with religious experience as a rare
glimpse of it. Such experiences must therefore be explained in purely
material terms, as some kind of neural malfunction. In Part II of this
book the arguments for and against these explanations are examined in
some detail, but are too complex to be adequately summarised here.
 Preface to the 2010 Reissue xv

I hope I have shown that the neurological case against religious exper-
ience is not proven. What is proved is that for everything going on
in consciousness something is correspondingly going on in the brain.
There is a complete consciousness–brain correlation. But I point out
that correlation is not identity. Indeed, the identity thesis faces formid-
able problems. We may be conscious of a complex scene around us,
involving colours, sounds and smells, and bodily pressure or discom-
fort or pain. But no part of the brain has any of these qualities. The
corresponding electro-chemical brain states may cause the conscious
state; they may be indispensable to it; but are they actually identical
with it? Surely not. Indeed the leading neuroscientists today admit that
the nature of consciousness remains a sheer mystery. I have quoted
V.S. Ramachandran of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the Univer-
sity of California at San Diago (himself a materialist) as saying, ‘despite
two hundred years of research, the most basic questions about the
human mind    remain unanswered, as does the really big question:
What is consciousness?’ (Phantoms in the Brain, 1998, p. 14). The C word
is the great elephant in the materialist’s room!
So all the issues discussed in this book remain current and alive.
I hope that this reissue may help to stimulate thinking and continued
discussion.

January 2010 John Hick

Foreword

It is a great honour to be asked to write the foreword for this new issue
of The New Frontier. John Hick is undoubtedly the most important of the
philosophers of religion of the last 30 years. His work is always scholarly,
yet always accessible, and this is particularly the case in this book which
engages with a range of complex theory drawn from neuroscience. His
engagement is, as ever, subtle and complex, drawing upon his know-
ledge of the many different world religious traditions and faiths, the
practices of philosophy and the theories of neuroscientists.
Hick’s approach to the philosophical discussion of religion has always
emphasised the role that religion can play in constructing a meaningful
human life, and there is a humane quality to his writing that makes
engaging with the ideas that he presents more than simply an academic
exercise. He encourages his reader to contemplate the depths of human
experience, and as such his work is defined by a genuine commitment
to the lived-experience of belief, not just with how religious beliefs and
practices might best be presented to a philosophically minded audience.
This makes his work of importance for all who seek to understand what
it is to be a human being. Most importantly, his answer to this question
involves the development of a contemporary spirituality that speaks not
just to academics, but to a much wider readership, hungry for religious
nourishment.
When this book appeared in 2006 it was significant for emphas-
ising an important dimension in the science and religion debate. The
debate is no longer simply about the tensions between these two areas
as they seek to represent and understand the external world. Contrary
to some popular critics of religion, the current shape of this debate is
not primarily the dispute between evolutionists and creationists. Many
theological positions, including Process thought, have long argued that
belief in God is not necessarily a bar to accepting the scientific world-
view expressed in evolutionary biology. The debate has now taken a
rather different turn that in many ways relates to the concern with the
subjective that dominates much public discourse in Western societies. If
social policy has moved from an emphasis on how to create the external
conditions for economic equality to a concern with how to ensure the

xvi
 Foreword xvii

emotional well-being of its citizens, a similar turn to the inner realm of

the individual can be discerned in the science and religion debate. Now
an important aspect of the discussion revolves around the attempt to
understand the nature of human consciousness: can consciousness be
reduced to the processes of the brain, or is there room for what philo-
sophers have traditionally called ‘the mind’, something that transcends
the physical brain and which cannot be reduced to it?
Some philosophers – myself included – might be tempted to shift the
debate in a different direction, arguing that religion and science are
speaking different languages and that religion cannot be understood
apart from recognising its kinship with art and poetry. Religion is, like
art and other forms of creativity, part of the human attempt to make
meaning, to construct narratives about our lives that speak to our hearts
and that enable us to locate ourselves in a world which often seems at
odds with our hopes and desires. If science seeks to describe the world,
religion seeks ways of understanding our place in it. For the religious,
this involves thinking seriously about the way in which we orientate
ourselves in the world, and, particularly, how our fallible human rela-
tionships might be transformed.
This kind of approach, which focuses on the emotional, non-
cognitive, aspects of religion, is not without its problems, and, as always,
reading Hick’s work confronts me with the failings and pitfalls of such
ideas. A method which seeks to distance religion from science can fail
to acknowledge the impact of the ‘scientism’ that denotes the attitude
of some contemporary scientists. In scientism, the sphere of science
is extended so that it becomes a method for explaining absolutely
everything: often to the detriment of a deeper understanding of the
mystery and beauty of human life and experience. Hick addresses the
problems of such an overreaching methodology head-on. His careful
analysis of the findings of neuroscience leads him to challenge the
attempt to make any straightforward identification between the brain
and the mind. Something is lost if this identification is accepted
unthinkingly. But what could have become a rather dry defence of
the difference between human consciousness and the physical brain
becomes, in Hick’s hands, something altogether more significant. His
concern is with the effect that reducing the mind to the brain has for
the interpretation of religious experience. If religious experience can be
reduced to (apparently delusional) processes in the brain, it cannot be
understood as something cognitive, as an experience that tells us some-
thing about the nature of the universe and the reality of the divine.
Hick’s defence of religious experience as an authentic phenomenon
xviii Foreword

reveals the limitations and unproven assumptions of much neuro-

science, but it does more than that as Hick uses this discussion to
open up important questions about what a meaningful contemporary
spirituality might look like.
In developing the form a contemporary spirituality might take, Hick
challenges both scientific and religious fundamentalisms. If he exposes
the failings of scientism, this does not mean that he will countenance
the oppressive forms that religion can take. He is particularly damning
of Christian literalism which he dismisses as ‘theologically crude’. There
can be no return to an exclusivist model of religion. Instead, he considers
the benefit of thinking about religion not in its institutional forms
but as the inner spiritual response to what he calls ‘the Transcendent’.
Emphasising this aspect of religion is to be welcomed, for it leads us away
from debates about the failings of religious institutions and their power
structures to something altogether more humane and personal. Hick’s
concern is not with establishing the differences between the world’s
religious traditions, with a view to determining which offers ‘the best
path’ to the Transcendent, but with considering where their similarities
might lie and how these might best be built upon. Emphasising the
spiritual realm enables creative connections to be found and used in
developing a pluralistic vision of the religions.
Hick’s approach relies upon seeing each of the religions as concerned
with providing responses to the stresses of finitude, including suffering
and death. Each, he argues, offers the real possibility of ‘a limitlessly
better existence’. Each, in this sense, is concerned with providing a path
to salvation. Identifying a common concern does not mean, however,
that he ignores difference or indeed that he does not address the
complexity of any one faith tradition. Different spiritual approaches
are to be found between adherents of any one religion. Identifying the
different paths possible within world faiths means that the religions
are not treated as amorphous masses whose key practices and claims
could be reduced to ‘all Christians think this’ or ‘all Muslims think that’.
Instead, Hick seeks to identify the benefits of accepting a pluralistic
perspective where a range of different insights into the divine can be
explored and used in the construction of a contemporary spirituality.
The insights of the mystics from a range of traditions become partic-
ularly important for this endeavour, for they challenge the dogma of
established religion and provide frameworks for the kind of spiritual
thought and practice that Hick wishes to advocate.
In developing this contemporary spirituality a number of themes
stand out. Principally, Hick does not reduce religion to a form of moral
 Foreword xix

practice. He may consider the way modern sainthood involves political

commitment and liberating action, but this is not sufficient to make a
complete identification between religion and morality. Why? Because,
he argues, religion is concerned with exploring ‘a further dimension of
meaning’. The importance of the religious perspective cannot be reduced
to the structures of the moral life. The religious perspective adds some-
thing that cannot be reduced to morality. This claim suggests something
important about the way a religious perspective provides a framework
for thinking about the nature of the world. What does it mean to be
alive in a world like this? What kind of stories might enable us to make
sense of this world and our place in it? There is a richness in the religious
perspective, when it is articulated through the spiritual dimension, that
allows for the deepening of our experiences and our relationships with
others.
To think in these terms is to emphasise the practical aspect of the posi-
tion that Hick is expounding. Rather than leave his reader to decide how
the ideas of this book might structure a contemporary spirituality he
suggests specific areas for our attention. This includes ‘cosmic optimism’;
the sense that it is possible to find a way of living in this world that,
while taking seriously the reality of suffering, acknowledges the possib-
ility of finding ‘a new orientation centred on the Transcendent’. The
universe is such that the good life is possible. Prayer and meditation have
a particular role to play in cultivating the mindset which will support
this orientation, and practices from a range of religious traditions and
perspectives are offered to support this development. What is particu-
larly appealing here is that Hick is prepared to offer his own spiritual
practice and his reflections upon it in order that the reader might have
an insight into what such practice involves. The spiritual dimension
that emerges is grounded in the cultivation of mindfulness, where the
self is located in the world and is open to that world.
This profound book confronts views of human being which would
reduce it to rather mechanistic and superficial processes. Religion, under-
stood through the spiritual dimension, becomes something which can
support an altogether richer understanding of the meaningful human
life. This book will stand many readings, for it challenges its readers to
think seriously about the role that religion might play in the future.
Hick’s vision is of a religion that does not constrain human possibility
but which deepens our engagement with life in this world. He reminds
us of how precious a thing it is to be able to reflect, as conscious beings,
upon our lives, our relationships, and our place in the cosmos. For
an age which can at times seem only interested in the trivial and the
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