One of the phenomena that opponents of religion have to explain is religious experience. If God does not exist, then why do so many people claim to have experienced him directly?

One possible explanation of widespread religious experience is the existence of a “God-Spot” in the brain. There is a theory that just as there is a particular part of the brain responsible for pain, and a particular part of the brain responsible for emotion, so there is a particular part of the brain responsible for experiences of God. According to this theory, our brains are so constituted that they can cause religious experiences whether there’s a god out there or not.

If this is correct, then people having experiences of God doesn’t prove that he exists; an alternative, naturalistic explanation of religious experience can be given.

Scientists from the University of Montreal have claimed to have disproved this theory. They took a group of nuns, and asked them to describe their mystical experiences. As the nuns did this, their brains were monitored to see if there was a peak in activity in any particular part of it. There wasn’t. The scientists concluded that there is no God-spot in the brain.

If this account of the experiment, which is based on that given by BBC News, is accurate, then the scientists have made a fairly basic error. The observational data that they collected simply does not support the inference that they are reported to have drawn.

If we wanted to locate the pain-centres in the brain, we would not measure the brain-activity of someone remembering a time when they were in pain, or describing what pain feels like. We would measure the brain-activity of someone who we were jabbing on the hand with a pin (or something similar), someone who was actually experiencing pain.

Similarly, to find out whether a particular part of the brain is associated with religious experiences, one would have to measure the brain-activity of someone having a religious experience. Measuring the brain-activity of someone describing a religious experience is not the same thing.

If we take the BBC News report at face value, this seems to be a case of misrepresenting the data. Perhaps there is more to the study than made it into the report. Perhaps the scientists’ findings have been misrepresented, or they have offered some explanation of why brain-activity in someone describing a religious experience is a good guide to brain-activity in someone having a religious experience. I hope so.

As it has been reported, though, there is a massive gap between the research and the inference drawn. The evidence given in the BBC article simply doesn’t support the conclusion that it is supposed to.