Sigmund Freud (credit: Wikipedia) 

Now, all of this evidence of science undermining religion may seem bad enough, but it gets worse. The third significant way in which science eroded religion came when science began to understand the workings of the human brain. Humans had long felt that many things in this world could not be explained in physical terms because they had long known that inside the privacy of their minds, they had dreams and feelings, and even outside in physical reality, they sometimes saw or did things, that by logic alone made no sense. Cruel or lustful thoughts and acts were bad enough, but at least they seemed somewhat predictable, given humans’ “sinful” nature. From long experience, we’ve come to know our instinctive human drives, so we can often accept intermittent thoughts of fornication, theft, violence, and even murder as natural. But people also have much weirder dreams and even see weird things when they’re wide awake that are, by the laws of physics and common sense, not possible.

   

                                                        The Nightmare (Fuseli) (credit: Wikipedia) 

Why do people have dreams and waking visions of angels or demons hovering in the air, or of talking cats on mountaintops bathed in orange light and standing on their hind feet? Night after night, many of us dream not just cruel or lustful dreams, but also many more that are simply absurd. Other people, wide awake, see angels, demons, and miracles. For centuries, if a person saw or did something that afterward he himself could not make sense of, the widely accepted explanation was that God (or Satan) had caused the event or had made him do the deed. Much of normal human experience, apparently, lies beyond science and even common sense.

When Freud came along, his big contribution to human knowledge was simply the proposition that all these perceptions come from inside the brain of the person having the dream or vision. Thus, visions and miracles can be easily explained. They come from stored-up memories that combine and recombine to form symbolic narratives that are driven by deep, unconscious needs—needs that the visionary isn’t aware of because they are buried so deeply she can’t consciously access them, no matter how she tries. Under stress, her brain transmits images into her optic nerves, which is the opposite of what usually happens. Thus, even wide awake, we can sometimes see what in physical reality is not there.

Most of our memories may not be recallable at will, but they are all in there. Unless a person has had some brain-destroying injury or disease, her brain holds all she has ever experienced, all the sense data that have ever been fed into it via sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. How they will affect her moment-by-moment flow of consciousness can’t be exactly predicted in advance, but the patterns in those “paranormal” experiences coincide too often and too closely with the subject’s personal issues for us to believe that those experiences are somehow independent of the mental states that preceded them. 

People have visions of angels when they have been reading about miraculous cures for the very troubles that they have been suffering under for the last year. They dream of tidal waves after watching a t.v. show about a recent big one in Japan. They see the ghosts of their dead fathers after days of feeling guilty for how they neglected him while he was alive – just before what would have been his 80th birthday. The sciences of the mind have shown us convincingly that we can literally see what we want/need to see.