Commentary on Hearing voices and other matters of mind: What mental abnormalities teach us about religions by Robert McCauley and George Graham

Abstract

As a recent survey of religious artifacts in the British Museum attests (MacGregor, 2018), religions exist in enormous varieties and have been ubiquitous globally and throughout history. This observation has led to the creation of the subdiscipline of psychology focused on religion which, although not as well-established as older subdisciplines such as social, cognitive and developmental psychology, is certainly thriving (Hood et al., 2009). Robert McCauley and George Graham’s book,Hearing voices and other matters of mind: What mental abnormalities teach us about religions, introduces a novel perspective to this field and delivers a thoughtful and stimulating exploration of the borderlines between psychopathology and religious experience and behavior. The authors approach this task within a framework which they describe as ‘ecumenical naturalism’, which stands on three claims. First, they accept the widespread assumption by researchers working on the cognitive science of religion (CSR), that many features of religion are by-products of the mental processes that underpin much of ordinary life. Second, they argue that many religious experiences share features with the experiences of people suffering from psychiatric disorders. Finally, they claim that findings from cognitive science will therefore be informative in understanding features of mental disorders that are also evident in religious experience. Importantly, although they claim that their approach is “free of presumptive ontological commitment or reference to anything supernatural” (p. 214), they say their aim is not to delegitimise or debunk religion, which they see as a natural feature of human life. They contrast this attitude to that taken by some notable previous contributors to what might be called the religion-psychopathology debate (they cite, in particular, Freud’s view that religion is a childish illusion). The core of the book is a series of chapters focusing on four types of mental illness: hearing voices, depression, obsessions and compulsions, and finally autism. In the chapter on hearing voices, they review the research literature showing that auditory-verbal hallucinations (one of the most common experiences reported by patients diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia) are the consequence of a failure of ‘source monitoring’, which leads to the misattribution of mental events, especially inner speech, to a source external or alien to the self. They then argue that “there is no categorical difference, at a subpersonal level, between the mental systems or cognitive dispositions involved in believing that God is speaking to you... . and the systems involved in believing that a secular agent is talking” (p. 75); religious belief simply provides a context in which the voice-hearer may interpret these experiences and thereby come to the conclusion that they are being addressed by God.