Make It Start, Make It Stop!

Hosted by Center for the Study of Religion and Psychology at Boston University's Danielsen Institute

Wesley J. Wildman, a School of Theology associate professor of theology and ethics, explores future developments in our understanding of religious and spiritual experiences in Make It Start, Make It Stop! the sixth lecture in a six-part series Religious Experiences: From the Mundane to the Anomalous. Breakthroughs in technology and neuroscience “free us from the delusion that those experiences somehow lie beyond human control and understanding,” Wildman says, opening up new ways to conceptualize and optimize the role of religion in our everyday lives.

In the past, he explains, humans relied on more primitive tools to experience spiritual transcendence, many of which are still in use today. Early tribes discovered the powerful hallucinogenic properties of certain plants, the hypnotic effect of rhythmic dancing, and their ability to induce altered states of consciousness through meditation. As we improve the technology to measure the effects of these methods — by studying plant chemistry or images of the brain in a meditative state, for instance — we gain an unprecedented degree of control over our religious and spiritual experiences, he says.

Wildman outlines a potential future based upon this growing knowledge. Naturalist worldviews will supplant supernatural faith as science strips away the mysteries of our religious experiences, he says. Yet our need for spiritual understanding and moral direction — and the powerful experiences that accompany them — will persist. In a future where religious experiences will be scientifically and psychologically customized to individual needs, religion will enrich our time in this life, rather than confirming the existence of the next. This, he concludes, is “a future that I will welcome with open arms.”

Part of a research project at the Danielsen Institute’s Center for the Study of Religion and Psychology, the lecture series is funded by a Templeton Foundation grant from the Metanexus Institute, which administers the Templeton Research Lectures.

April 14, 2008, 7:30 p.m.
Photonics Center

Video length is 01:24:39.

About the Speaker:
Wesley J. Wildman is an associate professor of theology and ethics at the Boston University School of Theology, where he directs the doctoral programs in Christian theology, in comparative theology, and in science, philosophy, and religion. Wildman has a bachelor’s in mathematics from Flinders University and a graduate degree in divinity from the University of Sydney, both in Australia. He earned a doctorate in philosophical and systematic theology and philosophy of religion from the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, California. He has published more than 60 articles and the book Fidelity with Plausibility: Modest Christologies in the Twentieth Century. Wildman is the coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, as well as a collection of debates on contemporary issues in religion and science. He has studied the nature and problems of religious experience for over a decade through his involvement with the Divine Action Project at Boston University, sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, and the Crosscultural Comparative Religious Ideas Project at BU. An ordained minister in the Uniting Church in Australia, Wildman has served churches in Sydney, Australia, and Piedmont, California.

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