According to the Japan Times, some folks in Japan are claiming that a species of mushroom can provide people with the most significant spritual experiences of their lives.
This might sound frivolous, or even insulting, compared to the experience of losing a parent or feeling the presence of god, but in a report published this week on the effects of magic mushrooms, more than 60 percent of people taking the hallucinogenic drug said the resulting "trip" met the criteria for a "full mystical experience" as measured by established psychological scales.
It's not insulting to anything except my intelligence. Just because it provides people with the same sensations as a "full mystical experience" doesn't mean that's what people actually have when they take the drug. If there was a drug that made a person feel like they were on Man of Steel Roller Coaster at Six Flags, that would not mean the person by taking the drug would actually be on the roller coaster. Nor would it mean that--since the effect can be generated in the brain without the person actually being on the roller coaster--the whole exercise of riding a roller coaster is pointless, or that the roller coaster doesn't exist but is merely a figment of the imaginative center of the person's brain.
The article features Roland Griffiths, pscyhopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins who was involved with the study.
Thought, emotion, and ultimately behavior, are grounded in biology, Griffiths said. "We're just measuring what can be observed. We're not entering into 'Does God exist or not exist.' This work can't and won't go there."
But assuming that "thought, emotion, and ultimately behavior are grounded in biology" already has implications as to whether God exists and his place in the order of things. That's the agenda behind stories like this. The scientists may very well believe they only want to measure "what can be observed." But the ultimate implication is that everything is observable and everything can be manipulated at the biological level. Sinners can be turned into saints, and saints into sinners, with a pill.
Course, this pill doesn't claim to do that. It just claims to give people "mystical experiences." That's actually what Griffith says at the end of the piece.
"Far from being threatened, the only thing we can imagine being of greater interest to religions is whether people live more wholesome, compassionate and equanimous lives in consequence of such experiences."
Of course he hopes it would and thinks religious communities ought to hope it would as well. But that would only further his own assumptions: that thought and emotion and behavior are grounded in observable biology, and therefore can be manipulated just as a science bereft of ethics is seeking to manipulate biology today. Right behavior is not a matter of chemicals. It is a matter of grace. And grace is one of those very inconvenient "nonobservables" in the field of science, which means it cannot be manufactured pharmaceutically.
This is not to say that science and pharmacology have nothing to offer in the way of treating behavioral disorders. But the fact of the matter is that we are largely living in a pop-a-pill society where many people are completely dependent on tablets to accoplish their goals. One of the few realms left where such quick-fixes are not possible is the realm of spirituality and religion. The last thing we need is more pills to apparently (but not actually) accomplish what only Providence can.
But to answer the question posed in the headline, yes. Mushrooms can bring one closer to God, but only in the same sense that any of God's creations can do so. In the same way as dogs or cats, or birds or trees, or horses and mountains. But if one fixates on any of these as if it is the way to commune with God, then it ceases to be an ally in the quest for God and becomes an obstacle. If these mushrooms become understood by the psychopharmacological field as the way to commune with the divine, they may find that just the opposite has happened.
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