Lesson video

Isn't it strange how the first three years of your life are the most important to your brain development.

The time when you actually do most learning in your entire life, and yet you yourself can't actually remember it.

This is a question which psychologists attempt to answer.

In fact, they attempt to answer anything to do with the human mind and behaviour.

It's not surprising then that Psychologists attempt to explain religious belief.

In this lesson, we'll be delving into the psychological explanations that belief incurred.

My name is Mrs. Cooper.

And when you are ready, make sure that you've got a pen and paper and a different colour pen to make alterations.

If you're not using your mobile phone to watch this lesson, then, please turn it off and find a comfortable space to continue with your work.

In this lesson, we will identify reasons why people believe in God, we'll explain some religious experience in more detail, using some examples.

And we are going to analyse the question of why people believe in God, applying some psychology.

You will need two different coloured pens or pencils and some paper, and an inquiring mind.

So, why do people believe in God? This is a question I've always asked myself.

It's all very well to say that science explains that God doesn't exist.

And if you've watched some of my previous videos, you'll realise that actually science doesn't necessarily prove that God doesn't exist.

But what always fascinates me is the amount of religious people all around the world.

In 2020, an Institute called ''Pure Research'' found that over 80% of the world's population are still religious.

31.

4% are Christian, 23.

2% are Muslim, 15.

4% are Hindu, 7.

1% are Buddhists, 6.

9% are from other religions.

Now that leaves 14.

1% who have no religion.

So there are a number of people that choose not to believe in God or don't wish to believe in God or haven't been brought up to believe in God.

But still a staggering over 80% of people do.

So then the next real question has to be Why? We're going to look into this in a little bit more detail.

When you are ready, please pause the video, and complete your task.

When you are finished, resume the video and we'll go through some potential answers.

Okay, so why do you think some people believe in God? So one of them will be because they may have experienced the paranormal.

And what I mean by that is, they believe they've experienced a ghost.

Or maybe they believe that some old happenings that happened in the house is somebody who's died, trying to message them from the dead.

Other reasons why people believe in God, maybe because it's in their family tradition.

Their family have always taken them to church every Sunday.

And therefore that upbringing, has made the person believe in God, believe in their religion.

Maybe because at some point they've read the Holy book.

This may also be part of their upbringing, but in reading that Holy book, it's contributed to their belief.

Maybe because they've attended a religious school, where lessons will be particular.

It may be that they've attended a religious school and therefore assemblies and lessons would have more religious instruction.

As I've mentioned already, it may be because the family is already religious and therefore they are brought up to be religious.

It may be because they've attended Sunday school.

Sunday school is a place where, certainly in Christianity, children will go on a Sunday morning, when their parents are attending church, and they will be taught stories about Jesus.

Other religious traditions, particularly in Britain, will also celebrate and have the extra classes for children, on different days.

Other people may have a slight belief in God because they celebrate festivals, so for example, in England, and many countries over the world, people celebrate Christmas.

Though they may not think about the reasons why, part of that leads them having a belief in God.

And the final reason, is because they may believe that they have experienced God in some way.

And this is what we're going to look at in greater detail now.

On the previous slide, we talked about the fact that one of the big reasons why some people believe in God, and have a religion, is because they believe that they have had some kind of religious experience.

That is actually what fascinates me because I myself have not had one.

However, there is some intriguing evidence to suggest that some people have.

So lets next delve into some of the different types of religious experience that people can have.

When you're ready, pause the video and try to match the keyword to its correct meaning.

So before I talk to you about what these words actually mean, I would like you to try and guess what they are.

So copy out the key words, and possibly use a pencil, to write out the meaning so that you can change what you've written, if it's incorrect.

When you're ready, you can resume and we will go through the correct answers.

So, NDE stands for Near-Death Experience and it means nearly dying and claiming to have had an experience of God.

A Miracle is something that happens that goes against the laws of nature.

So an example of this could be that, somebody has a baby when they are told that they are unable to.

A Conversion experience is one that often comes after one of the other types of religious experience.

It's an experience of God that is so amazing that it changes that person.

And the final one is, Numinous.

You may not have heard of this word before, but you may have experienced it yourself.

You may have heard of people describing their feelings of Numinous, but it's a feeling of awe and wonder.

Often somebody might describe the Numinous, when they've stood at the top of a mountain and looked at the beauty of all the world in front of them, feeling like their must be a Higher Power that has created it.

This is the feeling of the Numinous in religion.

I'm going to briefly look at one type of Near-Death Experience.

I would absolutely love to go into the different types of religious experience in more detail, but alas, we don't have time for that today.

There is some fantastic work being done on this in A level Religious studies or A level philosophy and ethics, if you're interested.

Today however, we're going to focus on one particular type of religious experience and that is a Near-Death experience.

A near death experience is something, an experience, that somebody has, when they are unconscious, comatose or clinically dead, and that is when the heart has stopped beating.

Something that is common to all Near-Death Experiences is the feeling of passing through a tunnel, and mystical light, and some really intense, positive emotions.

So while many different descriptions of Near-Death Experiences might be very different, depending on the circumstance of the death or the near death.

There is three things, that are all there, they are all common.

They've been reported by children, adults, scientists, doctors, religious people, non-religious people from all different countries, all around the world.

To me, I find this quite compelling evidence, that possibly may now have happened, but you may not be convinced.

So I'm going to give you some more evidence towards Near-Death Experiences.

One of the criteria, to know if somebody who died has had a Near Death Experience is that, they must have had a lucid experience.

What that means is they're able to talk about it, without it sounding kind of fuzzy.

Like there's not parts of their memory that's missing, and they only remember bits, like when you've had a dream and you wake up the next day and you remember bits of it.

It is very vivid and they can describe the whole thing.

Somebody called Dr.

Michael Sabom, took a group of patients having had cardiac arrests, which means they had a heart attack, the heart had stopped.

They were then asked to describe their resuscitation.

Now the interesting thing was, Dr.

Sabom took two groups.

He had five people, for example, who didn't claim to have had a Near Death Experience.

And another five people, so exactly the same number, who did claim to have had Near Death Experiences.

He asked both to describe what happened when they were being resuscitated, to see if essentially, people were making things up.

What he found is really interesting; the ones that claimed to have had a Near-Death Experience could explain what happened in much more detail.

They might have been able to describe the instruments used in the resuscitation.

They might have been able to describe the people that were part of the resuscitation better than people who didn't claim to have had one.

Another fascinating piece of evidence towards this religious experience is that, there have been times where people who have been blind documented having a Near Death Experience.

So while they've never physically been able to see, in their life, they have described things, that are around them at the time, of their Near-Death Experience.

They've described things accurately, down to the colour, down to the objects, down to the people.

That is incredibly compelling evidence.

So what was the evidence on the other hand? Some arguments against Near-Death Experiences, that also come from scientific origins, the main one is, that actually this is just what happens to a stressed or dying brain.

And that in fact, the feelings of happiness and euphoria, and the seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, could easily be explained by the changes that are happening to a brain that is losing oxygen and is dying.

Another explanation could be that it is all a very vivid dream.

Think of times when you may have fallen asleep and started to dream and for some reason or other you've woken up.

You wake up feeling like you've had a very long dream, but you look at the clock on your wall or the clock on your phone and realise, you've only been asleep for a matter of minutes.

It feels like it was the whole night, and in fact it was only a short amount of time.

So when people describe their Near-Death Experiences as being like the duration of the time their body was in a state of death, in fact, it was really only a mere few seconds or minutes before they fully woke up to consciousness.

When you are ready, pause the video to complete your task.

Use the sentence starters that I have given you to help Try to challenge yourself by giving a reason, arguing for the other point of view.

So how does psychology attempt to explain religious belief.

Psychology is the study of the human mind and behaviour, which I think I mentioned in the introduction.

what I'd like you to do, please, is to copy the following definition into your book.

You may pause the slide while you do this.

So, what are the psychological explanations for religious experience and belief in God? So, what are psychological explanations for belief in God? Carl Jung was a psychologist, who had a theory of archetypes.

He said that we are born with innate knowledge.

An example of this could be a baby, having innate knowledge to breath and feed from their mother.

So even when we are born, there are some things that we know, which means it's innate, without having learned it from anywhere.

Jung argue that we are born with this same innate knowledge of different types of Archetype.

Archetypes are models of people and personalities, that we are born with the knowledge of.

So for example, we are born with an archetype of our parents, of a male and female caregiver.

Jung argues that in the same way we are born with an archetype of God, of a God figure.

And this would be why so many different people around the world, are born with a knowledge of God or an understanding of God, because it's another archetype.

Now this doesn't necessarily disprove the idea of God, but it certainly explains why people believe in God.

Another psychologist, who was famous for explaining religious belief is Sigmund Freud.

Freud is known as the father of modern psychology.

He had all sorts of strange ideas, some of that, now very popular, many have been slightly disproved and are not so popular.

One example is Freud's idea of the Oedipus complex.

Freud argued that all little girls wanted to marry their fathers, and all little boys wanted to marry their mothers.

As I said, he had some very strange ideas.

So while he's world renowned, many of his ideas aren't very popular these days.

Freud however said the reason why people have a religious belief is because it's very comforting.

People feel safer when they believe there is someone looking after them.

People have a need to believe in an afterlife.

Freud's explanation for Near-Death Experience would be that it's a powerful part of our brain, trying to make us feel happier about the fact that we're about to die, because we have a belief that we are going somewhere, that there is something more than our physical selves in our physical world.

Freud said this is a really important part of being human to have this belief in something higher and something better, because it took away the fear and the lack of control of not knowing what happens when we die.

He also said that religion is used to make people behave.

It makes sense, and this is a similar idea to Marx, which you may have had to look up in my lesson on Sociology of Religion.

He argued that religion is there to give people rules, because otherwise they don't know how to behave rightly or wrongly.

I'll leave you to see if you agree or disagree with that.

Now I would like you to pause the video please, and complete your task.

You will need to rewind and go back through my explanations.

If you find this easy, try and challenge yourself to come up with more than five points.

You may want to use the internet for further research.

So in summary, what I would like you to do is get a different kind of pen, read through my summary of Jung's ideas and give yourself a tick or in a different colour pen, add any bits that you didn't already write down.

When you are ready, please pause the video to complete your task.

Remember to try and challenge yourself by getting a different point of view.

How did you do? Read through my argument and using a different colour pen try to mark your own work.

Personally, I think that psychology is successful in explaining religious belief.

This is because Freud said, that people use religion and belief in the afterlife as a comfort to help them feel better, about the unknown and the things that they are unable to control.

On the other hand, I do not think that psychology is successful in explaining religious beliefs because of the question of how Near-Death experiences can be explained.

Even scientists can not fully explain how a person can have such an experience when they are medically brain dead.

If you enjoyed this lesson don't forget to share your work.

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Then finally there is only a couple of things left to say, please, don't forget to complete the quiz to show off all the lovely knowledge that you've learned today.

I hope you've enjoyed the lesson.

If you have maybe, watch some more of my lessons on psychology and philosophy of religion.

Thanks for watching.

Bye.