Two Theories About the Voice of God and Religious Experience: Salman Rushdie’s Telepathic Radio and William James’s Alternate Personality

Various people in the Old and New Testaments hear the voice of God. But why doesn’t everyone hear the voice of God when God speaks? Two theories have been presented in this blog.

Salman Rushdie’s theory in Midnight’s Children is that a person’s brain is like a radio receiver: If your brain can tune in the right frequency, you can hear voices telepathically. Applying the radio theory to religious experience (which Rushdie does not do): Some people can hear the voice of God, because they can tune in to God’s frequency; or, because God broadcasts on a frequency specially tuned to the brains of certain people.

The other theory was proposed by William James in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which I discussed in a previous post. James’s theory is that religious experience comes from a person’s subconscious self, an alternate personality: Since an alternate personality is subjectively experienced as another person, it is interpreted as coming from an outside source. And if the message is religious, the outside person and source is inferred to be God.

A particularly interesting thing about William James is that, in spite of his scientific views, he, himself, remained a believer in God. Evidently, his own religious experiences were more compelling to him than his scientific conclusions. He rationalized that if God wanted to communicate with people through their alternate personalities, God was certainly capable of doing so.