Two recent surveys of people who took psychedelic drugs and reported “God experience encounters”, along with successful clinical trials using psychedelic therapy for depression, have given rise to public misconceptions about psychedelics and atheism. Specifically, three inferences have been drawn: (1) that the psychedelic experience tends to dissolve atheist convictions; (2) that atheist convictions, once dissolved, are replaced with traditional monotheist beliefs; and (3) that atheism and depression somehow correlate as afflictions for which psychedelic drugs offer relief. This paper argues, based on analysis of the studies and trials along with relevant supplemental evidence, that each of these popular inferences is substantially misleading. Survey data do not indicate that most psychedelic atheists have cleanly cut ties with their former convictions, and there is strong evidence that they have not traded atheism for traditional monotheism. Both personal testimony and the effectiveness of microdose clinical trials serve to complicate any notion that a psychedelic drug alleviates symptoms of depression by “curing” atheism. The paper then extends its focus to argue that the broader field of neurotheology includes elements that contribute to these popular misconceptions.Glausser, Wayne. (2021). Psychedelic Drugs and Atheism: Debunking the Myths. Religions. 12. 614. 10.3390/rel12080614.
Another person included in this story found a new version of God because, like the artist, she was nally really seeing the world. Her experience with DMT, she says, made me appreciate life more (Dawson 2020). This person is of particular relevance because she suffered from depression before her DMT epiphany, and credited the psychedelic experience with relieving those symptoms. Her story does not line up perfectly as a test case for the third popular inferencethat atheism and depression somehow correlate as afictions for which psychedelic drugs offer relief. This woman was not an atheist before her psychedelic experience; she was Roman Catholic. Her psychedelic conversion, in other words, moved her from a traditional monotheist belief to an alternative theism, something that sounds more like the artists pantheism than another version of monotheism.
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The robust test case for the correlation between atheism and depression comes from Rachael Petersen. Petersen, a science writer and Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School, participated in a Johns Hopkins clinical trial testing psilocybin as treatment for severe depression. She wrote about her experience in a complex essay with a simple title: Taking Mushrooms for Depression Cured Me of My Atheism (Petersen 2019). The headline promises a story to validate the popular inference that psychedelics offer relief for the correlated afictions of atheism and depression. Petersen explains that she became an atheist at age 12. As an adult, nding herself unable to nd relief for her symptoms by conventional therapies, she volunteered for the psilocybin trial not knowing much: she had chosen not to inuence [her] trips by reading literature on how psilocybin works. Her experience caused her to move away from identi-
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4 of 8 Religions 2021, 12, 614 cation as atheist, and her title seems to imply that the psychedelic drug simultaneously led her to God and healed her depression. Petersens essay, however, suggests afliations more in line with the atheist converts of Grifths 2019 study: religious identication as Other, and description of the entity encountered as Ultimate Reality. Like the former atheists of the survey, her new beliefs are not necessarily incompatible with atheism.
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Petersen, in fact, uses the phrase Ultimate Reality twice as she describes the entity she encountered during her trip. She says she felt most comfortable with that term. (It seems likely that the Johns Hopkins interviewers in follow-up sessions worked with prompts from a list similar to the one in the 2019 survey.) She names God only in a hedging way: she encountered what a religiously inclined person might label God. Even after her depressive symptoms returned, it was not God, but something Other, an Ultimate Reality that she relied on for comfort the sense of being held by a great, ineffable Beyond. Following her psychedelic sessions, Petersen says, I dedicated myself to reading Buddhist texts, seeking some tradition to scaffold my changed world. Tellingly, she chose the one non-theistic tradition among major contemporary world religions.
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