ABSTRACT
Accordingly, Evan Fales offers an engaging sociological explanation of the phenomenon of mystical perceptions of God. His theory has the alleged advantages of explaining a greater range of data than the theistic explanation of those same experiences, and of making use of otherwise familiar mechanisms – sociological and secondarily psychological – to explain the phenomenon. In the last decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of explanations, of a neuropsychological kind, has come to the fore. The key idea is that of 'cognitive structures'. This will provide the link to the proposed neuropsychological understanding of mystical experiences. Fales's sociological explanation explains well the connection between mysticism and social context for all forms of mysticism, theistic and nontheistic alike. A neuropsychological explanation of just some God-perceptions, say the more intense, dramatic ones, could take its place alongside other explanations that satisfactorily explain other episodes of God-perceptions.
