In an interview on Science

A lot of people might feel that William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience was not exactly a science book.

I suppose that’s true. It’s not precisely a science book, but James is trying to understand religion in a scientific sort of way. He tries to give some insight into it. I became interested in religious experience myself and I found it a wonderful book. Although it was written over a hundred years ago it could have been written yesterday.

William James was the elder brother of the novelist Henry James. He was a philosopher and a psychologist. Would you say that the things that prompted his own interest in religious experience were the same things that prompted yours?

I doubt it. I think I partly got involved with religious experience because my youngest child became very religious at one stage. He was evangelized and became a fundamentalist Christian, and people thought that I – a bad Jewish boy from South Africa – would be upset. I never was for a single moment. I never ever tried to persuade him not to be. Instead I began thinking about why people were religious and I even wrote a book about it, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, which is really about the evolution of religion. So the William James book is important to me.

Because James does not dismiss extremes of religious experience?

I think that one of the most important things that he says, is that when people do have a religious experience, it’s as real to them as anything that goes on in their day-to-day lives and I think that’s very important to understand. He also says that a truth experienced in the extreme of a fever is no less authentic because of the fever. Why shouldn’t fever be a state in which truth is experienced.