We are living in a “spiritual” age. I’ve heard even atheists speak of feeling spiritual, such as on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Surely, not believing in a soul or creator, they are speaking of human emotions, but use the term “spiritual” because it has become a fad, as I showed in a Google Ngram chart in part I.

In the realm of religion, “spiritual” is the term most closely associated with subjective truth. The best examples of this type of subjective truth are such statements as, “I know there is a God because I feel him in my heart,” or “I heard the voice of God telling me that I should do x, y, or z,” or “I felt the Holy Spirit in the worship service,” etc.

Because this kind of subjective thinking is so ingrained within religion, including Christianity, I am sure you have never heard anyone challenge this part of the Christian culture. As I write this, you are likely starting to think that I’m revealing my hand, that I’m a complete nut job at best, a horrible person, or not a Christian at worst. I am used to that characterization, and while I regret that attitude toward me, I feel like this is a discussion we must have.

I am writing this article for two reasons. The first is that many thinking people leave Christianity or never consider it in the first place when they are forced to have only a subjective experience as proof that their relationship with God is legitimate. The second reason is that treating emotions as spiritual and therefore infallible creates problems for the individual and for Christian society. Calling something spiritual implies that it is in another, supernatural “God dimension,” and therefore must be perfect as God is perfect.

Before you start to have pity on me for questioning this approach, “Poor Mike doesn’t really know the joy of a real relationship with God,” I will remind you for the hundredth time that I had at least 39 years (depending on how you count it) in a profoundly spiritual, mystical, experiential brand of Christianity. I went to Christian meetings that were mind-blowing in “manifestations” of the Holy Spirit. Speaking in tongues, people “slayed in the spirit,” people speaking prophecies, and “healings.” Everything was spiritual in that context. Looking back, I am confident that not one iota was supernatural; it was manufactured by our emotions.

I must add that, now that I am an objective Christian, I place a very high value on evidence-based experience and believe that reason, imperfect as it is, is God’s gift for finding truth. Human emotions, like all gifts of God, are wonderful, but many Christians feel they must relabel them as “spiritual experiences” to have value.

The word spiritual or spirit, as in John 16:13, is πνεῦμα (transliterated as pneuma, meaning “air”). In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for spirit is רוּחַ (roo’ach, which means air or wind).

I want to take you back to the Bronze or Roman Age, the times the Old and New Testaments were written. At that time, air was believed to be non-material yet having force upon the material. It could blow your hair around, move the trees, turn the sails of a windmill to grind grain, and move a ship across the Mediterranean or up the Nile. Not to mention that a typhoon or tornado could destroy an entire village. This was before the discovery of free gases, such as oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, which happened in the seventeenth century. As it turned out, air is a material; it has atoms just like stone, water, or iron.

But in the Bronze Age and the Roman period, air was considered to be in another dimension, separate from the material, magical, or supernatural. So, calling things like our emotions a spiritual phenomenon made sense, because they didn’t understand emotional phenomena either.

We now know much of how our brains work. It has a complex and interacting system for processing sensory input, motor movements, and higher levels of consciousness. Consciousness has two significant components: cognitive, a very rational, mathematical system for making sense of sensory input. It is located in several places, primarily centered in the prefrontal cortex. The other major component is our emotions, the deep sense of feelings that reside in several areas of the brain, most notably the limbic system.

We know, and I assume that most Christians reading this will disagree, that we humans cannot distinguish between human emotions and spirituality, no more than we can smell gravity. It is impossible.

Below, I will list just a token of the evidence to show how unreliable human emotions are for finding truth. In case you think that supporting this view from secular resources doesn’t count, let me remind you what the Bible says about our emotions. In Jeremiah 17:9, it is written, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? The following simply illustrates this verse in real time.

Before I turn this over to the mundane of citing studies, I ask you not to feel threatened or mad at me, but stick with this series as I make my case for the church creating space for us, who enjoy an emotional encounter with the creator as much as anyone, but do not find truth via those experiences. Those emotional experiences don’t define our or anybody’s relationship with the creator. As mentioned, I will also link how this wrong thinking has led to a lot of misery in human history.

I will eventually connect this to our headlines, the murder of Alex Pretti yesterday, and other historical events over the ages. I will just hint that when you rely on subjective rather than objective evidence, you don’t believe what your eyes see; instead, you rely on the emotional connection you have with a belief system’s authoritarian figure or ideology.

The Unreliability of Emotions for Finding Truth

Scientific studies demonstrate that emotions frequently distort objective reasoning, perception, and truth discernment through mechanisms like affective realism and emotional reasoning.

Scientific studies demonstrate that emotions frequently distort objective reasoning, perception, and truth discernment through mechanisms like affective realism and emotional reasoning. 

1. Distorting Factual Discernment

Research consistently shows that relying on emotions makes individuals more susceptible to falsehoods. 

• Belief in Misinformation: A 2020 study published in Psychological Science found that individuals experiencing high emotionality, whether positive or negative, were significantly more likely to believe fake news headlines.
• Intuition vs. Deliberation: In dual-process cognitive models, emotional “gut feelings” often lead to less accurate judgments. Reliance on emotion predicts lower “truth discernment”—the ability to tell real news from fake—while analytic reasoning improves it.

2. Altering Physical Perception

Emotions can literally change how we see physical reality. 

• The “Mountain out of a Molehill” Study: Researchers found that participants standing at the bottom of a hill perceived the hill’s incline as steeper when listening to sad music or feeling fatigued, compared to when they felt happy.

• Fear and Height Perception: Studies on acrophobia show that fearful individuals overestimate vertical distances, such as the height of a balcony, more than non-fearful individuals, suggesting fear distorts spatial accuracy.
• Affective Realism: In 2024 research, the brain was shown to experience “affective realism,” where it uses internal feelings to “architect” experience, such as misperceiving neutral objects as threatening in high-stress states. 

3. Biasing Social and Moral Judgments

Feelings often act as a “promiscuous” source of information, attaching themselves to unrelated judgments. 

• The Weather and Life Satisfaction: A famous study showed that people reported lower life satisfaction on rainy days simply because they were in a worse mood. When researchers first pointed out the weather, the effect disappeared, proving the original “truth” was just a misattributed feeling.
• Moral Judgment and Disgust: Experiments have shown that inducing disgust (e.g., in a dirty room) can lead people to judge morally ambiguous actions more harshly than those in a clean room.
• Legal Culpability: Mock-jury studies found that jurors who felt distressed by the consequences of a bankruptcy case were more likely to find a firm liable, even when that distress was unrelated to the firm’s actual legal guilt.

4. Impairing Accurate Prediction

• Affective Forecasting: Studies by Daniel Gilbert and others show that humans are poor at “affective forecasting, ” the ability to predict how they will feel in the future. Because we use our current emotional state as a proxy for the future, we often make suboptimal or “untrue” decisions about what will actually make us happy. 

Respectfully, Mike