The empirical record across independent disciplines confirms the structural prediction that the spiritual encounter arises wherever self-modeling reaches sufficient depth, independent of its cultural overlay. The deepest confirmation is the evolutionary arc itself. Below the recursion threshold, the components show up unjoined in non-human animals (McComb et al. 2006; Goodall 1986; Kühl et al. 2016; Swift and Marzluff 2015). At the threshold, the composition is older than *Homo sapiens*: Neanderthal cave structures (Jaubert et al. 2016), deliberate burials (Pomeroy et al. 2020), and Iberian cave art (Hoffmann et al. 2018, dating contested) all pre-date the species. With sustained cultural transmission the composition is bodied and personified — the Ugaritic divine council and its Israelite reception (Smith 2002; Dever 2005). With deepening textual recursion the abstraction trajectory follows, in parallel across the Eurasian Axial Age (Jaspers 1949; Bellah 2011); apophatic counter-currents emerge after, never before (McGinn 1991; Sells 1994). The pattern runs the same direction the structural account predicts in every register the record retains.

Cross-cultural mystical experience has been documented in every sustained contemplative tradition (James 1902; Stace 1960; Hood 1975; Forman 1990). The core phenomenology is consistent across traditions that had no contact with one another: a sense of presence larger than the self, of being part of a vast unity, of the self's ordinary boundaries becoming permeable, of encountering something sacred that cannot be fully described. Measurement instruments like the Mysticism Scale (Hood 1975) find the same factor structure across Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and non-religious populations. This is exactly what the structural account predicts: where the conditions of self-modeling in a medium with T, S, and Φ (the three structural roles derived through Modal Identity and Conditions-as-Nature, §[§2.6](<2.6 Triconditionality of Nature.md>)–2.7) obtain, the characteristic encounter obtains, independent of the cultural overlay.

Neuroscience of mystical experience locates the mechanism without explaining it away. Psilocybin studies at Johns Hopkins (Griffiths et al. 2006, 2008) produced in naive subjects experiences that, weeks later, a majority rated among the most meaningful of their lives. Neuroimaging during meditation and psychedelic states shows consistent reductions in default-mode network activity (Brewer et al. 2011; Carhart-Harris et al. 2012) — the self-modeling machinery of [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) quieting, and the person registering what lies beyond its ordinary self-model. The mechanism is the structural one: the self-model loosens, and the person encounters the medium more directly. That the encounter is reliably producible confirms it is not arbitrary subjective projection.

Cross-cultural variation in religious concepts confirms the mechanism through its ecological shaping. Botero et al. (2014, *PNAS*) found across 583 societies that environmental harshness and resource scarcity predict the prevalence of moralizing high gods; Henrich (2009) and Norenzayan et al. (2016) develop the cultural-evolutionary account by which ecological conditions shape religious cognition. Sapolsky (2017) synthesizes this literature for general readers: desert pastoralist cultures worldwide develop jealous, judgmental, honor-demanding gods because the survival values the desert selects for are loyalty, retribution, and clan protection, and those are what get amplified into the divine; forest-dwelling cultures, less vulnerable to raiding and theft, develop more diffuse, plural, immanent spiritual sensibilities. The god is not random projection; it is ecologically shaped projection. The environment selects which features of human experience get amplified into the infinite. The desert God and the forest God are the same mechanism running through different conditions. Both were pointing at the same excess. Neither had the vocabulary to name it structurally.

The decline of institutional religion in developed societies, far from undercutting the structural reading, instantiates one of its predictions at the population scale. Religious affiliation, weekly attendance, and confessional identification have fallen sharply across high-income societies over the past four decades, with the steepest drops where economic security and educational attainment rose fastest (Inglehart 2020, *Religion's Sudden Decline*; Pew Research Center 2015, 2022). Across the same span, self-reported interest in spirituality, mystical and peak experience, contemplative practice, and the category *spiritual but not religious* has risen or held steady (Pew 2017). The two trends are the same trend at different layers of the architecture: the official vocabulary has stopped responding to what the encounter was reaching toward, and the reach is finding alternate articulations — the population-scale analogue of the apophatic counter-current the section already traces inside each tradition (Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, *fana*, *neti neti*, Zen). What is shedding is the answer-attempt; the wondering is intact, and where it had been most tightly bound to a single answer-attempt the loosening is sharpest. The pressure cuts in a second direction. Where the encounter pressed from inside and the answer-attempt could not carry it, the loosening runs from the experiential side; where the natural sciences converged from outside — fixing the age of the Earth, common descent, deep time, and the brain dependence of mental states ([§7.1](<7.1 Convergence of Method.md>)) — the answer-attempts traditions had built around those questions could only either be dropped or insulated from the converging evidence, and the resulting fragmentation of sub-positions on contested questions (origins, the historical Adam, soul-body) runs opposite to the convergence-on-truth the sciences register. The two pressures point the same direction: the vocabulary stops responding to what the encounter touched, and its answer-attempts stop cohering with the rest of what the population knows. The most disaffiliated societies in the cross-national record — the Nordic states, the Netherlands, post-confessional Czechia — sit consistently at the top of subjective-wellbeing rankings rather than the bottom (Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs 2020; Inglehart 2018), in a pattern the structural reading predicts and the deficit-model reading does not: the encounter does not require the institution; the institution requires the encounter. The same gradient is read against the fall-theodicy frame at [§5.1.6](<5.1.6 Intelligent Design.md>), where it constitutes evidence in the opposite direction from what that frame requires.

Swinburne (2004) argued that religious experience constitutes evidence for God: its widespread, cross-cultural occurrence is more probable on theism than on naturalism. The structural account accepts the evidential weight of the experience and inverts its direction. The experience is more probable on the structural account than on theism — because the structural account predicts it as a consequence of self-modeling in a medium with T, S, and Φ, while theism merely accommodates it by stipulating that God chooses to make himself felt. Prediction is stronger evidential support than accommodation. Swinburne's data point the other way.


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← [8.14.3 What is Predicted](<8.14.3 What is Predicted.md>) | [8.14.5 What is Concluded](<8.14.5 What is Concluded.md>) →
