There is a modern phenomenon which – to put it modestly – obliterates Professor Dawkins' claims: this is the phenomenon of the Marian apparitions in Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, apparitions which began in 1981 and which, as author Randall Sullivan acknowledged, had been subjected to “perhaps more medical and scientific examination than any other purported supernatural event in the history of the human race.”

The continuing phenomena of the Marian apparitions in Medjugorje substantially challenge and, in many cases, downright disprove many arguments that Richard Dawkins has made in his popular book “The God Delusion” about personal mystical experience. Visions of the Virgin Mary Professor Dawkins has reduced to hallucinations or lucid dreams. Yet, exhaustive scientific studies on the Marian apparitions in Medjugorje have shown that the visionaries are not hallucinating in any form, nor are they in any dream state, completely contradicting and challenging Professor Dawkins' untested presuppositions on this subject. The extensive medical, psychological, and scientific studies on the visionaries have shown other things as well: that the visionaries are not lying; they are not neurotic or hysterical, nor under any form of hypnosis but, according to the electroencephalogram tests measuring their brain waves during ecstasies, they are experiencing something beyond scientific explanation during their daily apparitions.

As a scientist, Professor Dawkins should open his eyes to the phenomenon of Medjugorje. In Medjugorje, for the first time in human history, neuroscience and medical examination have played an instrumental role in penetrating the interior depths of mysticism by combining scientific inquiry with spiritual experience, thus elucidating our knowledge of the subject with empirical examination of the visionaries' ecstasies, beyond the unexamined presuppositions and reductionisms that we see in “The God Delusion.”