Was Moses High on Mount Sinai? If Yes, What Follows?

Benny Shanon is quoted by The Guardian as saying:

     As far as Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a
     supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend,
     which I don't believe either. Or finally, and this is very
     probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under
     the effect of narcotics.

   and

     The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of
     Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the
     imaginings of a people in an altered state of awareness . . . In
     advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is
     accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings.

These speculations of Professor Shanon raise some interesting questions. I take Shanon to be saying that Moses on Sinai (i) really did have an unusual experience, and that therefore there is nothing   legendary about the report in Exodus of this experience, but that (ii) this experience was not supernaturally caused, but caused by Moses' ingestion of a psychotropic drug, and that the etiology of the experience shows that the experience was nonveridical. Thus God did not reveal the Torah to Moses on Sinai; Moses had a drug-induced nonveridical experience of God revealing the Torah to him.

Question One

One question concerns the validity of the inference from

   1. Subject S under the influence of drug D experiences that p

   to

   2. S's experience that p is nonveridical.

Simply put, the question is whether one can validly infer the nonveridicality of an experience if the experience was had while the subject of the experience was under the influence of a drug.

Surely this is a non sequitur. Right now, under the influence of caffeine, I note that my coffee cup is empty. This is consistent with the perceptual experience of the cup's being empty being veridical,   which it is. So from the mere fact that a subject is 'on drugs,' it does not follow that that any of the subject's experiences are nonveridical. Now caffeine is a very mild drug. But suppose I was I was on a combination of caffeine, nicotine, marijuana, and methampehtamine. Even then one could not infer that the perception in question was nonveridical. Even on a dose of LSD-25 most of one's perceptual experiences remain veridical. In the case of Moses, from the fact, if it is a fact, that he was under the influence of a psychotropic drug while on Sinai, it does not follow that his experience of being addressed by God and being given the Decalogue was nonveridical.

(And anyway, aren't we always on 'drugs'?  The consciousness we enjoy in this life is brain-mediated, and the brain is the site of innumerable electro-chemical reactions.  In this life at least, 'No consciousness without chemistry.'  Our brains are always 'on drugs.'  But we don't take this fact as ruling out veridical perceptions, valid reasonings, true judgments, correct moral intuitions, etc.)

Returning to the case at hand, if you begin by assuming that there is no God, then it is plausible to explain the Sinai experience by saying that it was drug-induced. But that simply begs the question against the theist.

The crucial point is that a subject's being on drugs is logically consistent with the veridicality of his experiences; therefore, one cannot infer from the fact, if it is a fact, that Moses was under the   influence of a psychedelic or psychotropic drug that his experience was nonveridical. And that holds true for anyone's mystical or religious experience. 

If, however, there were independent reasons for believing that a certain experience was nonveridical, then one could explain the occurrence of the experience in terms of the influence of the drug.  But the occurrence/nonoccurrence of an experience is not to be confused with the veridicality/nonveridicality of the content of an experience.  So questions about how an experience arose, whether by normal or abnormal means, are distinct from questions about the content of the experience.  To fail to observe this distinction may lead one to commit the Genetic Fallacy.  It is so-called to highlight the fact that questions about origin or genesis are logically independent of questions about truth and falsehood.  If it has been antecedently established that the content of an experience is nonveridical, then it is legitimate to inquire into the origins of the experience.  But one cannot demonstrate  that the content of the experience is nonveridical by adducing facts about its origin.

So even if Shanon could prove that Moses and the people around him were under the influence of powerful drugs, that would not support his contention that nothing supernatural occurred on Sinai. It would not because it is consistent with theism. How does Shanon know that the drugs Moses supposedly took did not open "the doors of perception" (in Aldous Huxley's phrase) allowing him access to the transcendent, as opposed to shutting him up among figments of his own imagination?

Question Two

There is a second question whose full discussion should be reserved for a subsequent post. It is clear that mathematical and other truths can be grasped whether one is awake or dreaming, sober or drunk, on drugs or not. Sometimes when I dream I know that I am dreaming.  This awareness that I am dreaming is veridical despite the fact that I have it while dreaming.  After all, I am not dreaming that I am dreaming.  Or if a valid proof occurs to a mathematician in a dream, it is no less valid because the mathematician is dreaming. Why should not the same hold for moral truths? If it is true that it is morally obligatory not to kill human beings, then the experiencing of this truth is veridical whether or not the subject is awake or sleeping, sober or drunk, on drugs or not. So even if it could be proven that  Moses was under the influence of powerful drugs on Sinai, what  relevance would that have? At the very most it might cast doubt on the  veridicality of Moses' perception of God, but not on the veridicality of his experiencing of the content of the Decalogue. If it is true that one ought not kill, then it is true whether or not God exists.  And if it is true that one ought not kill, then one's intuiting that  it is true is veridical whether one is awake of dreaming, sober or drunk, on drugs or not, or a brain in a vat as opposed to a brain in a skull.

Suppose that all of Moses' perceptions of unusual physical phenomena while he was on Mt. Sinai were hallucinatory and thus nonveridical as the result of his ingestion of a drug.  Suppose there was no burning bush, etc.  It could still have been the case that he had veridical insights into objective moral truths.