A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
Sunday, January 23, 2005
All
You
know, we probably shouldn’t be here. I
don’t mean that in any cosmic sense, questioning the incredible odds of evolution
of the universe leading to the existence of human beings. The odds are astoundingly infinitesimal that
evolution would lead to my existence and your existence. But that’s not what I mean when I say we
probably shouldn’t be here.
I
mean that by now, by the twenty-first century, it was expected that no one
would be going to church any more.
Religion was expected to have withered away and virtually no one would
be found in a church on Sunday. Based on
the way leading thinkers thought about religion over the years, by now human
society should have out-grown the need for religion, and almost no one, or at
least no one in an advanced and educated society, would need a church or
synagogue or mosque or temple any more.
Yet
religion is as alive as it has ever been, and based upon how broadly you define
religion, it is increasing in its influence.
How did that come to be? Ever
since Copernicus discovered that the earth is not the center of the universe –
and therefore it is unlikely that human beings are the apex of God’s creation –
people have been predicting the obsolescence of religion. Over the centuries as science has exposed
more and more superstitions of religion, cultural critics believed that
religion would become less and less significant in human experience, until
eventually it would become an anachronism of human culture. It would take its place alongside other
out-dated human activities of the past, like, say, monarchy.
The
need that religion seemed to serve
has largely gone by the wayside. In
pre-scientific society, we needed something to explain phenomena that were
mysterious, like hurricanes and solar eclipses. Religion served an important role in helping
people cope with what they didn’t understand.
But one by one, such explanations were, and continue to be, found and we
no longer need religion to explain what science can do better.
When
Freud exposed the human psyche to his investigation, he concluded that the
human religious impulse could be explained in terms of projecting our infantile
needs for a father image and protector.
Ever since then, people have felt that religion, now exposed by Freud
and others as a sham, is destined to wither away from human society. Surely that would happen by the 21st
century!
Perhaps
Nietzsche said it most memorably in 1885 when he declared that “God is dead”
and that “we have killed him.” As many
leading intellectuals over the years have observed, religion will gradually
come to serve no more purpose.
Such
expectations about the end of religion were obviously ill conceived. Religion is alive and well. It has gone through many changes over time,
but it is still a major influence in human society all over the world. Some could say it is flowering, expanding
into more and more schools of thought or sects, and it is grabbing headlines in
the paper almost as never before. Going
to church on Sunday still remains a common part of life.
How can this be? It
has been a puzzling question for quite some time. Oddly, it seems that science itself is
starting to offer some credible but surprising answers. It may in fact be the case that the process
of evolution genetically designs human beings to be predisposed toward
religious and spiritual experience and activity.
In
the last few years, several studies have proposed to show the biological basis
for religious thought. One of the most
recent ones made the cover of Time
magazine, for example. That issue of Time declared with great fanfare on the
cover the title: The God Gene.
In a
book published last year with that shocking title, it was announced that we
seem to be close to identifying the genetic reasons why people seem to cling to
religion. We are designed by our genes
to do so.
The
author, Dean Hamer, is chief geneticist at the National Cancer Institute. His book is more or less a report on a
phenomenon he stumbled across almost accidentally. In a study of addictions, he gave various
standardized tests to 1,000 men and women, including a test that is to measure
what it calls “self-transcendence.”
“Self-transcendence” is considered to have several traits: the ability to get entirely lost in an
experience, a feeling of connectedness to a larger universe, and openness to
things not literally true. In this
context, “self-transcendence” sounded very close to describing what religious
experience is all about.
When he gathered together the results of those who scored high on the “self-transcendence” scale, he fished around to see if he could find whether there were common genetic characteristics. He says he found it. The gene is called – for those who care about such things and are taking notes – vesicular monoamine transporter. Those who scored high in self-transcendence seemed to have similar versions of this gene, and those who scored low had their own similarities.
I
hasten to add, that what was tested for here was not a belief in God, or any
particular identifiable belief in God.
It was a test for the propensity for what was called
“self-transcendence.” That, of course,
makes the title of his book, The God
Gene, quite a bit misleading, but one can only suppose that his
publisher insisted he would sell more copies that way than if he called it The Self-Transcendent Gene.
In
any case, Hamer seems to feel he has come across the source of religion in
human nature. Our religions are
biological implants, and it is human nature to turn to them, regardless of the
cultural context. Hamer said, “I’m a
believer that every thought we think and every feeling we feel is the result of
activity in the brain.”
Which
leads us to another cutting-edge science:
brain research. And that leads us
to another relatively recent book, with a similarly startling and misleading
title, called Why God Won’t Go Away. The author is Andrew Newberg, assistant
professor of Radiology at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania,
and also teaches in the Department of Religious Studies. Like Hamer, he was also interested in
discovering the biological origins of religious experience, only his approach
didn’t involve genetics, it involved neurological brain research.
And,
like Hamer, he found what he expected to find – we humans seem to be internally
hard-wired for religious thinking – some more so, some less so. He began by hooking up a Buddhist mystic to a
brain scan machine called a SPECT, which is able to identify locations of brain
activities. The Buddhist monk would go
into a deep meditative state while the machine scanned his brain. Sure enough, the machine identified several
various locations in the brain that are stimulated by religious
meditation. He did the same with several
other Buddhist monks, with similar results.
He then hooked up the scans
to measure brain activity of Franciscan Catholic nuns, and identified their brain
activity during deep and extended prayer.
The resulting picture was similar to the picture of the Buddhist brain
while meditating. When the brain scans
during religious activity are compared with brain scans of the same subjects
during normal consciousness, it was easy to identify which parts of the brain
are affected by and support religious activity.
I
will spare you a review of the actual names of the brain parts that are
associated with religious experience. I
do so mostly because the jargon makes my head spin and I don’t understand them
myself.
It is enough to say that
Newberg concludes that those parts of the brain which are active during
meditation and prayer are the parts that control how we experience ourselves as
beings separate from the world around us.
In our normal lives, something in our brain, he says (and he names it),
needs to tell us that we have a different existence from everyone else, and
that the world is an object and we are the subject. Something must help us construct a concept of
“self” as differentiated from “others.”
It is
that piece of the brain that seems to be affected most, although other parts,
such as the emotional center of the brain, are also involved. Newberg’s hypothesis, in viewing the brain
scan results of Buddhist monks at meditation and Catholic nuns at prayer, is
that such religious devotional activity involves primarily blocking the flow of
information that makes us aware of our separate identity from everything around
us. Religious activity turns off that
part of the brain that tells us we are a “self,” separate from everything
else. In Newberg’s words, such activity
orients the brain “to perceive that the self is endless and intimately
interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and
unquestionably real.”
And
Newberg observes that this feeling of being one with the universe, the loss of
self to something greater than us, is perhaps the most commonly shared
attribute of religious experience in all cultures. His book is punctuated throughout with quotes
from Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, Taoist, and Hindu writings, ancient and
modern. The following is an example from
the Hindu Upanishads that
illustrate by metaphor what the human mind experiences during meditation:
As the river flowing east and west
Merge in the sea and become one with it,
Forgetting that they were ever separate rivers,
So do all creatures lose their separateness
When they merge at last. . . .
What
Newberg found in his brain research seems consistent with what Hamer found in
genetic studies: that the source for
religious experience in human beings can be identified biologically, and that
the nature of that experience is fundamentally one of self-transcendence. And, like Hamer, Newberg confesses that this
has nothing to do specifically with a belief in God, and that non-believers are
also capable of self-transcendent experience.
It just happens that historically this experience of “something greater
than ourselves” has been associated with a divine source. Nevertheless, I also guess that his publisher had a hand in the book
title. Why God Won’t Go Away is quite a bit more enticing than the
title Why Self-Transcendence Won’t Go
Away.
Anyway,
there you have it. I began by observing
the curious fact that in spite of frequent predictions by leading intellectuals
over the years, religion has not withered away in modern society, but remains a
strong force in us. I wondered why this
is so.
And
I’ve given you a possible answer.
Religion won’t go away because it is biologically part of us, part of
our genetic make-up, part of the wiring of our brains. We have our answer. Religion is part of our anatomy, and it will
stay that way for millions of years, until evolution eventually selects it out
of the body.
In an
article for Free Inquiry entitled “Searching for God in the Machine,” writer
David Noelle makes the same point by saying:
“Modern science is beginning
to understand the neurological mechanisms that giver rise to the religious
experiences of the believer. Given these
results, the skeptic may present the believer with a simple question: How do you know that your religious experience
is not a simple trick of your brain – the unfolding of a perfectly natural
temporal lobe (stimulus)?”
The
point is well taken. Religion can be
explained by brain chemistry and genetics.
So we have our answer, and I can end the sermon here. We can close up shop, go on home, close the
church doors, sell the property to a private school, and sleep in on Sunday
morning from now on. There is nothing
more to question, for we know that religion comes from our genes and brain
chemistry. There is no reason to sit and
discuss the fine nuances of philosophical ideas, for it is all a sort of
mirage, having nothing to do with reality outside of us. Religion is all in our mind. Not real.
Well,
let’s not jump the gun. It’s not quite
time to call a special Board meeting to sell off the church building. For there’s quite a bit more to it than I’ve
mentioned, and I still have some sermon time left that I don’t want to
waste.
The
fact is that these studies seem to raise at least as many questions as they
answer. For one thing, does the
experience of self-transcendence that they identify in religious experience
have something to do with reality? In
other words, does the experience of unity of all existence reflect something
that is real?
Both
authors are quick to point out that their research is about biological
influence on human behavior. Both tell
us that they are not talking metaphysics, and cannot tell us whether
perceptions from religious experience are accurate perceptions. Their research, contrary to their book
titles, tells us nothing about God. It
tells us about us, and how we work as human beings.
Newberg
offers as an example the case of an opera lover. Suppose we hook up this brain scan to an
opera lover as she listens to her favorite opera. The machine would register pictures of brain
activity associated with that experience, which would be similar to brain
activity of any opera lover listening to a great opera. The scan will print pages with colorful
blotches indicating locations of brain activity. And yet we know that the blotches tell us
nothing about the music itself. They
reveal nothing of the music’s beauty, creativity, originality. The blotches tell us about human response to
the music. Then suppose this opera lover
goes home and we again connect her to the scan as she remembers the experience
and actually replays the music in her mind.
The same brain locales would be affected, and the blotches would show
strong similarity with the previous reading, even though, in this case, there
was no actual music. It was all in her
head, so to speak. The scan tells us
that the brain reacts, but not whether it is reacting to something that is real
or imaginary.
The
point is that nothing in these studies addresses what is real and what is
imaginary. It identifies what is “in our
head,” not what is in the world. It is a
mistake to conclude that just because we know how the brain works in response
to experiences that those experiences are real.
It is equally mistaken to conclude that because the responses are
explained by biology, that those responses are only in our minds and not in
reality.
Paul
Davies, a popular writer on physics and religion, put it this way:
“I think a lot of people
make the mistake of thinking that if you explain something, you explain it
away. I don’t see that all with
religious experience.”
Another
example. Let’s hook that brain scan up
to a Barry Manilow fan listening to Barry Manilow instead of opera. As the person gets lost in the music,
reacting with emotion, the picture of his brain, the blotches on the page, may
in fact look quite similar to the picture of the opera lover’s brain. In other words, this science tells us quite a
bit about human response to something, but tells us virtually nothing about the
nature of that something, or even whether it is real. Just because something can be explained
doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
Another
interesting question should be addressed before we sell off this church
building. If a predisposition toward
religion is part of our biological makeup, located in our genes and our brain
chemistry, why did evolution select this characteristic to pass on? According to evolutionary theory,
characteristics that are conducive to survival, that provide some advantage to
the species, are selected to be passed on through the generations, and characteristics
that are threatening to survival are de-selected and die out. Since we know that religion traces back to
prehistoric times, this biological trait seems to be a fairly strong human
characteristic. Why would evolution seem
to favor this human trait?
Why
has what Hamer calls “the God gene” (though more properly seen as a
“self-transcendence gene”) seem to be favored by evolution if it is, in fact,
not connected to reality? There may be
a number of answers. The simplest and
most obvious is that perhaps in pre-scientific times religion offered comfort
by explaining the ways of the nature that seemed otherwise inexplicable. The harsh impact of nature, with floods and
earthquakes for example, fit in to a cosmic plan that was ultimately good. The comfort and security that religion
offered, even if imaginary, lowered anxiety and provided at least psychological
protection, and in that sense, at least, contributed to survival.
Even
today, though, there is evidence of the benefits of religion toward human
well-being, something that surely evolution itself must have noticed. Current studies show that those who practice
mainstream religion live longer than the population at large. As we imagine with our ancestors, it is true
today that, according to a number of studies, people who practice religious
activities, such as meditation, prayer or attending religious services, have
reduced anxiety and depression and have a more positive outlook on life.
Religions
also tend to offer strong social support networks by creating communities of
friends and family. It is easy to show
how close social ties lend support toward mental health.
Andrew Newberg, the brain
researcher, put it this way:
“A quiet prayer, a stately
hymn, or an hour spent in meditation, can activate the body’s quiescent
function that has been shown to enhance immune system function, lower heart
rates and blood pressure, restrict the release of harmful stress hormones into
the blood, and generate feelings of calmness and well-being.”
With
such a list of assets, there can be little wonder why evolution would look
favorably upon the genetic and other biological predispositions toward
religion.
I don’t want to end, though, without giving some focus to
the meaning of religion that is affirmed by these more recent studies. Nothing in these studies identifies religion
with any specific religious doctrine.
In spite of the book titles, nothing in these studies has anything to
say about God, other than there is a tendency among many people to use that
word in describing their experience.
What the studies seem to say about religious experience is
that it has something to do with “self-transcendence,” or in other words
experiencing a connection to things that are greater than one’s feeling of
“self.” Recall the three elements of
“self-transcendence” used in Hamer’s study:
Ø
The ability to get entirely lost in an experience;
Ø
A feeling of connectedness to a larger universe; and
Ø
An openness to things not literally provable.
There
is no religious doctrine associated with these items. They refer to specific human experience,
available in any culture or religious tradition. It is a feeling attached to universal human
experience that doesn’t have to be connected in any way to what we typically
identify as religious belief. Newberg
said it this way:
“Humans are natural mystics with an inborn genius for effortless self-transcendence. If you ever ‘lost yourself’ in a beautiful piece of music, for example, or felt ‘swept away’ by a rousing patriotic speech, you have tasted in a small but revealing way the essence of mystical union. If you have fallen in love or have ever been wonder-struck by the beauty of nature, you know how it feels when the ego slips away and for a dazzling moment or two you vividly understand you are part of something larger.
“Like all experiences, moods, and perceptions, these unitary states. . . are the result of the softening of the sense of self into some larger sense of reality that we believe occurs when the brain’s orientation area is deafferented, or deprived of neural input.
“These activities, and the transcendent states they
produce, are not religious in any formal sense, but in neurological terms they
are similar to many unitary experiences produced by religious activity.” Pp. 113-116.
This
meaning of transcendence is applicable, even, to serious academics who
experience their subject with an intimacy that brings them out of their own
sense of isolated “self.” Einstein, for
example, wrote about his experience of what he called a “cosmic religious
feeling” that he associated with his studies of nature. This religious feeling had no theological
content, but it was very real.
”It is very difficult to
explain this feeling to anyone entirely without it, especially as there is no
anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human
desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves
both in Nature and in the world of thought.
He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to
experience the universe as a single significant whole.”
The etymological source of the word religion, originally,
means “binding together.” Whoever coined
the word “religion” to have that meaning seems to have known something only
recently understood. The biological
wiring for religion seems to be that which dissolves the isolation of the self
and binds us, connects us, in some meaningful and even emotional way to the
universe around us. Our self merges with
that which transcends us – whether ethics or music or political ideas or other
passions.
So
there seems to be something in our biological inheritance that encourages us
toward this experience we identify as religious, and there is no reason to
think it will disappear for quite some time.
I’ll close with Newberg’s words”
“As long as our brains are
arranged the way they are, as long as our minds are capable of sensing this
deeper reality, spirituality will continue to shape human experience. . . “