How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  SEEING THE PATTERN OF GOD

  As we have seen, humans are pattern-seeking animals. Our brains are hard-wired to seek and find patterns, whether the pattern is real or not. Psychologist Stuart Vyse demonstrated this in his research with his colleague Ruth Heltzer, in an experiment in which subjects participated in a video game, the goal of which was to navigate a path through a matrix grid using directional keys to move the cursor. One group of subjects were rewarded with points for successfully finding a way through the grid’s lower right portion, while a second group of subjects were rewarded points randomly. Both groups were subsequently asked to describe how they thought the points were rewarded. Most of the subjects in the first group found the pattern of point scoring and accurately described it. Interestingly, most of the subjects in the second group also found “patterns” of point scoring, even though no pattern existed and the points were rewarded randomly. We seek and find patterns because we prefer to view the world as orderly instead of chaotic, and it is orderly often enough that this strategy works. In an ironic twist, it would appear that we were designed by nature to see in nature patterns of our design. Those patterns have to be given an identity, and for thousands of years many of those identities were called gods.

  In his 1993 book, Fuzzy Thinking, Bart Kosko suggests that belief in God may be something similar to what we see when we look at the pattern in the Kanizsa-square illusion. The experience, Kosko suggests, is not unlike “our vague glimpses of God or His Shadow or His Handiwork … an illusion in the neural wiring of a creature recently and narrowly evolved on a fluke of a planet in a fluke of a galaxy in a fluke of a universe.” The neural wiring in our brain creates “neural nets,” or the sequence of neurons and the gaps between neurons called synapses, that together operate in the brain to store memory and pattern information. “These God glimpses or the feeling of God recognition,” Kosko intimates, “may be just a ‘filling in’ or déjà-vu type anomaly of our neural nets.” The Kanizsa square works to create the illusion of a square that is not really there. The four little Pac-man figures are turned at right angles to one another to create four false boundaries and a bright interior. But there is no square in this figure. The square is in our mind. There appears to be Something There, when in actual fact there is nothing there. As pattern-seeking animals it is virtually impossible for us not to see the pattern. The same may be true for God. For most of us it is very difficult not to see a pattern of God when looking at the false boundaries and bright interiors of the universe.

  The Kanizsa-square illusion works by fooling the mind into thinking there is a square. All that is seen are four figures turned at right angles to create four false boundaries and a bright interior. Perhaps God is an illusion of the mind, generated by the false boundaries and bright interiors of the universe.

  Do people see the pattern of God in the world and in their lives, and therefore believe in God for perfectly rational reasons? And if they do, does that pattern represent Something There or nothing there? Or are there other reasons people believe, such as an emotional need, a fear of death, a hope for immortality, an explanation for evil and suffering, a foundation for morality, parental upbringing, cultural influence, historical momentum, and so on? To find out I decided to do what I always do when I want to know why people believe something—ask. I started off by asking skeptics—defined simply as readers of Skeptic magazine and members of the Skeptics Society—if they believe in God, why or why not, and why they think other people do. I then asked a random sample of the American population (defined by a professional polling agency, which provided the database) the same set of questions. The results were most enlightening. But first we must consider another issue: Is the propensity to believe in God hard-wired, either genetically or in the brain?

  IS BELIEF IN GOD GENETICALLY PROGRAMMED?

  The renowned British psychologist Hans Eysenck, not noted for timidity in commenting on controversial issues, rang in on the God Question with this quip: “I think there’s a gene for religiosity and I regret that I don’t have it.” Is there a gene for religiosity? No, any more than there is a gene for intelligence, aggression, or any other complex human expression. Such phenomena are the product of a complex interactive feedback loop between genes and environment, where many genes code for a range of reactions to environmental stimuli. The relative role of genes and environment would be impossible to tease apart were it not for the natural experiment of identical twins separated at birth and raised in relatively different environments. Intuitively it seems as if something as culturally variable as religion would be primarily, if not completely, the product of one’s environment. Indeed, as late as 1989, Robert Plomin concluded that “religiosity and certain political beliefs … show no genetic influence.” So pervasive is this presumption, in fact, that behavioral geneticists have used religiosity as a control variable in their studies of twins, while exploring other variables that could possibly be strongly influenced by genetics.

  This assumption is beginning to change. Behavioral geneticist Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. directed the famous “Minnesota twins” study, one of the best known and most extensive studies to date. Bouchard and his colleagues have attempted to cleave the relative influence of nature and nurture on a number of variables long thought to be primarily under the control of the environment, including personality, political attitudes, and even religiosity. Studying fifty-three pairs of identical twins and thirty-one pairs of fraternal twins reared apart, looking at five different measures of religiosity, the researchers found that the correlations between identical twins were typically double those for fraternal twins, “suggesting that genetic factors play a significant role in the expression of this trait.” How significant? While admitting that their findings “indicate that individual differences in religious attitudes, interests and values arise from both genetic and environmental influences … genetic factors account for approximately 50 percent of the observed variance on our measures.” That is to say, about one-half of the differences among people in their religious attitudes, interests, and values is accounted for by their genes. After offering a proviso that much more research needs to be done in this area, and that this single study must be replicated, the twin-study experts concluded: “Social scientists will have to discard the a priori assumption that individual differences in religious and other social attitudes are solely influenced by environmental factors.” Nancy Segal, in her 1999 book on twins, Entwined Lives, points out that genes, of course, do not determine whether one chooses Judaism or Catholicism, rather, “religious interest and commitment to certain practices, such as regular service attendance or singing in a choir, partly reflect genetically based personality traits such as traditionalism and conformance to authority.” Clearly the fact that identical twins reared apart are more similar in their religious interests and commitments than fraternal twins reared together indicates that we cannot ignore heredity in our search to understand why people believe in God.

  Taken at face value, a 50 percent heritability of religious tendencies may sound like a lot, but that still leaves the other half accounted for by the environment. Given the range of variables that individuals encounter in their religious experiences, there is much research still to be conducted. Virtually all studies implemented over the past century have found strong environmental factors in religiosity, including everything from family to class to culture. In other words, even with a genetic component to religiosity we still must examine other variables.

  IS THERE A GOD MODULE IN THE BRAIN?

  During the month of October 1997 the media had a field day when the renowned University of California-San Diego neuroscientist, Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, entitled “The Neural Basis of Religious Experience.” One reporter stood outside Ramachandran’s office and declared, “Inside this building scientists have discovered the God module.” Robert Lee Hotz for the Los Angeles Times reported: “In what researchers called the
first serious experiment aimed at the neural basis of religion, scientists at the UC San Diego brain and perception laboratory this week said they found evidence of neural circuits in the human brain that affect how strongly someone responds to a mystical experience. As evidence of how brain cells and synapses might process spiritual stirrings, the experiment suggests a physical basis for a religious state of mind.” Hotz followed up six months later in the Los Angeles Times with a deeper analysis of “the biology of spirituality,” in which he explored just how far science might go with this line of research. “The issues are huge,” explained Robert John Russell, director of the Center for Theology and Natural Science in Berkeley. USC neuroscientist Michael Arbib agreed: “We cannot approach theology without some sense of the intricacy of the human brain. A lot of what people hold as articles of faith are eroded by neuroscience.” And Nancey Murphy, from the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, rationalized the problem to Hotz this way: “If we recognize the brain does all the things that we [traditionally] attributed to the soul, then God must have some way of interacting with human brains.”

  Specifically, what Ramachandran said was that an individual’s religiosity may depend on how enhanced a part of the brain’s electrical circuitry becomes: “If these preliminary results hold up, they may indicate that the neural substrate for religion and belief in God may partially involve circuitry in the temporal lobes, which is enhanced in some patients.” Using electrical monitors on subjects’ skin (a skin conductance response commonly used to measure emotional arousal) Ramachandran and his colleagues tested three types of “emotional stimuli”: religious, violent, and sexual, in three populations: (1) temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients who had religious preoccupations, (2) normal “very religious” people, and (3) normal nonreligious people. In groups 2 and 3 Ramachandran found skin conductance response to be highest to sexual stimuli, whereas in the first group the response was strongest to religious words and icons, significantly above the religious control group.

  Ramachandran considered three possible (but not mutually exclusive) hypotheses to explain his findings: (a) that the mystical reveries led the patient to religious beliefs; (b) that the facilitation of connections between emotion centers of the brain, like the amygdala, caused the patient to see deep cosmic significance in everything around him or her that is similar to religious experiences; (c) that there may be neural wiring in the temporal lobes focused on something akin to religion. Research other than Ramachandran’s tends not to support the first hypothesis, which leaves band c the likeliest explanations of the findings. Psychiatric and neurological patients experiencing hallucinations, for example, do not necessarily exhibit religious propensities, but TLE patients, when shown religious words, as well as words with sexual or violent connotations, showed much higher emotional response to the religious words. Cautious not to offend, Ramachandran concluded with this disclaimer: “Of course, far from invalidating religious experience this merely indicates what the underlying neural substrate might be.”

  Related to Ramachandran’s research, with implications for both supernatural and paranormal beliefs, is the work of Michael Persinger at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada. Persinger places a motorcycle helmet specially modified with electromagnets on the subject’s head, who lies in a comfortable recumbent position in a soundproof room with eyes covered. The electrical activity generated by the electromagnets produces a magnetic field pattern that stimulates “microseizures” in the temporal lobes of the brain which, in turn, produces a number of what can best be described as “spiritual” and “supernatural” experiences—the sense of a presence in the room, an out-of-body experience, bizarre distortion of body parts, and even religious feelings. Persinger calls these experiences “temporal lobe transients,” or increases and instabilities in neuronal firing patterns in the temporal lobe. These “transients” are not unlike the seizures studied by Ramachandran. How do they produce religious states? Our “sense of self,” says Persinger, is maintained by the left hemisphere temporal cortex. Under normal brain functioning this is matched by the corresponding systems in the right hemisphere temporal cortex. When these two systems become uncoordinated, such as during a seizure or a transient event, the left hemisphere interprets the uncoordinated activity as “another self,” or a “sensed presence,” thus accounting for subjects’ experiences of a “presence” in the room (which might be interpreted as angels, demons, aliens, or ghosts), or leaving their bodies (as in a near-death experience), or even “God.” When the amygdala is involved in the transient events, emotional factors significantly enhance the experience which, when connected to spiritual themes, can be a powerful force for intense religious feelings.

  Persinger got his start in this field when he began to explore the possibility that electromagnetic disturbances in the earth’s crust during earthquakes may cause such anomalies as ball lightning and other unusual atmospheric phenomena. From there he thought that perhaps earthquakes generate weak magnetic fields that could cause individuals to experience such paranormal phenomena as alien abductions and out-of-body experiences. Having now studied more than 600 subjects in the past decade, Persinger speculates that such transient events may account for psychological states routinely reported as happening outside the mind. These events, he suggests, may be triggered by the stress of a near-death experience (caused by an accident or traumatic surgery), high altitudes, fasting, a sudden decrease in oxygen, dramatic changes in blood sugar levels, and other stressful events.

  In my 1997 book, Why People Believe Weird Things, I recount in detail my own alien abduction experience triggered by 83 hours of sleeplessness and riding a bicycle 1,259 miles without stopping (as part of the nonstop transcontinental bike race called Race Across America). I was, therefore, curious to experience Persinger’s research firsthand, which a trip to his laboratory for a television program on the paranormal allowed me to do. The effects, Persinger explained, are subtle for most subjects, dramatic for a few. His lab assistants strapped me into the helmet, hooked up the EEG and EKG machines (to measure brain waves and heart rate), and sealed me in the soundproof room. I initially felt giddiness, as if the whole process were a silly exercise that I could easily control. Then I slumped into a state of melancholy. Minutes later, still believing the magnetic field patterns were ineffectual, I felt like part of me wanted to have an out-of-body experience, but my skeptical/rational mind kept pulling me back in. It was then I realized that it was the magnetic field patterns causing these experiences, but that I was fighting them. I concluded that the more fantasy prone the personality, the more emotional/spiritual would be the experience. Persinger confirmed my informal hypothesis in a post-experiment debriefing. In a large population there will be a wide range of mental experiences, with the more fantasy prone people interpreting these as being outside the mind (demons, spirits, angels, ghosts, aliens, God), and the more rationally prone people interpreting these as being inside the mind (lucid, dreams, hallucinations, fantasies).

  There is, in fact, a long history of research into the possibility of mental states being equated with the presence of God and other supernatural beings, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. The classic work in the field was Alexandre Brierre de Boismont’s 1859 On Hallucinations: A History and Explanation of Apparitions, Visions, Dreams, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism. Brierre de Boismont, a French medical doctor, examined the relationship between hallucinations and a number of conditions, including “morality and religion.” It is in the nature of man, he explained, to form a “mental representation of objects.” We do this, for example, when we call up “the recollection of a friend, a landscape, or a statue” but these images, without practice, are “indistinct and obscure” and “still inferior to the original.” With practice, however, the representation becomes much more realistic (as tested in a series of experiments with artists’ models, who appeared for a fixed duration, followed by the artists’ rendition from memory). Such mental representations can be pr
oduced in extended meditation, so a hallucination must be the product of something resembling the normal process of mental representation and not a state of disease—physiology, not pathology: “I believe I am justified in concluding that the phenomena—apparently so dissimilar—of sensorial perception or sensation; of voluntary and normal mental representation (memory imagination, conception), and of involuntary and abnormal mental representation (illusions, hallucinations )—result from the operation of one and the same psycho-organic faculty, acting under different conditions, and with apparent degrees of intensity.” If intense enough, the hallucination seems “exterior and at some distance from the ego,” and thus “the person sees and believes.” Especially intense hallucinations, as produced through reverie and meditation, and with religious overtones, are particularly effective, where “everything concurred to favour the production of hallucinations—religion, the love of the marvellous, ignorance, anarchy, and the still lingering fear that the end of the world was at hand.” When Martin Luther wrote: “It happened on one occasion that I woke up suddenly, and Satan commenced disputing with me,” this was no literary trope. He was hallucinating, says Brierre de Boismont. The “ideas of Luther, exalted by perpetual controversy, by the dangers of his situation, by the fulminations of the church, and by continually dwelling on religious subjects, would naturally fall under the influence of the demon, which he saw everywhere, and to whom he attributed all the obstacles he encountered, and whom—like his contemporaries—he conceived interfered in all the affairs of life.” For Brierre de Boismont, Satan is a socially constructed hallucination, the product of a mind trapped in a demon-haunted world.