And religious belief appears to be an important factor in our culture of monogamy-based relationships, which by definition results in more competition among both sexes to secure a suitable mate. Consider the traditional Christian wedding ceremony: “What God hath joined together, let no man set asunder.”
A 2009 study of Arizona college students showed that both men and women appeared to have an increase in religious feelings when shown pictures of attractive members of their own sex—not, as you might think, attractive members of the opposite sex. Thus, when competitiveness for potential mates comes into play, so does religion.
Most religions are preoccupied with sex, and that in itself offers strong evidence that religion is man-made.
Up to this point we have described the basic psychological building blocks of belief and ritual—how it is a by-product of adaptive cognitive mechanisms. But, we also now possess evidence from imaging studies of our brains. Let’s now look at what is seen through that window into the mind.
9
Oh Ye of Little Faith
Discovering the Physical Evidence of God(s) as By-product
How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.
—Charles Darwin
The word by-product sounds trivial, as if it means weakness, or insignificance. Quite the contrary. Reading and writing, for instance, are cultural by-products of adaptations originally designed for other purposes. We do not have reading and writing modules in our brain. What we do have is vision, a spoken language, symbolic thought, and fine motor movement of our hands, along with various other adaptations originally designed for other purposes. All of these adaptations came together when humans created writing and reading, the most important cultural invention of our species.
Similarly, music possibly is a by-product of spoken language, with its hard vowels and consonants, put to rhythm, originally the rhythm of a beating heart. To appreciate a cultural by-product’s power to move us, just listen to a favorite piece of music, especially one that evokes memories.
Religion is a powerful force that has shaped history and individual behavior beyond measure. Calling it a by-product does not diminish its obvious power, especially when recent respected studies support it as such. Recent revealing and powerful empirical evidence now exists to explain religion’s supernormal power over us.
As Lone Frank, the Danish neurobiologist and journalist says, “the sacred is found between the ears.” And, with the new techniques of neuroscience and imaging, that is exactly what is being discovered.
Probably the most famous in this new world of brain research and religion has been Michael Persinger, a psychologist at Laurentian University in Canada. Since the 1980s he has experimented with what is now known as the “God Helmet.” People are placed in a dark and quiet room, sight and sound perception are blocked, and a helmet that magnetically stimulates the temporal lobes is placed over the head.
Test subjects report the presence of “another.” Depending on their personal and cultural history, the “sensed presence” might be interpreted by the helmeted subject to be a supernatural religious figure. Women reported these experiences more frequently than men.
Persinger argues that we do not have a stable, single sense of self or one part of the brain from which it emanates. There are instead several areas of the brain that contribute to our conscious experience of our self. In our usual waking state, the left side of our brain, which controls language, dominates. In other settings, such as those marked by fear, depression, personal crisis, too little oxygen, low blood sugar, or the wearing of the “God Helmet,” when the right temporal area is stimulated, that additional sense of self intrudes into consciousness and feels like “another.”
This stimulation of religious experiences via the temporal lobes is not just an academic oddity or artifact of magnets in a lab. The temporal lobes are crucial for speech, and a common element of religious experiences is hearing the voice of a god. One can misattribute our inner voice to an outsider’s voice. It has been documented for years that many individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy, which comes from electrical disturbances in the temporal lobes, have intense religious experiences, and that extreme religiosity is a common character trait among such patients.
It is possible that St. Paul was actually having an epileptic fit when he was “struck down” on the road to Damascus, and equally possible—even likely—that some of the founders and leaders of the world’s various religions would today be evaluated and treated for temporal lobe epilepsy. Saint Teresa of Avila, Feodor Dostoevsky, and Marcel Proust, among others, are thought to have had temporal lobe epilepsy, which may have contributed to their focus on the spiritual.
Andrew Newberg, MD, an internist and radiologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College and an adjunct professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, pioneered neuroimaging studies of nuns praying, monks meditating, Pentecostals speaking in tongues, and individuals in various trance states. His work suggests that emotional states in which the individual “feels at one with the universe” correspond to high frontal lobe activity and low activity in the brain’s left parietal lobe, an area responsible for integrating information that orients us in our environment. That area tells us where our body ends and the world begins.
If sensory input to that region of the brain is blocked by intense prayer, meditation, slow chanting, elegiac melodies, whispered ritual incantations, or other techniques, the brain may be prevented from distinguishing self and nonself, inner and outer world. When that area does not integrate such information from the outside world, the individual will feel merged into everything.
Admittedly, such studies involve exceptions—helmeted subjects, nuns, epileptics, mystics, Pentecostals, and others on the extremes. For example, when Pentecostals and Charismatic Christians speak in tongues, glossolalia, the opposite happens. There is low frontal lobe activity, which corresponds with feeling a loss of control, and high parietal activity, which corresponds with an intense experience of the self in relation to a god, an attachment figure.
With regard to modern neuroimaging investigations in more ordinary religious and nonreligious folks, “The Cognitive and Neural Foundations of Religious Belief,” a study published in the spring of 2009 from the National Institutes of Health by Dimitrios Kapogiannis and five other researchers, gives us stunning evidence to support the by-product theory of religion.
Test subjects’ brains were monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). While researchers read to them various statements about religion, subjects were asked to agree or disagree. Although no “god center” was found within the brain, the neuroimaging evidence did localize religious belief within the same brain networks that process capacities for theory of mind, intent, and emotion.
A comparison of results from both religious and nonreligious test subjects revealed no differences in the brain mechanisms used to assess the statements. Religiosity is not a separate function; it is integrated into the same brain networks used in social cognition. Religious belief is not sui generis—not unique. The study provides powerful evidence that religious beliefs engage well-known, ordinary, social brain circuits and mind mechanisms, and that these mechanisms mediate the adaptive functions already described herein.
Another recent study by Sam Harris also used fMRI and tested both religious believers and nonbelievers as they were presented with religious and nonreligious propositions. The believers’ brains showed activity in parts having to do with identity and with how the individual both sees and represents himself, regardless of the content presented to them.
Mirror Neurons
Mirror neurons, which exist in all of our brains, probably in many different areas, were discovered accidentally by researchers working with Macaque monkeys at the University of Parma in the 1980s and 1990s. Subsequent research has shown them to be active in humans as well. Their discovery is one of the most imp
ortant recent findings in neuroscience. These neurons fire both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action done by another animal. These neurons “mirror” the behavior of the other, as if the observer were performing the same action. So it really is true that “monkey see, monkey do.”
Let’s illustrate this. When you raise your right hand, nerve cells activate on the left side of your brain, in the area that controls right-arm movement. If you watch me do this, the same neurons will light up, even though your right arm remains still. If I stick a knife in my right hand, the pain perceiving areas of my left brain activate. If you see me do it, your brain reacts the same way.
But you do not need pain to prove this to yourself. If you watch someone suck on a lemon wedge, you will “taste” the bitter lemon and your mouth will water, just as if you were doing it yourself. Or try not to yawn when someone else does.
Fundraisers understand this at some level. They can recite all the statistics about child hunger in the world without much effect on the typical person, but if they show that person a picture of one starving child, he or she will be much more likely to donate. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti released a massive outpouring from around the world due to the horrific images and stories flashed across the media. We all could feel the pain of loss and hopelessness, and our heartstrings would not allow us to sit by and do nothing.
We often hear that if it weren’t for religion, we would be immoral and unethical. Mirror neurons resoundingly refute this. We literally feel other’s pain, and that induces in us empathy, distress, and the urge to help. Our brains are ethical by design. Religions utilize this, and, consciously or not, they utilize it in a way that can traumatize.
How many children are exposed to the distressing image of the crucifixion? Most Christians may think they have become used to it, but the evidence would suggest that every time they see it, at some level they still feel that pain, as if they were being nailed to the cross. That image is a very powerful manipulator of our basic ethical capacities.
Mel Gibson, the famously “traditionalist” Roman Catholic actor and director, took full-out advantage of this tendency in his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, which is so graphically violent that even some Christians blanched. Gibson was accused of both anti-Semitism and of prolonging the film’s violence for the express purpose of strengthening religious belief. The film spawned two documentaries and still has an active Web site that makes the film available—with added violence cut from the film’s theater release—as teaching tools for churches.
Some zealously religious people reportedly have, over the life of Christianity, even physically manifested the stigmata—the mysterious appearance on their hands, feet, and side of the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion. They are generally designated as saints, but it is more likely that their unconscious mind perceived that image so powerfully and so traumatically that it was physically manifested. This kind of mind power is not unknown to science. It is equally likely that they inflicted wounds to themselves while in a trancelike state, either knowingly or unknowingly.
As you read this there are dedicated researchers at work who continue to harness modern neuroscience to explore how our brains generate, accept, and spread religious beliefs. They will build on the work just described and one day they will give us a comprehensive neuroanatomy of religious belief in the brain. Count on it.
10
Lest Ye Be Judged
Educating Our Minds
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
—Charles Darwin
In 1918 William Jennings Bryan, former secretary of state and presidential candidate, began what Dudley Malone called his “duel to the death with evolution.” The battle culminated in the summer of 1925 with the famous Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. But it was not evolution that died. Clarence Darrow, the lead defense attorney, called Bryan to the stand as a hostile witness, then demolished Bryan’s foolish biblical literalism point by point. It ranks as one of the great cross-examinations in American legal history. Bryan had to know he had been humiliated; he died five days later.
Although John Scopes, who taught evolution in a high school, was convicted of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which expressly forbade the teaching of evolution, the conviction was later overturned and the case was not retried. So though Bryan technically won the court fight, he inevitably lost the battle.
The broader war, however, is not over. The Butler Act actually remained in effect for almost forty years and the legal issues surrounding the teaching of evolution remained dormant until another teacher challenged the act on First Amendment grounds in 1967.
Since the mid-1960s, there have been nineteen major challenges to the teaching of evolution, two before the United States Supreme Court. Many in the religious right have tried to derail the teaching of evolution by insisting that creation science and its most recent version, intelligent design, be taught side by side with Darwinian evolution. But every time the issue has reached a decisive point in our legal system, science has won.
As recently as late 2005, Judge John E. Jones III, a Pennsylvania federal district court judge, ruled against requiring the presentation of intelligent design as an alternative to Darwinian evolution in ninth-grade science classes. In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Kenneth Miller, a Brown University biologist and practicing Catholic, testified in support of the scientific integrity of evolution, stating that there is no conflict between religion and science. His words echoed the most famous speech from the Scopes Trial, the “academic freedom” speech by Clarence Darrow’s co-counsel, Dudley Malone, who noted no conflict between evolution science and religion. While the Dover case marked a great victory for science and science education, Judge Jones, in an otherwise exemplary decision, conformed to the viewpoint of Miller and Malone, making explicit reference to this presumed absence of conflict between science and religion.
Despite the political correctness of proclaiming no conflict between science and religion, the constant din of battles in school boards and educational committees across the United States (and, more recently, in the United Kingdom and Canada) is becoming deafening. There unquestionably is a conflict between religion and science.
For centuries religious dogma has made claims about the origins of the cosmos, the origins and nature of man, and the nature of the universe. Science has slowly but irrefutably disproved these claims and explanations, not without peril, as Galileo might tell you were he still living. The real search for truth shows that men and women in today’s world are an African ape, the last surviving hominid, Homo sapiens.
As we noted in chapter 3
, even Darwin had difficulty abandoning religion, and he had only a fraction of empirical evidence to consider, compared to what we now know.
The mental mechanisms that combine to make us vulnerable to religious belief are deeply ingrained. When they combine with societal indoctrination of children, often from birth, we face what might be the ultimate battle between unquestioned belief and intelligent inquiry. As Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist and former believer, has said, “In religion faith is a virtue; in science it’s a vice.”
It is also, as any former believer might tell you, so much easier to believe. Religions offer sets of rules and, when combined with all of our adaptive mental mechanisms, eliminates the need for serious thought about the issue. The 2010 Pew Poll on Religion actually found that agnostics and atheists were more knowledgeable about the world’s religions than believers were, which would seem to indicate a higher level of thought about the issues involved.
But there is hope. In a June 6, 2010, ABC News interview, physicist Steven Hawking, considered by many to be one of the greatest scientific minds of our or any time, said, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority; and
science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.” As most people know, without the aid of science, Hawking would long ago have succumbed to the ravages of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or “Lou Gehrig’s disease”) no matter how many people prayed for him. Instead his fine mind survives and continues to learn and teach, aided by an array of technological accoutrements.
As demonstrated in this book, science—specifically the cognitive and social neurosciences—shows us how and why human minds generate religious beliefs. More than an outline is apparent, and with each passing day, the psychological mechanisms, the neuroanatomy, and the neurochemistry of religion continue to come into sharper focus.
It will not be long before another John or Jane Scopes teaches the evolutionary cognitive neuroscience of religion in a public high school biology or psychology class. When those classes are taught, you can bet on the response by the fundamentalist Christians in the United States. They will take it to court. The case will ultimately be heard in a federal court, maybe even the Supreme Court. We should all welcome such a trial. It will generate an even wider audience for these discoveries about how human minds create and sustain religious belief. If history is any guide, science—in this case, the evolutionary cognitive neuroscience of religious belief—will win decisively.
Why We Believe in God(s) - Andy Thomson - Atheist Book Page 8