For millennia, humans have believed in superhuman, supernatural beings, and constructed elaborate behavioural patterns, called religions, around this belief. As long as there has been religion, there have also been individuals theorizing about the precise nature of this belief, which has lead to schisms in religious communities, genocide, homicide, prejudice, abuse, and war. The majority of this time, the disparities between these groups were mostly based on the foci of the belief, like the precise nature of the Holy Trinity, whether the buffalo-god or the tiger-god was the most powerful, how the true name of god is spelled, which historical figures were truly prophets, which were saviors, how best to worship Odin, whether a true virgin ought to be sacrificed, or if a cow is an acceptable substitution, and, for that matter, if the gods care whether the whole cow is burned, or only the inedible portions. The past few centuries, however, the validity of belief itself has been questioned, placing doubt on the existence of the beings being worshipped. Even more recently, there has arisen scientific evidence that the human Belief in Something Greater may be nothing more than phenomena in the brain, ranging from endogenous hallucinogens to epilepsy and brain damage.
The Need for Religion as a Survival Mechanism
Evolution is a fact of nature, and it is awesome. Let’s just put that out there. A lot is known about human evolution, although, granted, there are still many details left to be discovered. Let’s focus, for our purposes, on social structures that have evolved, and how they’ve affected religion. ‘Lower’ primates, such as the ones humans evolved from, have specific patterns of social organization, usually living in relatively large groups, with a single dominant male. This kind of structure works well for a foraging species, where food is plentiful, fruits and leaves just an arm’s length away. Without much competition for resources, and the sexual privileges reserved for the dominant male (apart from secretive ‘dates’ hidden from his knowledge), the group dynamics tend towards endless squabbles for better positions in the hierarchy. However, once such a foraging species makes the move towards a more predatory lifestyle, this infighting can no longer be supported. Desmond Morris, in The Naked Ape, analyses human religion as an animal behaviour:
‘… Religious activities consist of the coming together of large groups of people to perform repeated and prolonged submissive displays to appease a dominant individual. The dominant individual concerned takes many forms in different cultures, but always has the common factor of immense power… The dominant individual is usually, but not always, referred to as a god.’
In a cooperative hunting society, the dominant human ancestor needed the loyalty of the group, but if he was to lead a cohesive group in successful hunts, the other members had to want to help him, instead of plotting to take his position of dominance. So, there arose a super-dominant individual, the god of the group. Since this god was dominant over even the leader, and the leader participated in the submission displays, the leader became ‘one of the group’, and not a resented tyrant.
Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, who wrote Faces in the Clouds, touts another evolutionary theory for the emergence of religion. He explores the pervasiveness of seeing human traits in everyday, non-human phenomena, like mistaking the wind in the trees for whispers, the smoke from the World Trade Center attacks being perceived, by a surprising many, to form into an image of the face of the devil himself, to see Jesus in the burn patterns of your morning slice of toast, and other similar mis-perceptions. This trait arose from ancestors who would mistake things such as the snapping of a twig for an enemy, and how this would lead to an increased survival rate. Better to think that a sound is an enemy, and be proven wrong, than to write a sound off as a twig snapping, and be murdered in your bed. As this trait spread through the population it expanded to encompass pretty much everything, and so, religion ‘may be best understood as systematic anthropomorphism.’
This anthropomorphism is probably helped along by the human mind’s excellence at facial recognition, which helps babies identify faces at a very young age. Researchers have discovered that human newborns preferentially look at human faces to the rest of the body, and that facial recognition begins, in a healthy, non-autistic child, as soon as the baby opens its eyes. Up until 2 months of age, the baby reacts to any and all human faces positively, at about 2 months singling out its mother, and soon afterward reacting positively (smiling, gurgling, laughing) to other ‘friendly adults’, such as father, aunt, etc. The initial facial recognition is inborn, and later preferential recognition is learned. So, it seems that humans are all born with the ability to recognize their own species, and later on develop a preference for certain other humans. This is different for, say, geese and ducks, who famously imprint on the first thing they see after hatching, leading to amusing stories of geese on farms who believe that they are humans, or dogs, or pigs. Children start to recognize body structure at about 18 months of age, which is around the same time they start to recognize themselves in a mirror. So when it comes to human species-recognition, the face is the first thing we see.
A third theory, offered by Dawkins, explains the evolution of belief and religion as a holdover of a child’s survival mechanism. The idea is that a child who believes his parents and elders unconditionally will have a better chance of survival than a child who prefers to judge situations for himself. For example, an uncle telling a child not to swim in the pond, since there are alligators present, even if they are out of sight. The believing child will not swim in the pond, whereas the unbelieving child might swim in the pond, and, if there were indeed alligators, will probably get eaten. In the child’s mind, statements like ‘there are carnivores in the pond’ and ‘there is an invisible man you must appease’ are equivalent statements. The belief implicit in this child survival mechanism does not allow for shades of grey, or for differing levels of belief. So, the child who believes avoids the potential dangers of the pond, but will also grow up believing unfortunate things, which will then get told to his or her children in turn, who will believe the helpful along with the just plain silly.
So, religion could very logically have arisen as a survival mechanism, for an individual or for a group, or, more likely, for both. Well, creationists by definition refuse to believe in evolution, despite the truckloads of evidence. But then again, there are truckloads of evidence. So I’m inclined to discount anything the creationists say, and I’m counting this as science 1, God 0.
The Religious Workings of the Brain
Andrew Newberg, MD, conducted a study of how the brain acts during religious activities such as meditation, prayer, and religious ecstasies such as speaking in tongues by running SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) scans on the brains of over 100 volunteers, of differing belief systems. He took baseline scans of these people at rest, and scanned the brains again when the individuals had reached what they claimed as their most intense religious state, during prayer for Franciscan Nuns, meditation for Buddhist monks, and speaking in tongues for Pentecostal christians, for example. Although there was a lot of variance, a couple trends became apparent. All the religious experiences made the brain act in very similar ways, increasing activity in the prefrontal cortex (the area of the brain dealing with the ‘higher’ brain functions, such as attention, planning, reasoning, judgment, as well as personality and emotion), as well as decreasing activity in the parietal lobe (the area responsible for incorporating sensory data to build a coherent picture of the world, for spatial orientation, and for coordination of movement). This combination creates a sense of ‘oneness’ with the words, blurring the borders between ‘self’ and ‘everything’. These patterns of brain activity are also very similar to those observed during sexual orgasm, which produces similar feelings of well being and connectedness.
Newberg is a religious man (‘Fundamentalism, in and of itself, is benign and can be personally beneficial’), and has tried to show that the commonality between different religions’ brain activity somehow ‘proves’ god. He has gotten a lot of criticism from both sides of the debate. Scientists say that showing common activity patterns in the brain merely shows that human brains use the same techniques for the same phenomena, and that furthermore, people with different religious affiliations, including Buddhists who don’t believe in a God figure, all showed the same patterns. So, how, exactly, does that ‘prove’ God? On the other side, Richard Grigg, philosophy and religious studies professor at Sacred Heart University, claims that Newberg ‘provides absolutely no neurological evidence that the self opened up by meditation makes real contact with an external something that transcends it.’ Griggs sees this a failing in the research, and continues to say ‘the brain often provides a picture… that does not reflect reality.’ The brains scanned by Newberg were providing their humans with a ‘picture’ of oneness with god, and by Grigg’s own admission, this ‘does not reflect reality’. Science 2, God 0.
Hallucinating God
Rick Strassman, a biological psychiatrist, has investigated God in the brain, but not as a result of brain activity, but, rather, of endogenous hallucinogens. Specifically, N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), produced naturally in the pineal gland. Related to serotonin, it is the main component of ayahuasca, the extremely powerful hallucinogenic tea used by Amazon tribes to induce spirit visions, and also floods the brain when the body nears death, which may be the cause of the homogeneity of ‘near-death’ experiences. Strassman administered doses of DMT to 60 volunteers on 400 occasions, and recorded their experiences. These sessions induced undoubtedly ‘religious’ experiences, such as bliss, visitations by angels, saints, and spirits, traditional near-death experiences, involving hovering over the body, long tunnels of light, a sense of well-being, a certainty of life after death, peace, bliss, etc. There were also many recurrences of hallucinations involving aliens, elves, superior beings, and, for some reason, clowns.
These experiences were very similar to each other, and through all the literature of DMT experiences through the ages. So, does this mean that there exists a spiritual realm, into which we can peer during near-death experiences and through the opening of the mind’s eye with hallucinogens? No. The experiences showed similarities, but they were not all exactly the same. So DMT, as some have claimed, is not a god-given tool for revelation, but rather just an endogenous neurotransmitter that has hallucinogenic properties, which, when badly regulated or allowed to build up in the brain, may be the cause of ‘religious revelations’. How it arose and what its evolutionary or survivalistic benefits may be are not known, but because of the difficulty to research hallucinogens, it may be quite a while before we can find out. This research merely shows a similarity of reactions between individuals, within a range. Importantly, though, it also shows that a specific endogenous molecule can be responsible for inducing visions that religions have used as ‘revelations’ and proofs of a god. I’m calling this one science 3, God 0.
Inducing God
The next to last research project I will discuss in this paper is that done by Michael Persinger, a neuropsychologist. His theory suggests that actual experiences of sensing or seeing god or other equivalent supernatural entities boil down to a cerebral mistake. He thinks that temporal lobe epilepsy or injury in the temporal lobe may be a root cause of reported visitations, either by god, angels, saints, or aliens and otherworldly beings, and that this epilepsy may be temporarily inducible my electromagnetic pulses. This theory is heavily based on Wilder Penfield’s research as a neurosurgeon. Penfield stimulated patients’ brains in the 1950’s with electrical stimuli while they were conscious, and in this way mapped the sensory and motor cortices of the brain. He and other researchers after him found that deep stimulation of the temporal lobes frequently induced religious experiences, of seeing saints and angels and god, or of hearing these entities, or merely of a deep conviction that they were nearby, a feeling of their presence. Another indication that Persinger was heading down a promising road in his research was the evidence that Ellen White, founder of the Seventh Day Adventists, suffered a brain injury as a child, and thereafter suffered the hallucinations I mean, enjoyed the experiences sent by God, which led her to start the religious sect. Her brain injury occurred in the temporal lobe of her brain.
Tectonic plate shifting, solar flares, meteors, and other fluctuating electrical fields may all contribute to phenomena like UFO sightings and mass-experiences of religious events, such as the miracle of the falling sun at Fátima in 1917, when a large group of people swore that the sun ‘seemed to loosen itself from the firmament and advance threateningly upon the earth as if to crush us with its huge fiery weight.’ However, astronomers did not notice anything strange at the time, all these people had been staring directly at the sun for hours, because of a prophesy given by three young boys, and not everyone saw the same thing.
Persinger has built a machine, a ‘God Helmet’ that uses mild electromagnetic pulses to stimulate the temporal lobes, mimicking temporal lobe epilepsy. Over 600 people have experiences the God Helmet, and a majority experienced things like out of body floating, visitations with God, angels, extraterrestrials, and a connection with the universe. There is a large variance in the results, because, as Dr. Persinger states, temporal lobe sensitivity fluctuates between individuals, and even throughout the day based on factors such as stress, depression, relaxation, anxiety and other moods. The people who volunteered ranged from the very religious to the very atheistic, and some religious people felt nothing, while some atheists had very intense experiences.
The very idea that inducing a religious experience through electromagnetic stimulation is one that is very uncomfortable for everyone. On the one hand, the religious community is livid because this pretty much disproves that religious visions can only be induced by god himself, but on the other hand, being able to induce religious visions at will can be very dangerous. Religion, even without visions and personal experiences, is a very strong polarizing and even brainwashing tool, but imagine planting god-given instructions into the mind of anyone. Many psychotics and serial killers embarked on their bloody work because God told them to. This helmet could potentially be the most dangerous mind-control device conceivable. The research, however, for our purposes gives science another point, and God finishes with no points in his favour.
The God Gene?
There is also some emergent research into the genetics of ‘religiosity’. Dean Hamer, a molecular biologist who has done research on the genetics of homosexuality, cancer, and cigarette addiction, has identified the VMAT2 gene as a factor in religiosity. He and his team asked monozygotic and dizygotic twins to self-assess their spirituality, specifically, their self-transendence, which is the tendency to lose one’s self in repetitive activities, to sense a connectedness with the world, and to put more emphasis on the importance of things other than themselves. The VMAT2 (vesicular monoamine transporter 2) gene correlated strongly with increased self-transendence. Since monoamines have much to do with emotions and even spiritual states of mind, Hamer concludes that genes (specifically, VMAT2) affecting the production of these neurotransmitters by proxy also affect religiosity.
Whether there is or is not one specific gene associated with belief in god, there is some strong evidence that genetics do play a factor in belief. In adult male mono- and di-zygotic twin studies done by Laura Koenig and others at University of Minnesota, hundreds of pairs of twins were asked to self-report on spirituality and religiousness. The researchers found that environment as well as genetics played roles in those traits. Specifically, that during childhood environment plays a much larger role in religious belief, and that during adolescence the individuals’ religiosity is determined more by genetic factors. The monozygotic twins, regardless of upbringing, showed religious similarity, while the dizygotic twins grew more religiously dissimilar over time.
Conclusion
There is much more research being done on why and how humans conceive of god, and the mechanisms of belief. Faith is, after all, defined as a belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence, and is even staunchly held to be true even in the face of evidence to the contrary. This can also be said to describe schizophrenic beliefs. Indeed, any person the modern day who claims to have been visited by a supernatural or superhuman entity is immediately evaluated for mental illness. Why should we believe that a thousand years ago these were true visions, when we know that they are caused by mental defects? The evidence against God-sent visions is overwhelmingly in favour of the non-existence of God, or any other supernatural being. However, it is still very controversial, and the science is constantly fighting an uphill battle.
The main rationalization against taking science seriously when it comes to religious things is the idea that science shouldn’t impinge on the domain of religion. However, if there is in fact a God, wouldn’t that change everything we know about the physical world, that which does concern science? If prayers could cure cancer, there should be medical research into that, because chemotherapy has very nasty side effects. If God can change the laws of physics so that sun in Portugal dances and falls, but 11 kilometers away nothing untoward is happening with it, then everything we know about astrophysics and optics and the solar system is completely worthless. If there is a God, and, as is commonly held, He has a hand in everything that happens to everybody, then that is the most depressing idea I’ve ever heard, and what would be the point of continuing to live?
It’s a mistake for scientists, as many do, to agree that science has no right to examine anything on the religious domain. Handling believers with kid gloves is not going to make searching for the nature of our world any easier, it will just keep giving them excuses to promote ignorance, bigotry, prejudice, and violence. And anyway, they haven’t abided by their own rules, have they? They keep using pseudoscience to further their own agenda (creationism and Intelligent Design, anyone?) to undermine scientifically hard-won facts and data and evidence, and soon as science asks a perfectly valid question, they scream foul. There is no God, and science is the only way to prove it. And if science happens to prove that there is, in fact, a God, well then, I’ll be first in line for communion.
Sources (In case you want to see where I get my info)
The God Delusion Richard Dawkins, Houghton Mifflin, 2006
The Naked Ape Desmond Morris, McGraw Hill, 1967
Faces in the Clouds Stewart Guthrie, Oxford university press, 1993
“The God Experiments” John Horgan, Discover presents The Brain, Fall 2009
“This is Your Brain on God” Jack Hitt, Wired Magazine issue 7.11, Nov. 1999
“God vs. Science” Dan Cray, Nov. 5, 2006 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1555132-1,00.html
“A Religious History of American Neuroscience” Leigh Eric Schmidt, Jun. 24, 2008 http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/scienceenvironment/317/a_religious_history_of_american_neuroscience
“How Our Brains are Wired for Belief” event transcript, May 5, 2008
“Reducing Andrew Newberg” Mike Martin, no date
“Holy Visions Elude Scientists” Raj Persuad, Mar. 20, 2003 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3306312/Holy-visions-elude-scientists.html
“Neurotheology – With God in Mind” Victoria Powell, 2004
“3D Brain” iPhone App, Produced by the Dolan DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
