God on the Brain
About a decade ago when I began research on the question of why people believe in God, I asked a colleague in a religious studies program at Occidental College (where I was teaching at the time) to recommend the latest pathbreaking scientific work in this area. “William James’s 1890 Varieties of Religious Experience,” he responded sardonically, explaining that in his opinion the field was largely moribund.
That’s an exaggeration, of course, but his point was that with the exception of a handful of psychologists teaching at theological seminaries, mainstream social and cognitive scientists had largely ignored the question. This has changed dramatically in the past decade, as the renewed debate on the relationship of science and religion has exploded onto the cultural landscape and scientists from a variety of fields have jumped into the fray. Much of this research, along with my own, appeared in the first edition of this book. In this new chapter for the revised second edition I would like to review, critique, and comment on the research that has come out since the original edition of How We Believe.
THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF GOD
I begin with a book with the intriguing title Why God Won’t Go Away, by Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, both medical doctors, with Newberg holding joint appointments in radiology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and D’Aquili, now deceased, a professor of psychiatry at Penn. God won’t go away, the authors argue, because the religious impulse is rooted in the biology of the brain. When Buddhist monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray, for example, their brain scans (these scientists used the single photon emission computed tomography, or SPECT) indicate strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a bundle of neurons the authors have dubbed the OAA, or Orientation Association Area, whose job it is to orient the body in physical space (people with damage to this area have a hard time negotiating their way around a house). When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly there is a sharp distinction between self and non-self. When OAA is in sleep mode—as in deep meditation and prayer—that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy. Is this what happens to monks who feel a sense of oneness with the universe, or with nuns who feel the presence of God?
Yes, say the authors, who believe they have “uncovered solid evidence that the mystical experiences of their subjects—the altered states of mind they described as the absorption of the self into something larger—were not the result of emotional mistakes or simple wishful thinking, but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events … .” It is an odd distinction to make, which the authors do throughout the book. “A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to all spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfirings of a bundle of nerve cells.”
Indeed, I am one such skeptic, but I fail to see the difference (outside a minor linguistic distinction) between a delusion and a decrease in OAA activity. In this case, delusion is simply a descriptive term for what happens when the OAA shuts down and the brain loses the ability to distinguish self from non-self. But it is still all in the brain. Unless, of course, you believe that these neurologically triggered mystical experiences actually serve as a conduit to a real spiritual world where God (or what the authors call the “Absolute Unitary Being”) resides. That is, in fact, what they believe: “ … our research has left us no choice but to conclude that the mystics may be on to something, that the mind’s machinery of transcendence may in fact be a window through which we can glimpse the ultimate realness of something that is truly divine.” Thankfully they are honest enough to admit that this conclusion “is a terrifically unscientific idea” and that to accept it “we must second-guess all our assumptions about material reality.” In the end they do just that.
The strength of Why God Won’t Go Away lies in the original research conducted by the authors, and the brain correlates of mystical states they have identified, that together go a long way toward explicating the experiences of religious mystics. For the billions of believers who have never had a mystical experience, however, explanations for their faith are more likely grounded in the psychology and sociology of belief where, for example, the number one predictor of anyone’s religious faith is that of their parents, modified by siblings and peer groups, mentors, education, age, cultural experiences, and other variables (see Chapter 4). This is not a critique, since the authors focused their attention on the neurological correlates of belief only, but the book does unravel when they seek an evolutionary origin for religion.
As compelling as such evolutionary explanations are—and surely this must be where the ultimate reason for belief lies (see Chapter 7)—much of the authors’ case depends on explanation in the just-so storytelling mode. (Critics of sociobiology will find much fodder for their cannons here.) We are told, for example, that religion alleviated the “existential gloom” facing our paleolithic ancestors who were “taken off their game by the soul-sapping notion that no matter how hard they struggled, how skillfully they hunted, how fiercely they battled, or how creatively they thought, death was always waiting, and that their lives added up to nothing in the end. The promises of religion protected early humans from such self-defeating fatalism, and allowed them to struggle tirelessly but optimistically for survival.” That’s interesting. Prove it.
The authors also fall into the trap of thinking of human evolution as almost entirely centered around men on the hunt, a paradigm abandoned decades ago in favor of more sophisticated models of social evolution that stress the importance of relationships, hierarchy, dominance, cooperation, reciprocal altruism, and various forms of social exchange. It is out of this paradigm, in conjunction with psychosocial models, that a fuller explanation for why God won’t go away is to be found (again, see Chapter 7).
In related research, a story that broke as I was writing this chapter came out in the pages of the journal Nature. Swiss neuroscientists Olaf Blanke, Margitta Seeck, Stephanie Ortigue, and Theodor Landis, from the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne, through electrical brain stimulation of a forty-three-year old woman who was suffering from severe epileptic seizures, discovered a part of the brain that can induce Out-of-Body Experiences. Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) are typically associated with Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), and have a long tradition of harboring religious and spiritual overtones, as if the experience itself was a conduit to a transcendent state or spiritual dimension. The scientists repeatedly generated OBEs in this woman through electrical stimulation of her brain’s right angular gyrus, part of the temporal lobe that is thought to play a role in the way that the brain analyzes sensory information and monitors the difference between self and non-self (as in the Orientation Association Area, or OAA, described in the research above). Blanke and associates believe that when the angular gyrus misfires it can produce the sense of floating outside of the body: “Stimulation at this site also elicited illusory transformations of the patient’s arms and legs (complex somatosensory responses) and whole-body displacements (vestibular responses), indicating that out-of-body experiences may reflect a failure by the brain to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information.” Figure 1 shows the area of the brain electrically stimulated to produce OBEs.
Figure 1. Three-dimensional surface reconstruction of the right hemisphere of the brain from magnetic-resonance imaging.
In initial mild stimulations, the patient reported that she was “sinking into the bed” or “falling from a height.” More intense stimulation led her to report “I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk.” Two additional stimulations induced “an instantaneous feeling of ‘lightness’ and ‘floating’ about two meters above the bed, close to the ceiling.” They then asked the patient to stare at her outstretched legs while they stimulated her brain. This led her to seeing her legs “becoming shorter.” When they had her first bend her legs and then applied the electrical stimulation, “she reported that her legs appeared to be moving quickly towards her face, and [she] took evasive action.” The same thing happened with her arms when the experiment was duplicated. Blanke and associates concluded: “These observations indicate that OBEs and complex somatosensory illusions can be artificially induced by electrical stimulation of the cortex. The association of these phenomena and their anatomical selectivity suggest that they have a common origin in body-related processing, an idea that is supported by the restriction of these visual experiences to the patient’s own body … . It is possible that the experience of dissociation of self from the body is a result of failure to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information.”
This is an exceptionally important study that goes a long way toward providing a normal explanation for what has long been considered to be paranormal phenomena, associated not only with near-death experiences, but with remote viewing, alien abductions, auditory and visual hallucinations (particularly, for our purposes here, those affiliated with religious epiphanies), and other mental ephemera and psychological anomalies. This study should stimulate other neuroscientists to explore adjacent regions of the brain to see if they can replicate other such phenomena, such as alien abductions and visual and auditory hallucinations. Although caution is called for because the subject pool was only one, all our brains are wired in a similar manner so there is little reason to think that stimulation of this brain region in other patients will not corroborate the finding. In fact, last December the British medical journal Lancet published a Dutch study in which 344 cardiac patients were resuscitated from clinical death. About 12 percent reported Near-Death Experiences where they saw the light at the end of a tunnel. Some even reported speaking to dead relatives. If these studies are corroborated it means yet another blow against those who believe that the mind and spirit are somehow separate from the brain, from pure neural activity. In reality, all experience is mediated by the brain, and these studies are another step in the long historical tradition where mysterious phenomena are subsumed under the blanket of science and naturalism.
Paranormal beliefs in general, in fact, may be related to brain chemistry. The July 2002 issue of New Scientist magazine reported the proceedings from a meeting of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies in Paris, in which a study was presented showing that people with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none. The research was conducted by neurologist Peter Brugger of the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. Brugger’s subjects consisted of twenty self-professed believers and twenty self-confessed skeptics. His methodology was to briefly flash images on a screen to see if there was a difference between believers and skeptics on what they thought they observed. In one experiment real faces and scrambled faces were shown. In another experiment real and scrambled words were flashed. Brugger found that believers were much more likely than skeptics to see a word or face when there was not one. Skeptics were more likely to miss real faces and words when they appeared on the screen. The dopamine variable was added when Brugger gave his subjects L-dopa, normally used to relieve the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease by increasing levels of dopamine in the brain. (Dopamine is also involved in the brain’s reward and motivation system and has some relevance for the treatment of drug addiction.) Although both groups made more mistakes under the influence of L-dopa, skeptics became more likely to interpret scrambled words or faces as the real thing. This finding suggests that paranormal thoughts and beliefs may be associated with high levels of dopamine in the brain. The significant effect is that L-dopa makes skeptics less skeptical. By contrast, and surprisingly, L-dopa did not seem to increase the tendency of believers to see coincidences or relationships between the words and images. Brugger concluded that this could mean that there is a plateau effect for believers, with more dopamine having relatively little effect above their belief threshold.
GODS, ANGELS, AND ESP: WHAT PEOPLE BELIEVE ABOUT THE SUPERNATURAL
It is possible that studies like these will begin to explain at least some of the reasons why people believe in paranormal, supernatural, and spiritual entities. Just how many believe in such ephemera? According to the Scripps Howard News Service, in a study conducted in collaboration with Ohio University, Americans overwhelmingly believe in the angels that heralded the birth of Jesus 2000 years ago and think they still walk the Earth today. In a survey of 1,127 adults, one out of every five Americans believes he or she has seen an angel or knows someone who has. Of those 1,127 adults polled, 77 percent answered “Yes” to the question: “Do you believe angels, that is, some kind of heavenly beings who visit Earth, in fact exist?” Another 73 percent believe angels still “come into the world even in these modern days.” Belief in angelic beings cuts across almost all ranges of education, income, and lifestyle. Women and young people are slightly more likely to believe than are men or older Americans, but a majority of almost every demographic group are angel believers.
Consider the following account given by Catherine Forbes, seventy-two, of Derby, Kansas: “Yes, I absolutely believe in angels. I met one.” The circumstances of this experience are telling. After the death of her husband, Forbes decided to take a trip to Jerusalem with a friend in 1953. On their way through the Dallas airport they got lost and became anxious. “All of a sudden, the nicest voice I ever heard said, ‘May I help you?’ I turned around and saw a clean-cut young man, just the most handsome, beautiful man. He picked up my luggage and showed me where to go and which people I was to be traveling with. I turned around to thank him, and he had absolutely disappeared.” Although there was no flash of light, the helpful young man had disappeared from sight in an apparently impossible fashion, she said. “I know some people will think I’m off my rocker, but I know what I saw.”
There is no doubt that Forbes’s experience was a real one. The question, however, is: was the source of her experience inside or outside the brain? The scientific evidence shows that such experiences are brain-generated, mediated by past experiences (in the form of memories) and the context in which they occur (in this case the airport during an episode of extreme grief). There is no need to call forth supernatural explanations when natural ones will do.
Yet, the angel belief poll was emblematic of the larger trend in beliefs in spiritual and paranormal phenomena. The Gallup News Service, for example, reported on June 8, 2001, the results from a survey they conducted on paranormal and spiritual beliefs. “The results suggest a significant increase in belief in a number of these experiences over the past decade, including in particular such Halloween-related issues as haunted houses, ghosts, and witches. Only one of the experiences tested has seen a drop in belief since 1990: devil possession. Overall, half or more of Americans believe in two of the issues: psychic or spiritual healing, and extrasensory perception (ESP), and a third or more believe in such things as haunted houses, possession by the devil, ghosts, telepathy, extraterrestrial beings having visited earth, and clairvoyance.”
There were interesting differences in beliefs by various subpopulations. For example:
Age: Younger Americans—those 18–29—are much more likely than those who are older to believe in haunted houses, in witches, in ghosts, that extraterrestrials have visited Earth, and in clairvoyance. There is little significant difference in belief in the other items by age group. Those thirty and older are somewhat more likely to believe in possession by the devil than are the younger group (perhaps as a result of seeing The Exorcist?). Gender: Women are slightly more likely than men to believe in ghosts and that people can communicate with the dead. Men, on the other hand, are more likely than women to believe in only one of the dimensions tested: that extraterrestrials have visited Earth at some point in the past.Education: Americans with the highest levels of education are more likely than others to believe in the power of the mind to heal the body. On the other hand, belief in three of the phenomena tested goes up as the educational level of the respondent goes down: possession by the devil, astrology, and haunted houses. Importance of Religion: Perhaps not surprisingly, the major difference in belief in these phenomena by importance of religion focuses on the devil: 55 percent of those who say religion is very important in their daily lives say they believe in devil possession, compared to just 14 percent of those who say religion is “not very” important to them. Religion is also correlated with belief in extraterrestrials: Those for whom religion is very important are less likely to say they believe in beings from other worlds that may have visited this planet than are those who are less religious.
The change in belief percentages over the past decade are seen in Figure 2.
The National Science Foundation found similar percentages of belief in pseudoscience as the Gallup Pollsters did in belief in the paranormal. In April 2002, the NSF published their biennial report on the state of science understanding and public attitudes toward science, which included a section on the relationships between science and pseudoscience. The results were alarming:
30 percent of adult Americans believe that UFOs are space vehicles from other civilizations60 percent believe in ESP40 percent think that astrology is scientific32 percent believe in lucky numbers70 percent accept magnetic therapy as scientific88 percent agree that alternative medicine is a viable means of treating illness
The NSF survey summarized the overall findings on pseudoscience this way:
Belief in pseudoscience, including astrology, extrasensory perception (ESP), and alien abductions, is relatively widespread and growing. For example, in response to the 2001 NSF survey, a sizable minority (41 percent) of the public said that astrology was at least somewhat scientific, and a solid majority (60 percent) agreed with the statement “some people possess psychic powers or ESP.” Gallup polls show substantial gains in almost every category of pseudoscience during the past decade. Such beliefs may sometimes be fueled by the media’s miscommunication of science and the scientific process.
As for alternative or complementary medicine, the NSF report highlighted their findings as such:
Alternative medicine, defined here as any treatment that has not been proven effective using scientific methods, has been gaining in popularity. One study documented a 50 percent increase in expenditures for alternative therapies and a 25 percent increuse in the use of alternativa therapies between 1990 and 1997. Also, more than two-thirds of those responding to the NSF survey said that magnetic therapy was at least somewhat scientific, although no scientific evidence exists to support claims about its effectiveness in treating pain or any other ailment.
Of the various alternative modalities, the survey reported magnets as the most popular. “Among those who reported using energy healing, the most frequently cited technique involved the use of magnets. In 2001, NSF survey respondents were asked whether or not they had heard of magnetic therapy, and if they had, whether they thought that it was very scientific, sort of scientific, or not at all scientific. A substantial majority of survey respondents (77 percent) had heard of magnetic therapy. Among all who had heard of this treatment, 14 percent said it was very scientific and another 54 percent said it was sort of scientific. Only 25 percent of those surveyed answered correctly, that is, that it is not at all scientific.”
Education by itself is no paranormal prophylactic. Although belief in ESP decreased from 65 percent among high school graduates to 60 percent among college graduates, and belief in magnetic therapy dropped from 71 percent among high school graduates to 55 percent among college graduates, that still leaves over half fully endorsing such claims! And for embracing alternative medicine, the percentages actually increase, from 89 percent for high school grads to 92 percent for college grads.
On a positive note the survey revealed that “for the first time, a majority (53 percent) of NSF survey respondents answered ‘true’ to the statement ‘human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,’ bringing the United States more in line with other industrialized countries in response to this question.” The report also noted, however, that the teaching of creationism still finds majority support, in that “although a majority (60 percent) of people surveyed in a Gallup poll were opposed to the Kansas State Board of Education’s decision to delete evolution from the state’s science standards (a decision that was later reversed), more than two-thirds favored teaching both evolution and creationism in U.S. public school classrooms.”
We can glean a deeper cause of this contradiction in another statistic: 70 percent of Americans still do not understand the scientific process, defined in the study as grasping three concepts: probability, the experimental method, and hypothesis testing. One solution is more and better science education, as indicated by the fact that 53 percent of Americans with a high level of science education (nine or more high school and college science/math courses) understand the scientific process, compared to 38 percent with a middle level (six to eight such courses) science education, and 17 percent with a low level (less than five such courses). The NSF report concluded:
Although more than 50 percent of NSF survey respondents in 2001 had some understanding of probability, and more than 40 percent were familiar with how an experiment is conducted, only one-third could adequately explain what it means to study something scientifically. Understanding how ideas are investigated and analyzed is a sure sign of scientific literacy. Such critical thinking skills can also prove advantageous in making well-informed choices at the ballot box and in other daily living activities.
GOD AND EVOLUTION
The key here is teaching how science works, not just what science has discovered. An article published in Skeptic, Volume 9, Number 3, presents the results of a study that found no correlation between science knowledge (facts about the world) and paranormal beliefs. The authors, W. Richard Walker, Steven J. Hoekstra, and Rodney J. Vogl, concluded: “Students that scored well on these [science knowledge] tests were no more or less skeptical of pseudoscientific claims than students that scored very poorly. Apparently, the students were not able to apply their scientific knowledge to evaluate these pseudoscientific claims. We suggest that this inability stems in part from the way that science is traditionally presented to students: Students are taught what to think but not how to think.”
In no area of human knowledge is this observation more true, and critical thinking in such desperate demand, than when scientific claims appear to conflict with religious tenets. Here I am thinking of the creation-evolution controversy, which continues to inflame many religious Americans as they try to come to grips with the findings of modern science. (Indeed, the day I finished writing this chapter, the Cobb County, Georgia, board of education voted to include a sticker in all public high school biology textbooks indicating that evolution is just one theory among many to explain the development of life, and that creationism and Intelligent Design Theory should also be included in the curriculum of biology classes.) In March of 2001 the Gallup News Service reported the results of a survey that found 45 percent of Americans agree with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” while 37 percent preferred a blended belief that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,” and a paltry 12 percent accepted the standard scientific theory that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”
In a forced choice between the “theory of creationism” and the “theory of evolution,” 57 percent chose creationism against only 33 percent for evolution (10 percent said they were “unsure”). Only 33 percent of Americans think that the theory of evolution is “well supported by evidence,” while slightly more (39 percent) believe that it is not well supported, and that it is “just one of many theories.” One reason for these disturbing results can be seen in the additional finding that only 34 percent of Americans consider themselves to be “very informed” about evolution. Clearly the 66 percent who do not consider themselves well informed have not withheld their judgment on the theory’s veracity.
This fact was brought to light for me in the overwhelming response to my February 2002 Scientific American column on evolution and Intelligent Design creationism. Where I typically receive a couple of dozen letters a month, for this one no less than 134 were submitted (117 men, 4 women, 13 unknowns—a ratio equivalent to the magazine’s gender split).
When I first started writing for Scientific American I found reading critical letters mildly disconcerting, until I hit upon the idea that these are a form of data to be mined for additional information on what people believe and why—an informal vox populi. Conducting a content analysis of all 134 letters, I discovered a pattern within the cacophonous chaos that gave me additional insight into why people reject the theory of evolution. Initially I read through them all quickly, coding them into about two dozen one-line categories that summed up the reader’s point. I then coalesced these into six taxonomic classes, and reread all the letters carefully, placing each into one or more of the six (many readers made more than one point), giving a total of 163 ratings from which the following percentages were derived:
Excerpts from the letters illuminate each taxon. (Although most were friendly and reasonable, one fellow opined that my column “could have been written in 1939 by a Nazi,” while another said that “Michael Shermer must not only be a sceptic but also stupid in the 3rd degree the way he talks about ‘Intelligent Design.”’) I was initially surprised to discover that only 7 percent agreed with me about the veracity of evolution (and the emptiness of creationism), with one reader going so far as to claim, “The defenders of science behave too well. No amount of evolution education will counter the deliberate, sly, selective ignorance of creation ‘science.’” Nearly double that number argued that evolution is God’s method of creating life, such as one correspondent who agreed “that evolution is right—but still I see GOD in the will and cunning intention in the genetic system of all living organisms and in the system and order present in the laws of nature. Seeing all the diversity in the methods of camoflage in animals and plants for an example, I know that there is a will behind it.” Another reader sees creation and evolution “as complementary to each other. Put simply, since all parts of the universe follow intelligible law as educed through human intelligence, and such a law is a principle or cause, it follows that the universe as a whole must be the effect of the operation of a singular all-encompassing Principle.”
Critics of evolution in the third taxon hauled out an old canard every evolutionary biologist has heard: “I want to point out that evolution is only a theory.” And: “To my knowledge evolution is just a theory that has never been put to the test successfully and is far from being conclusive.” That evolution requires faith to believe (the fourth category) found many adherents among readers, such as these: “There are so many vast chasms that evolutionists paint over with broad strokes, they act as if their faith is fact as often as a creationist.” Or: “On my view, a key part of being a rational skeptic is consistent dedication to the standards and methods of critical thinking and logic. In his zeal to defend his faith in evolutionary theory, Dr. Shermer violates those standards.” My favorite letter in this class echoed a standard refrain we hear often at Skeptic magazine about inadequate or misplaced skepticism (with a cc list that included “Pres. George W. Bush, V.P. Dick Cheney, and The Members of The US Congress, American Academy of Science; Dr. Dean Edell, America’s Doctor; Dr. Laura, America’s Jewish Mother”!): “I applaud your SKEPTICISM when it comes to Creationism and Astrology and ‘Psychic Phenomena’; but how can you be so THICK HEADED when it comes to the GLARING WEAKNESSES of Darwinian Evolution??? Honestly, you come across as both a ‘brain-washed apologist’ and a ‘High School Cheerleader’ for Darwinian Evolution.” Charles Darwin, he’s our man. If he can’t do it no one can.
The penultimate taxon was that Intelligent Design creationism must be true because life is simply too complex to be explained by evolution. For example: “ID theorists also see a variety of factors, constants, and relationships in the construction of the universe which are so keenly well-adjusted to the existence of matter and life that they find it impossible to deny the implication of intelligent purpose in those factors. Materialists see the same thing and wave their hands vaguely and mutter mystical phrases about ‘Anthropic Principles.’ What the materialist calls the anthropic principle, the IDer calls the Designer.”
Intriguingly, the greatest number of responses fell into a noncommittal position where readers expounded on the relationship of science and religion, often presenting their own theories of evolution and creation as alternatives to the models under discussion. For example: “Evolution is not a theory. It is an analytic approach. There are three elements of science: operation, observation, and model. An observation is the result of applying an operation, and a model is chosen for its utility in explaining, predicting, and controlling observations, balanced against the cost of using it.” And: “There is nothing that scientists have ever discovered, or could ever discover, that can prove or disprove the existence of God. The Bible is a tool for the illumination of the heart, not the revelation of observable facts. Thus there is no conflict between the Bible and science—there is even an amazing synergy between the two—when each is kept in its proper place.”
It has been my experience that correspondents in this final classification, like questioners in the Q & A sessions of lectures I present at colleges and universities, are less interested in my opinion and more intent on launching their own ideas into the cultural ether. With no subject is this more apparent than for evolution; it is here we face the ultimate question of genesis and exodus: where did we come from and where are we going?
FAITH, RELIGION, AND THE SOUL: WHY RELIGION MATTERS
Since the initial publication of How We Believe, books on religion, particularly on the relationship of science and religion and on the origin and purpose of religion, have tumbled off the presses in droves. There is money to be made in the religion publishing business, not the least of which is due to the fact that there are so many believers. Oxford University Press’s newly released second edition of its World Christian Encyclopedia reports that of the earth’s 6.1 billion humans fully 5.1 billion of them, or 84 percent, declare themselves believers who belong to some form of organized religion. Christians dominate at just a shade under two billion adherents (Catholics count for half of those), with Muslims at 1.1 billion, Hindus at 811 million. Buddhists at 359 million, and ethnoreligionists (animists and others in Asia and Africa primarily) accounting for most of the remaining 265 million. But as the editors note, such overall numbers tell us little. There are, in fact, 10,000 distinct religions of ten general varieties (in decreasing size and inclusiveness of cosmoreligion, macroreligion, megareligion, and so forth), each one of which can be further subdivided and classified. For example, Christians (classified as members of a cosmoreligion because it is open to all) may be found among 33,820 different denominations.
The variety of non-Christian religions is also stunning, with worldwide distribution outstripping Christian religions despite the tireless efforts of evangelists to convert as many souls to Christ as possible. (One irritation with this encyclopedia is its Christian bias—its senior editor is Reverend David B. Barrett, who heads the Global Evangelization Movement, making one wonder if all this data is being collected to calibrate how long it will take to reduce this rich diversity to one cosmo-macro-mega Christian religion.) One table, for example, tracks the number of Christians (69,000) and non-Christians (147,000) by which the world will increase over the next 24 hours. A diagram reveals the global convert/defector ratio, adjusted for births and deaths, indicating that the sphere of evangelism continues to expand into non-Christian belief space.
A visual companion to the encyclopedia is Oxford’s New Historical Atlas of Religion in America, which is packed with 260 color maps and charts printed on thick glossy paper to enhance the fine detail and shades of geographical differences between and among the various religious sects that inhabit the landscape. This new edition of religious historian Edwin Gaustad’s 1962 classic includes the arrival of religious colonialists to the New World over the past four decades, including Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, and especially Muslims, who have enjoyed a fourfold increase in America. Likewise, the number of Baha’is has risen nearly proportional to the membership drop in many mainstream religions, such as Episcopalians, Methodists, and Presbyterians. By contrast, “Southern Baptists” might better be labeled “All Over America Baptists,” as their ranks have swollen well into the northern territories. Likewise, the “Bible Belt” is now wider than a weightlifter’s leather girdle. Their ranks have even penetrated the formerly impenetrable Mormon-dominated Utah; but, in turn, in three-quarters of the counties west of the Rockies, the Mormon church ranks in the top three religious denominations. Most revealing are the historical maps and charts that track the changing demographics of American religion. Conservative pundits who proclaim that we need to return to the good old days when America was a Christian nation better look closely at Figure 4.16, showing that church membership as a percentage of the U.S. population over the past century and a half has increased from 25 percent to 65 percent. If America is going to hell in an immoral handbasket, it is happening when church membership is at an all-time high, and a greater percentage of Americans (90–95 percent) proclaim belief in a God than ever before.
Why do so many people believe and belong? One answer is that it is good for us. Studies show that religious people live longer and healthier lives, recover from illness and disease faster, and report higher levels of happiness. While most of these effects are probably due to lifestyle, diet, and exercise (e.g., religious people drink and smoke less), there is something about having family, friends, and a community that enhances life and longevity. An interesting book entitled Aging with Grace explores this thesis through a remarkable study of 678 nuns ranging in age from 75 to 104, lovingly told by Dr. David Snowdon, once a Catholic altar boy and now a distinguished epidemiologist and the director of the Nun Study at the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging at the University of Kentucky. As the book of Proverbs proclaims, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.” It turns out that a powerful predictor of which nuns would live the longest was the positive emotional content contained in their youthful writings, even when the analysis was controlled for age, education, and linguistic ability. The lowest emotional group averaged 86.6 years old at death, the highest emotional group averaged 93.5 years old at death. Snowdon also argues that profound faith, along with prayer and contemplation, “have a positive influence on long-term health and may even speed the healing process,” but then oddly concludes: “We do not need a study to affirm their importance to the quality of life.” Oh yes we do, if we want to make this a scientific claim. In fact, prayer and healing is now a hot field of study in medicine, but to date the studies have been severely flawed, failing to control for intervening variables and lacking consistent findings across comparative studies. I have no doubt that Snowdon is right about the importance of community and close relationships, but you don’t need God or religion for that. All humans benefit from any type of social commitment because we are a social primate species.
There is another side to this story that recent research is illuminating, and that is that religious beliefs are not always a source of comfort during illness. In fact, in some cases, they may actually increase the risk of dying. A study conducted at Duke University Medical Center and Bowling Green State University, whose results were published in the August 13, 2002, issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, found that of the nearly 600 older hospital patients (95 percent of whom were Christian) negative feelings evoked by religious beliefs sometimes predicted mortality. Some of the key variables that increased the risk of death were feelings of being “abandoned or punished” by God, “believing the devil caused the illness,” or “feeling abandoned by one’s faith community.” “The study reminds us that religion … can, at times, be a source of problems in itself,” the lead author, Kenneth Pargament, concluded. Additional findings included: patients who reported feeling alienated from God or who blamed the devil had a 19 to 28 percent increased risk of dying during the following two years, although (and surprisingly) there was no association of gender, race, diagnosis, brain function, independence, depression, or quality of life with mortality. Duke University’s Dr. Harold Koenig noted that anger and frustration were normal grief responses when people discovered health problems. Those who were religious and were able to reconnect with God and their spiritual feelings could use those resources for support. But those who continued to experience conflict could be making their health worse. “Those people are in trouble and doctors need to know about it. Doctors need to be assessing their patients for these kinds of feelings.”
What we’re really after here in our search for scientific answers to the question of why people believe in God is the undergirding beneath the panoply of religious faiths. For Michael Barnes, a professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, the commonality is to be found in the thinking process itself. In his cleverly argued book, Stages of Thought, Barnes uses Piaget’s stage theory of development to argue that cultures, like individuals, develop in stages from easier cognitive skills to harder ones, and that not only religion and faith, but science and reason have followed this general pattern. Both religion and science evolved from simple to complex because complex cognitive thinking first requires simple cognitive technologies such as writing and formal logic, as well as simple social institutions that reinforce those skills that can then be built into formal religions and sciences. Barnes is certainly correct about science and technology, because they are cumulative and complex and depend significantly on what came before. I’m not so sure about religion. Is monotheism really more cognitively challenging than polytheism, itself more complex than animism? Might it not be the opposite, where the world is so much easier to explain with one God than many, and many gods simpler than the spirit-haunted world of so-called primitive peoples? A stronger case for Barnes’s cognitive model can be made within religions and especially for theology, which has turned the question of God’s existence into a quagmire of syllogism and contorted logic (see Chapter 5).
On one level it is that very stage of advanced cognitive development that Huston Smith rails against in his book Why Religion Matters, a passionate personal manifesto for why society must return to its more fundamental roots of basic spirituality. While not completely disparaging science (his oncologist did save his life), Smith claims that it has trapped us in a tunnel whose floor is scientism, whose walls are liberal democracy, higher education, and a morally sterile legal system, and whose ceiling is a cowardly media. It is a closed system that excludes old-time religion. To get it back we must exit the tunnel and embrace the sacred. “The sacred world is the truer, more veridical world, in part because it includes the mundane world.” Barnes would describe Smith’s mundane world as an early stage of cognitive development, and that does appear to be the level at which Smith thinks religion should operate. Religion matters, he says, because “there is within us—in even the blithest, most lighthearted among us—a fundamental disease. It acts like an unquenchable thirst that renders the vast majority of us incapable of ever coming to full peace.” Maybe for thee, but not for me. And that’s the problem with Smith’s book. It is, by its nature, personal and anecdotal, and so ultimately can tell us nothing more about why God and religion persist for anyone beyond Smith and those he copiously quotes in support.
What can inform us about these persistent questions? Science. Although it has its limitations, science is the best method ever devised for answering questions about our world and ourselves. Therefore, Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The
Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is a penetratingly insightful scientific analysis of religion because as an anthropologist he understands that any explanation must take into account the rich diversity of religious practices and beliefs around the world, and as a scientist he knows that any explanatory model must account for this diversity. Boyer is at his ethnographic best in describing the countless peculiar religious rituals he and his anthropological brethren have recorded, and especially in identifying the shortcomings of virtually every explanation for religion ever offered. You name it, Boyer has an exception to it. To that end, anyone offering a theory of religion should read this book before transducing thought to ink. As a consequence, however, Boyer himself fails to provide a satisfactory explanation because he knows that religion is not a single entity that is the result of a single cause. “There cannot be a magic bullet to explain the existence and common features of religion, as the phenomenon is the result of aggregate relevance —that is, of successful activation of a whole variety of mental systems.” Here the book bogs down in the jargon-laden field of cognitive science, as the author struggles to unite an array of disparate findings, but comes up empty handed. “Is there some religious center in the brain, some special cortical area, some special neural network that handles God-related thoughts? Not really … religious persons are not different from nonreligious ones in essential cognitive functions.” Then what is the origin of religious faith and belief? For Boyer they “seem to be simple by-products of the way concepts and inferences are doing their work for religion in much the same way as for other domains.” in other words, religion requires no special explanation, an answer many will find unsatisfactory.
Whatever its origin, what does the future hold for religion? One avenue for the ever-burgeoning religious landscape is cyberspace, the subject of the aptly titled Give Me that Online Religion by Brenda Brasher. It is a delightful romp through spiritual cyborgs, virtual monks, and the new world of cyberspirituality. Global prayer-chains, e-prayer wheels, cybercast seders, and neo-pagan cyber-rituals are all practiced from home, finally making Martin Luther’s proclamation of “every man his own priest” a virtual reality. Even mainstream religions have gone online, offering adherents and potential converts a smorgasbord of doctrines to download (except Scientology. whose lawyers pounced on an ex-member who was posting their religious documents like Torquemada on a relapsed heretic). Much of this book will leave you LOL (for the computer illiterate that’s laughing out loud), my favorite being Brasher’s discussion of the more than 800,000 web “shrines” devoted to Princess Diana and other celebrities. “Scanning fan sites, it is easy to believe that the spiritual discipline of imitato Christus has been replaced by imitato Keanu Reeves.” For those who do not wish to risk choosing the wrong God to achieve immortality. read about the transhumanists. who believe that some day we will be able to download our minds from our protein brains that survive only about a century, to silicon-chip brains that can last hundreds of centuries, by which time they can be downloaded into something more permanent still, ad infinitum to infinity. Is this in any sense possible? The transhumanists think it is, but since the technology is not yet available cryonics is a temporary solution, a quick fix if you will. Recall the brouhaha that developed shortly after baseball legend Ted Williams died, when his son whisked the body away to Phoenix, Arizona, where it was cryonically frozen at minus 320 degrees. The hope is that one day “Teddy Ballgame” would be resurrected to play again. If Williams’s body were reanimated one day, would it still be the cranky perfectionist who was the last to hit .400? In other words, even if future cryonics scientists could bring him back to life, would it still be “him”? Is the “soul” of Ted Williams also in deep freeze along with his brain and body?
Duke University philosopher Owen Flanagan would probably answer “yes,” if by soul we mean the pattern of Ted Williams’s memories, personality, and personhood, and if the freezing process did not destroy the neural network in the brain where such entities are stored. But as for some ethereal entity that continues past physical death (whether buried, cremated, or frozen), Flanagan would offer an emphatic “no.” In his latest book, The Problem of the Soul, a courageous and daring look into the heart of what it means to be human, Flanagan builds a bridge between two irreconcilable views of the mind: the humanistic/theological versus the scientific/naturalistic. The former includes a place within our brains for nonphysical mind, free will, and a soul, but fails to offer any tangible proof that such things even exist. The latter is grounded in solid empirical data but fails to show how humans as evolved animals can lead moral and meaningful lives. Flanagan’s purpose is to reconcile the two, and he has done so successfully in this crisply reasoned work. “Can we do without the cluster of concepts that are central to the humanistic image in its present form—the soul and its suite—and still retain some or most of what these concepts were designed to do?” Flanagan’s answer is an emphatic “yes.” To that I add “amen.”
It may simply be that I resonate well with Flanagan because I am a nonbelieving, nontheistic, naturalistic scientist. After a lifetime spent reading the obfuscating works of philosophers and theologians twisting logic into pretzelian contortions to prove such unprovable concepts as God, the soul, and free will, I want to stand up and cheer when I read passages such as this one from Flanagan’s opening salvo: “There is no point beating around the bush. Supernatural concepts have no philosophical warrant. Furthermore, it is not that such concepts are displaced only if we accept, from the start, a naturalistic or scientific visions of things. There simply are no good arguments—theological, philosophical, humanistic, or scientific—for beliefs in divine beings, miracles, or heavenly afterlives.”
How then, without such ephemera, can we find meaning in this meaningless cosmos? By broadening the scope of science. Flanagan convincingly demonstrates that the scientific quest to understand our place in the cosmos and our relation to other beings, including and especially our own species, itself generates both awe and reverence—feelings that were previously the exclusive domain of religion: “There is benevolence and compassion expressed by a feeling of connection to all creatures, indeed even to the awesome inanimate cosmos.” This connection comes through knowing something about creatures and the cosmos, and Flanagan spends most of the book discussing the nature of what it means to be human, how brains can create minds (that are not separate from neurons), why free will is not necessarily incompatible with the deterministic assumption behind making free moral choices, how natural selves exist and retain most of the benefits of supernatural selves (souls) with the exception of immortality, and how ethical principles can be derived (and consequent moral behaviors generated) through a purely naturalistic worldview. Here the reading slows a little as Flanagan reviews all the major competing views before delivering his verdict on them along with his alternatives (for example, it takes fifty pages to dispense with the soul and another fifty pages to rebuild it through a natural system). But the effort pays off, as when he delivers this brilliant denouement showing how it is not the answers of science that provide transcendence, it is the quest: “It is becoming, worthy, and noble. It is the most we can aim for given the kind of creature we are, and happily it is enough. If you think this is not so, if you want more, if you wish that your life had prospects for transcendent meaning, for more than the personal satisfaction and contentment you can achieve while you are alive, and more than what you will have contributed to the well-being of this world after you die, then you are still in the grip of illusions. Trust me, you can’t get more. But what you can get, if you live well, is enough.”
It is enough for Flanagan. And it is enough for me and the (roughly) 60 percent of practicing scientists who, according to a 1996 survey by Ed Larson, have no belief in God or an afterlife. But will it ever be enough for the masses? Can we convince hundreds of millions of people—even billions of souls—that the scientific worldview is good enough? The realist in me remains pessimistic. But the idealist in me wants more—a worldview where science is presented as a humanistic and humane enterprise. Science is constructive, not destructive. A few structures (like the soul) may be demolished to make room for the new edifice, but many of the contents of the old building will be preserved in the new. That is the cumulative and uplifting nature of science.
IN SEARCH OF SPIRITUAL MEANING
There is a humorous scene in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, when his unfulfilled and neurotically Jewish character fails to find meaning in alternate religious expressions after visiting a Catholic church and returning home with a loaf of white bread, a jar of mayonnaise, and a crucifix. The reason, of course, is that the trappings and facade of a religion will not get you to that deeper place where so many desire to go. This is the deeper side of the psychology of religion, the exploration of which I found illuminating in Martha Sherrill’s narrative account entitled The Buddha from Brooklyn. There are no grand theories here, no sweeping pronouncements about “what it all means,” but it is a compelling case study in the search for spiritual meaning in an age of materialism. This is the story of Catharine Burroughs, born and raised in Brooklyn as Alyce Louise Zeoli, who was severely abused as a child but found redemption first as a psychic and spiritual counselor in suburban Maryland, then as a Tibetan tulku, or reborn lama (a type of living Buddha—thus accounting for the book’s alliterative title) when she was told by a visiting Tibetan religious leader (His Holiness Penor Rinpoche, who sits just beneath the Dalai Lama himself) that she was the reincarnation of a sixteenth-century Tibetan saint. This conjuncture of events led to her becoming the first American woman to ever achieve such high religious status in this faith.
Now holding the honorific title of Jetsunma Ahkön Norbu Lhamo, or just Jetsunma, Zeoli/Burroughs (name changes are common in this story) founded a Tibetan Buddhist center in Maryland in 1986 and quickly developed a cast of loyal followers, which we meet one by one in detail through the sensitive and searching eyes of Sherrill, who is herself seeking spiritual balance. The history of how Burroughs turned to the mystical in response to her tragic upbringing (including cigarette burns on her body and beatings with a radiator brush), however, is not where the power of this story is to be found. The downtrodden bootstrapping themselves into happiness is vintage Americana and not especially interesting outside of the particulars of how it was done.
Where Sherrill’s insight is most valuable is in introducing us not only to the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, but in exploring the fascinating ways it has been modernized for the 1990s. Imagine a Buddha who wears makeup, paints her nails red, and shops at mall stores while also believing that we will all reincarnate “countless times, as bugs and animals, even descend into the ghost realms and hell realms, before you achieved liberation from the endless hamster wheel of death and rebirth.” One of the reasons the characters in this story continue reinventing themselves is that in Tibetan Buddhism “the student progresses toward enlightenment by practicing intense introspection and retraining the mind, learning to see the world differently. The student is taught, sometimes rather painfully, to abandon the notion of self (it is a delusion anyway) and to go in search of his or her own Buddha nature.”
Tibetan Buddhism, however, is not just focused inwardly; in fact, true enlightenment comes through “being of benefit to all sentient beings,” as Sherrill explains. “Everything in Tibetan Buddhism is about sentient beings—and ending the suffering of sentient beings. You say sentient beings instead of ‘human beings’ because you don’t want to exclude anybody, and sentient is a way of describing all lifeforms that are conscious, sensate—all people, all animals, all bugs and fish, including the invisible realms, the ghost realms and the hell realms.” This is not a religion for the spiritually faint of heart. “There are eighteen different hells in Tibetan Buddhism, and there are countless beings there, too, all hoping to be released.”
Are people released from their private hells in this religion? This is the subtext of Sherrill’s narrative as she explores the many ways people deal with the slings and arrows of modern life, and the answer is a highly qualified one. Some do, some don’t. Some leave too early, some stay too long. Some are undercommitted, some are overcommitted. The story of Betsy Elgin (aka Elizabeth, aka Alana) is an especially troubling one. Attractive, mid-thirties, happily married with children (but with the usual doubts about the meaning of it all), Elgin first encountered Zeoli (or should it be Alana met Jetsunma?) when the latter was doing psychic readings for twenty bucks a pop. Occasional meetings became regular rituals, time with the Buddha took precedence over time with the family, and before long, she recalls, “I remember laying in bed thinking, Here I am in my perfect town house with my perfect little kids and my perfect little husband and everything … but why do I feel so empty?”
To find out she consulted a channeled entity named Santu, who told her to divorce her husband, which she promptly did, moving into an apartment with her two daughters. In the sociological study of cults this is what is known as detachment—the individual is removed from her traditional reference sources and isolated into the new group that now controls her life. Elgin later confessed as much: “I was needy and compulsively fixated on her and our friendship. I was trying to make that replace what I had given up. I felt a need to have something.” It still wasn’t enough, as Sherrill explained: “She went through a period of promiscuity, becoming sexually involved with several men at the center and others outside. For nearly two years ‘I was either at the temple,’ she said, ‘or out on a date. It was a bit crazy.’ Her daughters were left alone at night. Eventually the older one moved out to live with her father. Her younger girl, just sixteen, was ‘close to the edge.’” Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident, and Sherrill considers the sometimes subtle differences between a cult and a religion.
Still, a much more common story is like that of Sherrill herself, a successful journalist at a prestigious publication (The Washington Post), who discovers in her self-searching that “aside from the well-trod pleasures of the quotidian—holidays at the beach, dance parties—you could still feel a greater need for something else entirely. You could feel a hunger and emptiness. You could be tormented by unanswered questions. Modern life leaves many people feeling insignificant and a bit lost. If you were living a spiritual life—and believed you were helping to end suffering—that could make you feel quite potent.”
Indeed, and here we begin to approach that mystery of mysteries of why people believe. Sherrill does not give us the answer, but she does offer one explanation that carries an important qualifier: “There is nobility in sacrifice—any sacrifice. And as much as I didn’t want to admit this, there is in fact a sort of ladder that people seem to ascend in order to be liberated from self-concern and see themselves as part of something larger. And sometimes people do ridiculous things to get there.”
The rub, of course, is in finding that larger something without losing yourself along the way. It is the journey of a lifetime, a voyage we all must take if we want to find deeper spiritual meaning.