The “How” Does Not Explain
The “Why”
The Eclectic Church presents the following article in the interest of discussion, the article is followed by some observations of our own!.
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SUNDAY
SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT |
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THE BRAIN
Searching
for the physical basis of spirituality 
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By
SHANKAR VEDANTAM
Washington
Post
7/1/01
In Philadelphia, a researcher discovers areas of the brain that are activated during
meditation. At universities in San Diego and North Carolina, doctors study how
epilepsy and certain hallucinogenic drugs can produce religious epiphanies. And
in Ontario, a neuroscientist fits people with a magnetized helmet that produced
"spiritual" experiences for the secular.
The work is part of a broad
effort by scientists around the world to better understand religious
experiences, measure them and even reproduce them. Using powerful brain imaging
technology, researchers are exploring what mystics call nirvana, and what
Christians describe as a state of grace. Scientists are asking whether
spirituality can be explained in terms of neural networks, neurotransmitters
and brain chemistry.
What creates that
transcendental feeling of being one with the universe? It could be the
decreased activity in the brain's parietal lobe, which helps regulate the sense
of self and physical orientation, research suggests.
How does religion prompt
divine feelings of love and compassion? Possibly because of changes in the
frontal lobe, caused by heightened concentration during meditation.
Why do many people have a
profound sense that religion has changed their lives? Perhaps because spiritual
practices activate the temporal lobe, which weights experiences with personal
significance.
"The brain is set up
in such a way as to have spiritual experiences and religious experiences,"
said Andrew Newberg, a Philadelphia scientist who wrote the book "Why God
Won't Go Away." "Unless there is a fundamental change in the brain,
religion and spirituality will be here for a very long time. The brain is
predisposed to having those experiences, and that is why so many people believe
in God."
The research may represent
the bravest frontier of brain research. But depending on your religious
beliefs, it may also be the last straw. For while Newberg and other scientists
say they are trying to bridge the gap between science and religion, many
believers are offended by the notion that God is a creation of the human brain,
rather than the other way around.
"It reinforces
atheistic assumptions and makes religion appear useless," said Nancey
Murphy, a professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in
Pasadena, Calif. "If you can explain religious experience purely as a
brain phenomenon, you don't need the assumption of the existence of God."
Some scientists readily say
the research proves there is no such thing as God. But many others argue that
they are religious themselves, and that they are simply trying to understand
how our minds produce a sense of spirituality.
Newberg did an experiment
that consisted of taking brain scans of Tibetan Buddhist meditators as they sat
immersed in contemplation. After giving them time to sink into a deep
meditative trance, he injected them with a radioactive dye. Patterns of the
dye's residues in the brain were later converted into images. He found that
certain areas of the brain were altered during deep meditation. Predictably,
these included areas in the front of the brain that are involved in
concentration. But Newberg also found decreased activity in the parietal lobe,
one of the parts of the brain that helps orient a person in three-dimensional
space.
"When people have
spiritual experiences, they feel they become one with the universe and lose
their sense of self," he said. "We think that may be because of what
is happening in that area - if you block that area, you lose that boundary
between the self and the rest of the world." In doing so, you ultimately
wind up in a universal state."
At the University of
California in San Diego, other neuroscientists are studying why religious
experiences seem to accompany epileptic seizures in some patients. At Duke
University, psychiatrist Roy Mathew is studying hallucinogenic drugs that can
produce mystical experiences and have long been used in certain religious
traditions.
Could the flash of wisdom
that came over Siddhartha Gautama - the Buddha - have been nothing more than
his parietal lobe quieting down? Could the voices that Moses and Mohammed heard
on remote mountaintops have been just a bunch of firing neurons - an illusion?
Could Jesus' conversations with God have been a mental delusion?
Newberg won't go so far,
but other proponents of the new brain science do. Michael Persinger, a
professor of neuroscience at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, has
been conducting experiments that fit a set of magnets to a helmet-like device.
Persinger runs what amounts to a weak electromagnetic signal around the skulls
of volunteers.
Four in five people, he
said, report a "mystical experience, the feeling that there is a sentient
being or entity standing behind or near" them. Some weep, some feel God
has touched them, others become frightened and talk of demons and evil spirits.
"That's in the
laboratory," Persinger said. "They know they are in the laboratory.
Can you imagine what would happen if that happened late at night in a pew or
mosque or synagogue?"
His research, Persinger
said, showed that "religion is a property of the brain, only the brain and
has little to do with what's out there."
Those who believe the new
science disproves the existence of God say they are holding up a mirror to
society about the destructive power of religion. They say that religious
fanaticism and intolerance spring from dogmatic beliefs that particular gods
and faiths are unique, rather than facets of brain chemistry.
"It's irrational and
dangerous when you see how religiosity affects us," said Matthew Alper,
author of "The God Part of the Brain," a book about the neuroscience
of belief. "During times of prosperity, we are contented. During times of
depression, we go to war. When there isn't enough food to go around, we break
into our spiritual tribes and use our gods as justification to kill one
another."
Theologians say meditative
practices don't describe most people's religiousness in either eastern or
western traditions. "When these people talk of religious experience, they
are talking of a meditative experience," said John Haught, a professor of
theology at Georgetown University. "But religion is more than that. It
involves commitments and suffering and struggle - it's not all meditative
bliss. . . . They have isolated one small aspect of religious experience, and
they are identifying that with the whole of religion."
Belief and faith, believers
argue, are larger than the sum of their brain parts: "The brain is the
hardware through which religion is experienced," said Daniel Batson, a
Kansas psychologist who studies the effect of religion on people. "To say
the brain produces religion is like saying a piano produces music."
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OUR THOUGHTS!
Sometimes the arrogance of science can
rival that of religion. It seems to me
that just because there is a physical understanding and explanation of how a
process works, it doesn’t explain the “why” it works that way. It becomes obvious to realistic believers
that if in fact a Creative Force created, He/She created according to the laws
of physics ordained by Him/Her. There
are mechanisms governing all phenomena that we experience and all information
is processed through our mind. To find
that a spiritual experience produces brain activity, or vice versa proves
little about the authenticity of the experience --- and it really says nothing
about the existence or non-existence of God.
There are many aspects of our human
experiences that can be measured in various brain activity, but it proves
nothing about the credibility or reality of the experience. In recent years we have discovered that
certain areas of the brain are the
centers for various activities from movement of our limbs, to our
vision, our memories and emotions. If
seeing something, for example, activates a certain brain activity; does that
mean that what we see is only imagined?
Because under certain conditions people can see a mirage; does that mean
all our visual experiences are not to be trusted? Are the experiences of love, pain, loneliness, any less real
because certain brain processes occur during these emotional realities? Is thought itself any less a miracle because
it is associated with electro-chemical processes?
While it is often true that believers are
quick to jump to the conclusion that an event, seemingly out of the ordinary is
a supernatural miracle of some sort, our atheist friends are too often prone to
make the jump that simply because we understand or explain a process it somehow
disproves any higher purpose or cause.
But what is often missed here is the miracle of “why” those processes
produce those results.
Science is making great strides in
understanding the mechanics of the brain, but such understanding does nothing
to explain the miracle of life, the wonder of thought or the awesome fact that
we can study and understand the mechanics of our thinking. We have come a long way in the last century
in understanding the laws which govern
the physical realities around us.
Things such as eclipses, rainbows, storms, the Northern lights ---
things which at one time would have been seen as signs from the gods are now
understood and explained as natural phenomena.
For this reason, religionist need to take great care in asserting any
even as supernatural, or, proof of God’s existence. But on the flip side of the coin, for every event that science
can explain the process, the “HOW”, there is a “WHY” does it work that way that
has no definitive answer.
As to the above article, for those who
would say that it explains away the concept of a “religious experience” the
most obvious question would be: Why
would such a center evolve in the human brain if it serves no purpose in
reality? Why would there be a center
where we lose the idea of self and recognize a connection to the whole? In truth, the idea of self is only an
illusion, because all of us only because of the whole. We are all a product of the creation, no
matter how one sees it cause and in a very real sense that makes us one with
it!
Let us know what you think --- email us
or post your opinion on our message borad.