Why are humans the only primates that have developed religion? Why does philosopher Will Herberg call us “Homo Religiosus,” a species that seems to need faith as much as it needs food or water? And why are we also the only species that has developed both philosophical systems and scientific methods of exploration?
Answer: Because we're so smart that we're scared out of our wits.
How's that? Well, our use of tools, a product of our handy-dandy opposable thumbs, allowed our brains (and our frontal lobes) to rapidly evolve and grow to the point where we were able to lift our heads up out of the dirt and the grind of survival long enough to be able to look up towards the starry sky and wonder. And while the ability to wonder and reflect is indeed a wonderful thing, it does, however, come at a price: it has made us nervous and anxious wrecks.
Allow me to explain.
The nature of existence and the infinite and uncharted universe— in all of its terrifying and unknown vastness—are rather daunting things to consider. Fortunately and, some might say, unfortunately, our evolved minds are, at least on this planet, uniquely able to apprehend and consider just how expansive that unknown universe might be. And that mysterious, unknown expanse simply scares the hell out of us.
And it's not just cosmological reflection that we find daunting. There's one other thing that our large brains are uniquely capable of (as far as we know), and that's also contributed to our emotional discomfort: our powerful intellects can apprehend the temporal notion of both past and future. While it may be true that being able to reflect on the past can help us to learn from our mistakes and that looking ahead into the future can help us to plan for that much-feared rainy day, there are also some negatives associated with this magical time-travelling ability.
In very broad strokes, there are several negative emotional states that are the outgrowths of our backwards and forward-looking ability: we can feel shame and guilt when regarding past conduct and events, and we can feel anxious and fearful when thinking about the unknown future—especially when thinking of our inevitable death. In other words, we're so smart, that, unlike members of the animal kingdom, who are living in happy, ignorant bliss about their impending mortality and their unknown futures, we know that death is gonna come-a-knockin'—and that terrifies us.
Indeed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ernest Becker had written in his seminal work The Denial of Death (1972) that, in essence, the sum of all of human endeavor—our art, our architecture, our religions, our procreation—are all just desperate attempts to deny our own mortality, to placate our terror (what psychologists call Thanatos Anxiety) over the possibility that there's nothing more beyond the physical realm.
And it's not just death that was scary; life could be pretty frightening as well—especially the mysterious and unknown dangers that were associated with the daily rigors of primitive survival. When the original anthropoid—let's call him Caveman Bob—was first able to look out over the plains and consciously become aware of the predatory dangers that lurked in the high grasses—well, let's just say that was also probably the first time that a human developed an ulcer. It's not that gazelles don't instinctively know that tigers are bad and that dangers lurk; it's just that gazelles' brains don't allow them to ruminate and obsess over these things because, unlike us, they live in the moment. Unfortunately, as a byproduct of our powerful mind's ability to apprehend past and future (and, as mentioned, the accompanying guilt, fear, and anxiety that accompanies those thoughts), that simple way of being—the ability to be present in the here and now—is some-thing many humans have lost. As a consequence, we, as a species, have become a nervous, anxious, self-medicating mess.
Yet some have realized the damage caused by ruminating and not living in the moment. Understanding the psychological and spiritual importance of being present, entire Buddhist belief systems, as well as various types of mindfulness-meditation techniques—not to mention the best-selling The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle— were all developed to help us reconnect with that long-lost vestigial skill: our ability to experience the peace of the present moment.
Take a moment—no pun intended—to think about that: We gradually stopped living in the moment once our brains were able to conceptualize the concept of tomorrow, which then led to “What the hell else should I be worrying about for tomorrow? What else can eat me? How else can I die? What else can go wrong?!”
No wonder Caveman Bob was stressed out. Hell, you and I are stressed out, and we don't even have to worry about whose lunch we might be. We just have bills to pay, children to raise, jobs to maintain, relationships to handle. But at least all those issues are things that we kind of understand (well, except maybe the relationships part).
During Caveman Bob's time, not only did he have to worry about not being eaten, but he also lived in a world that was incomprehensible to him. Think about it: in prehistoric times, little of the natural world was understood. We tend to take for granted the comfort of a world that's been thoroughly deconstructed and demystified by the lens of science, but take a moment to try and appreciate what it might have been like during the dawn of humanity, when every strange bump in the night represented unknown mystery and danger. Today our young children sometimes cry at night for Mommy when they think there's a bogeyman under the bed, or if they think that a strange creaking in the closet might be a monster. But whom did Caveman Bob turn to when he saw and heard strange and scary things in the darkness? And how did he make sense of these unknown dangers?
Using the creative power of the human psyche, imaginative stories and myths were created to help early humans to understand their world; thus, every predator became a demon, every shadow a monster, every natural disaster the wrath of an angry deity, until eventually all of those interpretations of the natural world were woven into a cohesive and explanatory tale that tied into a creation myth.
The reason for this tendency towards story and myth is our need to make sense of our natural world; indeed, modern neuroscience research indicates that we're hard wired with this yearning to make sense of things. We even sometimes try and connect dots when those dots aren't actually connected. (See Chapter 8 and the discussion of optical illusions.) Thus, our brain will see a pattern that helps us to make sense of the nonsensical; that's why we see shapes in clouds or a man's face on the moon or conspiracies around every corner.
Those connections help create the illusion of order in the universe because we don't like randomness. In fact, psychologically, we need the comfort of order; it soothes us like a mother's embrace and makes us feel that the world is less threatening and that everything will be all right. Order, in its defeat over chaos, allows for the belief that there is, in fact, some sort of unifying purpose to help us make sense of our seemingly random universe.
It's with this quest to make sense of things—this need for order and purpose—that religion, science, and philosophy come in. They give us interpretive and explanatory frameworks for a better understanding of our world. They allow us to organize and process those overwhelming and sometimes frightening realities that our powerful minds are able to not only grasp, but, unfortunately, ruminate over as well.
While science tends to parse and deconstruct the minutiae of the natural world, religion and philosophy tackles the big questions head on. Whether these religious or philosophical frame-works are objectively valid lenses is irrelevant to the critically essential psychological role that they play in our emotional well-being. Valid or not, they act as soothing coping mechanisms (to use psychotherapeutic parlance) that help us deal with our “life is scary and overwhelming—and then you die” anxiety.
But religion and philosophy soothe us in very different ways.
Religion soothes our anxiety via the aforementioned explanatory stories and creation myths. These stories and myths help us understand how things came to be and how we should conduct ourselves (thus serving an important function by promoting a species-preserving social conformity). But they also help us understand how we might be able to get around that little thing called death, which seems to paralyze us with fear.
And that fear of death is a big-ticket item. It's why religion, like McDonald's, has served “billions and billions.” Religion offers us a way to cheat death, because it promises spiritual immortality in the great hereafter, giving us a “get out of jail free” card that allows us to effectively bypass our date with the Grim Reaper. In that sense, religion is indeed a coping mechanism of the highest order—on both a personal and societal level—that helps us deal with our overwhelming Thanatos Anxiety. And, sure enough, there's been extensive research indicating that people who have some sort of faith or religion are actually healthier and happier and live longer lives—as well as die easier deaths—than those without. Indeed, there's ample literature in which hospice workers describe how people of faith die more peacefully than those without a belief system, who oftentimes have a look of anxious terror when they pass.
But does the research that illustrates the positive psychological benefit of religion in a person's life somehow refute the theological tenets of that religious system? Does, as many skeptics and atheists assert, the simple fact that a religious or spiritual belief acts as a soothing analgesic somehow prove that those spiritual beliefs are false? Does our psychological need for something preclude the existence of that something? Does, for example, a child's need for a mother's love preclude the existence of that mother's love?
I don't think so. In a later chapter, I'll address this very important notion that simply because something replete with fanciful mythology serves a soothing psychological purpose (Karl Marx once famously described religion as “the opium of the people”), that fact, in and of itself, does not preclude or refute the theological premises put forth by that belief system. Instead, it merely explains the psycho-social constructs and dynamics that often accompany such spiritual phenomena.
Some have suggested that religion, in addition to acting as a feel-good quasi-opiate, may also serve a rather Darwinian purpose as well. In Nicholas Wade's book The Faith Instinct (2009), the award-winning science writer for the New York Times rigorously cites scientific evidence indicating that humans are hardwired to believe in the transcendent and further argues that our very survival required this belief. Wade takes the position that the evolution of man depended not only on individual natural selection, but also on the natural selection of groups. Since, the reasoning goes, religious doctrine imposes moral norms that facilitate collective survival in the name of a larger cause, groups held together by religion were more likely to survive than less-cohesive, nonreligious tribes. And since the socially more cohesive religious groups were more apt to survive, this religious tendency was passed down as a hereditary trait.
Molecular biologist Dean Hamer takes this genetic interpretation of religious experience one step further. In his controversial book The God Gene (2004), he not only claims that spirituality is an adaptive trait, but also claims to have actually located one of the genes responsible for that trait. This reduction of the spiritual experience to a physiological correlate was also claimed by several neuroscientists, who claimed to have found the “God spot” in our brain, the place where religious/ecstatic experiences were thought to be localized. However, more recent brain-imaging research seems to indicate that a variety of neural centers are actually involved and activated during spiritual or religious experiences.
Hamer's quest to localize and reduce spirituality to a gene began back in 1998, when he was conducting a survey on smoking and addiction for the National Cancer Institute. He had recruited over a thousand men and women, who agreed to take a standardized, 240-question personality test called the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI). Among the many traits measured by the TCI was one called self-transcendence, which, in turn, consisted of three other sub-traits: self-forgetfulness, defined as the ability to get entirely lost in an experience; transpersonal identification, which is a feeling of connectedness to a larger universe; and mysticism, defined (quite problematically, in my opinion) as “an openness to things not literally provable.” When all of these sub-traits were put together and scored, one was able to measure what would seem a rather difficult thing to quantify: a person's level of spirituality.
Hamer, resourceful devil that he is, gathered all of the data that had been collected for his smoking and addiction survey and decided to conduct a little spirituality study on the side. He went about ranking all the participants along the self-transcendence scale of the TCI, placing them on a continuum from least to most spiritually inclined.
Then he went gene hunting. He wanted to see if there was any correlation between being spiritual and the presence or absence of any corresponding gene. This was no easy trick, since the human genome contains 35,000 genes consisting of 3.2 billion chemical bases. To narrow his search, Hamer focused in on nine specific genes known to play major roles in the production of brain chemicals known as monoamines—which include serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine—which regulate such essential functions as mood and motor control.
After studying the genetic samples that his subjects provided, he hit pay dirt. He discovered that a variation in a gene known as VMAT2 seemed to directly correlate to how the volunteers had scored on the self-transcendence scale. Those with the nucleic acid cytosine in one particular spot on the VMAT2 gene ranked high, while those with the nucleic acid adenine in the same spot ranked lower.
Hamer had done it. He had successfully reduced spirituality to a microscopic speck on an otherwise unremarkable gene. The tendency to seek God—to transcend, to experience union with the infinite cosmos—was all reduced to the positioning of a tiny little nucleic acid.
So that's it spiritual seekers; pack up your tents and call it a day. Nothing else to see here. The riddle of God has been solved! And all it took was a rather clever molecular biologist to sort it all out!
But did he?
Hamer is what one might call a scientific reductionist or a scientific materialist; he's one of those scientists that I spoke about earlier who likes to deconstruct and reduce a phenomenon down into tiny, quantifiable bits without considering that the phenomenon they're exploring may synergistically be more than just the sum of its various parts. But that doesn't seem to register for reductionists/ deconstructionists. In a Time magazine cover story (October 25, 2004) entitled “The God Gene,” Hamer expressed his view on what it means to be human: “I'm a believer that every thought that we think and every feeling that we feel is the result of activity in the brain. I think we follow the basic law of nature, which is that we're a bunch of chemical reactions running around in a bag.”
How very special. Human beings as nothing more than chemical reactions running around in a bag! What a visionary and uplifting sentiment of the human potential given by our Dr. Hamer!
That's what scientific reductionists do; they break things down until they're no longer recognizable. So they reduce the human condition down to approximately nine dollars worth of chemicals, wrapped and shaken in skin and served refreshingly at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's it—that's the sum whole of what we are.
Our soul, or to use more secular language, our consciousness, we are told by these enlightened neuroscientists, is merely an “epiphenomenon” of our brains—that is to say, dependent on and a byproduct of said brain. Pull the plug on our heart—the brain's biological battery—and the screen fades to black. No brain activity, no consciousness. No consciousness, definitely no soul.
As I've mentioned, a major problem with the deconstructive reductionism of most materialist scientists is the failure to recognize that most phenomena work synergistically to be more than the sum of their parts, just as wood, violin strings, and a musician's trained fingertips can converge together in a perfect storm of brilliance to create a Vivaldi violin concerto that is much more than just the wood and string of the violin randomly shaken, and just as nine dollars' worth of chemicals become much more than “chemicals running around in a bag” when animated by the life force. While studying those various chemical elements that come together to create a human being might lead to some interesting chemistry insights, those efforts will reveal nothing of the synergistic phenomenon that those chemicals (with a little animating, Dr. Frankenstein–like jolt of electricity) come together to create: a human being. Studying sulfur or magnesium will tell you absolutely nothing about love, or the thirst to create, or our ability to write epic poetry or compose breath-taking music. It will yield no insights into our ability to imagine (and sometimes perceive) infinite worlds and infinite levels of realities.
No, studying magnesium won't illuminate the larger human process, and studying genes does not reveal the full spiritual picture. Sorry, Dr. Hamer.
I somewhat facetiously mentioned the animating jolt of electricity as being the thing that makes us come alive, but what about this thing called a soul, the animating force that René Descartes had viewed as the “ghost in the machine”? Where in Hamer's bag of chemicals is the soul?
Now, I fully understand that talk of a soul brings smug snickering from the scientific materialists who think that we shouldn't waste time and research on such an unscientific (meaning, we can't readily observe it) concept. But to them I would say, “Not so fast.” There does indeed seem to be quite a bit of research indicating that our consciousness (the secular term that I'll use instead of soul) can exist beyond just our biological brain; research that would seem to suggest that, in fact, consciousness is more than just the epiphenomenon of the brain that neuroscientists insist it is. Indeed, there have been rigorous, repeatable, and statistically significant consciousness studies done by researchers like Dean Radin and my friend and mentor William Braud that point to consciousness having an effect beyond just its neurobiological domain. This profound research indicates that the invisible hands of consciousness are somehow able to interact with the physical world and that there is indeed an entire universe of unseen realities.
Perhaps, as some have theorized, the reason that thoughts and matter can interact is because they are essentially different manifestations of the same thing. Albert Einstein established that matter is really compact and dense energy; in the same way, perhaps consciousness, in the form of thoughts, is composed of the same elemental stuff as matter (perhaps the tiny subatomic filaments of string theory, albeit unseen by our technology) and is, in fact, merely a different manifestation or variation of a larger continuum.
This theory defies the post–Newtonian-Cartesian paradigms, which seem to tell us that if we can't see or measure something, it can't exist—and that includes God, the human soul, cosmic consciousness, the collective unconscious, or any kind of spiritual (i.e., non-corporeal) dimension. But even though we can't see gravity (or fully understand it, for that matter), we acknowledge that it exists. Even though we can't see the source that the great artistic masters draw their creative inspiration from, their paintings most certainly exist. And what of love? And ideas? They're all invisible phenomena, yet are they not real?
Sure, the most cynical and reductionist of the neuroscientists may tell us that all these phenomena (except for the external and collectively experienced gravity) are all interior neuroprocesses— neurons and synapses firing to create the illusion of external phenomena. They may explain that love is only a conditioned and learned neural-feedback loop. Ideas and dreams? More neurochemistry, nothing more.
But if consciousness research indicates that there is more to who we are than synapses and neurons, perhaps the neuroscientists have deconstructed only the mechanism that helps us actualize consciousness—not consciousness's source.
The analogy here is an old transistor radio or cathode-tube TV. When the TV or radio is plugged in (when their “heart” is active), they come “alive” to produce music or screen images. What is the source of the radio's music or of the TV's picture? When we become like the neuroscientist and attempt to deconstruct them, we think we have it figured out. Aha! There is no source, we think; the music and the picture are all just epiphenomena of the TV or radio hardware.
But the “soul” of that radio or TV really exists in an invisible plane—the airwaves. This invisible plane, which we cannot see, hear, or touch, is the causal source that animates the radio or TV and makes it come alive (after it's been plugged in). The cathode tubes and transistors, like so many neurons and brain hemispheres, are the necessary mechanisms to actualize the process of the life of both the radio and the TV, but they ain't the source.
We can't see the airwaves, just as we can't see the causal informational realm that Plato and Pythagoras believed existed, just as we can't see the strings of superstring theory, just as we can't (usually) see Ultimate Reality, or God, for that matter. And since we can't see all those things, the empirical sciences would have us shut the door on even allowing for the possibility of those unseen realities. Just as the high priests of science would, if not entirely denounce a spiritual experience, most certainly reduce it to a gene variation or a soothing fiction created by a psychologically needy mind.
Religion as an opiate, religion via natural selection as an inherited gene, religion as a way to help us make sense of the world—as I asked earlier, do all of these explanations and deconstructions of the religious (or spiritual) experience preclude the existence of a God?
The question that really begs asking is, which came first, God or the need for God?
Some have argued that perhaps the neuropsychological need or tendency to seek God has been hardwired into us by that very same transcendent intelligence. Sort of like the homing pigeon seeks the home it was trained to find, humans may be seeking what they were programmed to seek. And gene VMAT2 can help facilitate that process, just as religion can help facilitate that spiritual journey home.
In my experience, when discussing religion with intelligent non-religious people, they often exhibit a visible discomfort with the mention of the word God. Perhaps, in addition to the baggage that organized religion has brought upon itself, there is also a semantic problem with regard to how people define God.
Without getting caught up in the cultural and religious projections of an anthropomorphic God that looks like Moses and carries a big staff, what if we consider the idea that perhaps God is merely the universe made sentient by our sentience; perhaps if “I think, therefore I am” is true, then the universe, through us, its sentient beings, also thinks and therefore is.
The analogy here is neurons in a brain. The neuron is an individual living cell, yet it comes together with billions of other living cells to become a part of the larger consciousness of the brain. Is it possible, that we are the neurons in the mind of God? (Feel free to substitute the word universe for God if the G word has too much baggage for you.)
Just a thought.
Admittedly, all of the research regarding our hardwired tendency to seek transcendence does nothing to either prove or disprove the existence of God or any other sort of spiritual or metaphysical reality; it merely helps to explain the human tendency towards spiritual experience a bit better.
Unfortunately, it would seem that finding scientific proof of God or any other kinds of transcendent realities can be a rather tricky thing. And it's this matter of proof and evidence that gets to the source of the modern conflict between science and religion: science demands affirmative proof for what is essentially unprovable in the scientific arena. But, as we'll see in the next chapter, perhaps when it comes to matters of “proof” regarding the existence of God, maybe the evidentiary burden should instead fall on the atheists to prove that there is not a God or, at the very least, that there isn't some sort of cosmic purpose; indeed, if atheists are so quick to invoke science as their guiding rationale towards the belief in a random universe without a God, then they should—as science requires—prove it. Because, contrary to popular opinion, the other side of the God debate has indeed provided some proof; as we'll soon see, using the laws of logic, a wise philosopher during the Middle Ages actually did provide what has become known as a “proof for God.”