10

The Brain of God

The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is however impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal; and apparently follows from a considerable advance in the reasoning powers of man, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder.

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

The creation of the mythic universe demanded the invention of two planes—the physical and the spiritual—a dualistic universe. The mythic world of stories would exist alongside the world of cuts and scrapes, broken bones, blood, weaponry, love, jealously, and hate, though elements of daily life bleed into the spiritual realm as well. The mythic world was something new, for it was “beyond,” and could only be reached through dreams and visions, induced by sleep, trance, deprivation, hallucinogenic pharmacopeias, prayers, meditation, music, oratory, ritual, or songs.

The first physical evidence we have of the mythic mind coming into play is from the cave paintings, bone placements, burials, and carvings from around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, but the fact that all of us stem from African ancestors some 150,000 years ago, and all share the same abilities in language, music, art, and mythology, shows that artistic/mythic thought first developed with human beings in Africa before the great diaspora that led to our species populating the rest of the world. Most artifacts do not remain preserved; even fewer are ever found.

Dualistic thinking is a long-held notion in the Western world, but it is certainly not limited to it. Dualism is found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and can be traced to the Persian dualism between Ormuzd and Ahriman,1 (the good and evil powers that established Zoroasterism), as well as through Plato, and even the founders of science, such as Descartes—who believed in the mind/body split. But splitting everything into halves is common to the human mind, and dualism can be found around the world. Consequently, dualities surface everywhere: night and day; life and death; good and bad; man and woman; male and female; sun and moon; black and white; left and right; friend or foe; plant and animal; man and animal; man and nature; stop and go; happy and sad; young and old; guilty and innocent; nature and nurture; yin and yang, and on and on.

The most likely underlying reasons for carving the universe into binary units stem from two sources—the biological brain interacting with the environment to find the easiest methods of making value judgments, and the preference throughout the animal kingdom for symmetry. For our ancestors, there would have been little value in knowing that the universe consisted of eleven possible dimensions. Hominids on the African savannah had to make decisions instantly regarding survival, and this decision making was facilitated by emotion through the limbic system, which instigated action. A snake is about to strike you—run. Slicing the world into dual segments is a very efficient way for a brain to work fast. This is good; that is bad. A particular food could sustain you or make you sick. You were either the potential meal of another animal, or it was a potential meal for you. You could trust someone or you couldn’t. A member of the opposite sex seemed like a good catch or someone to avoid.

Symmetry in nature is also an integral aspect of the biological world, with most animals being members of Bilateria, meaning they have a front and back as well as an upside and downside. The first creatures to exhibit this evolved some 550 to 600 million years ago. Symmetry is a marker for health. Biologists Thornhill and Moller found that those animals lacking symmetry had significant reductions in health and ability to have offspring.2 Magnus Enquist and Anthony Arak found that “the existence of sensory biases for symmetry may have been exploited independently by Natural Selection acting on biological signals”: in other words, the deep-seated preference for symmetry is both ancient and genetic.3 There are two sides to every story, and our categorizing brains want to place things where they think they belong. Of course, the massive human brain with its neocortex is quite capable of seeing beyond such simple equations, but dualistic thought is still employed on a daily basis by all of us. It was Levi-Strauss and structuralism that first revealed this binary aspect of human thought, that (according to J. R. Rayfield) “the unconscious mind, has a certain structure that is manifested in all symbolic systems, i.e., all aspects of culture and even in the natural world.”4 Derrida, on the other hand, was preoccupied with “undermining the oppositional tendencies that have befallen much of the Western philosophical tradition . . . revealing the dualistic hierarchies they conceal.”5 Dualistic and hierarchical thought certainly can be oppressive, as the deconstructionists like Derrida claimed, but at the same time they are intrinsic. This does not mean that we are sentenced to see everything in simple oppositions; the freedom to rebel from such restriction is also part of what trickster tales reveal. The protean ability, an animal’s potential to do the unexpected, which includes thinking the unexpected, is also part of our genetic makeup.

Potheism/Monotheism and the Search for Meaning

Religion is one of the true universals for humans. It is found in every culture on earth. In Zoroasterism, Christianity, Islam, and other religions associated with state-level societies, the dualities of good and evil are usually interpreted as sharply defined polarities, represented by opposing deities. But in most primal cultures the godhead, as well as the pantheon, is both good and evil at once, containing the essential elements of Trickster, who mitigates between the polar extremes. Actually, if we examine even the Old Testament more closely, we find that the Jewish god too embodies many negative traits as well (playing a trick on Mankind, kicking Adam and Eve out of the Garden; sending a flood; confusing the languages, and then we have references to “sons of god” going down and having sex with human females—and all of these betray trickster-like behavior). Trickster tales are an integral part of the mythic literature attempting to answer things like: Is the Creator good or evil? Does he behave for the good of Man, or is Man just a plaything the gods can destroy at their whim, without consequence? And where does morality fall into all of this? Socrates put it this way: “Is conduct right because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is right?” Are moral prescriptions relative or absolute?

Scientific methodology has allowed us to tease out the primal secrets that eluded us when trying to answer these questions through myth. Hence, we human beings have come a long way from the time when Jehovah could get angry with us for simply building a tower of mud reaching a few stories into the sky and confuse our tongues. Yet, even through we have gone to the stars and discovered the double helix of DNA, the quest for “God” goes on, though the definition for him or her has certainly changed. One would be hard-pressed to find very many top scientists who believe in an anthropomorphic Zeus or Yahweh, but even the search for unification in physics is part of the historic quest to uncover the ultimate forces that brought us here, which in tribal times meant deities.

The beginnings of science actually involved the search for God though his creations, as it was often men of the cloth who set out to find, through the particulars of nature, the hand of God in their design. Minute observation of phenomena was key to this search. The early religious men who developed what came to be science were radicals in that they dared to look for answers outside the pages of sacred texts, looking instead at the intricacies of nature itself. But they were surprised by what they found—like why did God make 10,000 species of beetle? Why did God make an untold number of parasites who seemed to have no other function than to devour us or make us miserable? Greater examination led to greater doubt. But it was not until Darwin that the real split between science and religion came to stay for good, for natural selection had no reason to keep God in the picture. But, as we can see today, religion has not withered away due to logic. Since the publication of The Origin of Species, many people have struggled to make coherent a worldview that takes into account the knowledge of science and the older worldviews based upon myth. Nearly every kind of argument has been invented so that evolutionary theory and religion can get along, such as maybe God got the whole thing going, or possibly Adam and Eve were really hominids whom God gave souls, as if there must be some way of reconciling myth and science. Then again, fundamentalists from every religion have dismissed science altogether, except when it comes to utilizing it to drive their cars, watch digital televisions, get medications, or fly somewhere else they want to be. Yet, for those who have the kind of minds in which truth cannot be so easily compartmentalized, the essential problems between science and religion have not gone away. For if the universe developed from natural causes that can be explained through the long and slow process of evolutionary change, who needs the hand of God? Educated people around the world, when confronted with the fact that the Jewish stories that make up the Old Testament were probably only written down some 2,600 years ago, in a world that is billions of years old, inevitably reach the conclusion that there is a disconnect between mythic explanations and scientific ones. But ironically, now that science has taken us to the point where we can begin to coax out the secrets of the brain itself, once again it is scientists who are leading the search for God. But they are not looking skyward. Rather, they have been looking into the synapses to try and discover how and why we came up with the notion in the first place. From the standpoint of survival, of natural selection, is there a reason for religion to exist?

Why God?

For some twenty years, I had held in my head a theory that in many ways echoes that expressed in Matthew Alper’s The “God” Part of the Brain. Alper’s journey in search of God is in many ways my own. Having grown up in the Bible Belt culture, from the earliest moments I can remember I was immersed in the Bible-thumping old-time religion of my family and community. I loved the music, drama, and communal nature of that culture, and until I was a teenager I had a fairly absolute belief and imagined a life devoted to the Lord. The emotional part of this training is not easily put aside, and to this day there are few things I love more than singing the old hymns I learned as a child. Yet, around sixteen I began, like many teens, to question. The thesis I finally developed to explain religion went like this: Human beings, who having accidentally developed brains that were much too large for their own good (in that we think too much), suddenly had to face the prospect of their own demise. This was devastating knowledge, and from the fear of death religion sprang up in humans to give them peace. The mythic world was created by mankind in order to give hope and meaning to people living in a world they were now all too conscious of being temporary. They were aware of being aware, and they were aware that they would die. In order to survive, early humans needed some mechanism to counteract the knowledge of death, and this mechanism was religion.

Matthew Alper’s scenario for how religion develops along these lines includes an added twist at the end: that god is a genetic trait from which developed a kind of organ in the brain—“A God Part of the Brain” that in culture after culture caused mankind to create the deities and religions that surround them.6 Reading Alper’s story gave me a sense of dejavu, for I certainly related to his progression toward a scientific explanation. But I no longer agree with his conclusion of how religious thought developed in our species—even though I had held a similar one for so long. While I agree that religion does many things that help avert fear, that religion often creates a sense of purpose, leads to feelings of cohesion and tranquility for the people and communities that practice it, I don’t think that is how it started, just as I don’t see that getting God into the genes is possible.

In order for that theory to work, there would have had to have been a time in the distant past where humans quite suddenly became acutely aware of their mortality (due to a relatively quick increase in brain size or cognitive ability). And with this knowledge they would have had to start despairing to the point where life itself no longer mattered. The non-god-believing hominids would have had to begun jumping off cliffs into the abyss to put an end to it all. At the same time, a few male believers who found “god” (through some change in their genetic code—which had not been found in the overall population) would suddenly have turned so suddenly charismatic in their life-affirming positive energy that they would have attracted the many females that flocked to them, thereby spreading these god genes wildly through the population. (Just like patriarchs of old—Abraham, with his harem—or King Solomon with his 700 wives). The believers would have won and instilled in their descendents the God gene.

I don’t think so. Whatever the timeline of our mental rise to religious thought, it didn’t happen overnight, and it hardly seems as though a specific gene for a belief in God could have developed and been so powerful to override the other physical and mental attractors that our species had developed for enticing sex. Plus, when it comes to sex, we are almost always talking about very young people in ancient times—and as we know now—until the age of twenty-five the brain is not fully developed. Risk assessment is notoriously skewed until then, as the brain has not developed the ability to reliably predict danger. This is one of the prime reasons the young make good soldiers: they will go into war thinking they’re invincible to spears or arrows or guns. It’s also why insurance rates are so staggering for youthful drivers: they get into more accidents because they do more stupid things than older people. They think they’re going to live forever. The majority of those who would really need religion to give them peace of mind would be past the prime age for reproduction, and then it would be too late to get many of their genes into the pool anyway.

What Caused Religion?

Just because religion mighty supply us with some benefits in relieving stress, it does not mean that such benefits are the cause of religion. In addition, not all religions give the assurance that Christianity or Hinduism does. (In Christianity, the ego and body remain intact as permanent fixtures in an everlasting life. In Hinduism, the end of karmic law is the final extinction of the self and a final end to suffering.) Some cultures offer a dim view of the afterlife. Life after death for the Lakota is ill defined. The soul goes up to the Milky Way. The “heaven” of the Nez Perce is hardly a “heaven” at all. Rather it is a shadowy world without joy, where people sit it semi-darkness. It’s not always the case that religion offers a panacea to the ills of this world or a sense of peace to alleviate our fear of death. Nor do all religions offer paths of increasing wisdom, or courses of instruction that continue from one stage to the next—with the hope of attaining enlightenment, or at least contentment. Some religions strike fear into the hearts of their believers. In Christianity, this is certainly the reason we have Satan and hell. Even if believers can feel the certainty of an eternal reward, knowing that one’s friends or loved ones who are not believers will burn forever in excruciating torture is not a very consoling thought. (The Gnostic Gospel of St. Peter actually has Christ telling the apostle this secret: that those in Hell will eventually get out).

In most tribal religions, the gods play little to no part in morality, judgment, reward or punishment. They exist, like other aspects of nature, without being sources of goodness or ethical revelation. They are put up with, or they are burdensome, requiring sacrifices to prevent the people from being pelted with volcanic rocks or left to starve because of drought, or drown in a flood. They are very “human” in their desires, lusts, and political machinations. They are not meant for universal consumption (every tribe has their own gods for themselves), and their concern is not for humanity but their particular group.

It’s true that religions of every stripe involve music, singing, communal fellowship, group cohesion, stories that explain the meaning of the world with highly charged emotion. If you were a Quaker that emotion might lead to peace and tranquility. If you were living in the world of the Aztecs that emotion would probably be one of sheer terror, where the religious elite regularly cut out the living hearts of victims. For not all religions eliminate anxiety (the base of Alper’s hypothesis). And while sometimes religion can bring out what we think of as the best in people—an altruistic spirit, concern for the poor and less fortunate, love for one’s fellow Man, and tolerance—religion, as we all know, can also instigate brutality, war, torture, rape, genocide, conquest, annihilation, and the worst kinds of intolerance. Even Christianity, based on the teachings of a Jewish “rabbi” who preached turn the other cheek instead of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, has been used for hundreds of years to condone mistreatment, even genocide, against Jewish people. Religion is often the utmost specimen of contradiction in our species.

Origins of Religion

It could be that religion arose like the arts: those who developed incredible shamanistic powers became the most powerful people in the tribal hierarchy and consequently were able to attract a greater number of mates. But if the ethnological record from contemporary tribal peoples is any indication, this doesn’t seem likely. Shaman, or medicine men, though given a good deal of respect in tribal cultures, and at times having opportunities for extra sexual favors due to their weird charisma, are on the other hand often seen as being a little crazed. They are often lost in their own visions, obsessed with their spiritual path, which is certainly not of this world, and there’s not much in that repertoire that would make them prime candidates for husbands. They tend to be the most introspective members of the tribe—not the ones bringing home the bacon.

I believe it most likely that religion stemmed from the emotional and schema/categorizing properties of the brain itself, and specifically with our Theory of Mind. The limbic system of the brain, having to do with emotion, long ago in our ancient hominid ancestors likely led to the development of ritualistic communal celebrations, as we saw in the rain dances of chimpanzees, which coincided with the development of music. Our hominid ancestors reacted to the natural environment with awe, which is a kind of “spiritual” state. Music led to language, which played upon the pre-existing pattern of schema: basic cause and effect scenarios arising in the subconscious brain constructed for survival. Once parable/stories entered into true speech, the basic cause and effect patterning of the mind, when pointed to the larger questions (as a result of an expanded brain), intuitively began to make connections that had an undercurrent of dualistic logic.

In order to have a story, there has to be conflict. Conflict and personal agency are embedded in the structure of our sentences: an actor acts. We anthropomorphize. Our Theory of Mind is rampant. Origin myths are based upon the idea that willful intelligent agents cause things to happen. Humans were accustomed to seeing the world through the lens of personal intent. Your neighbor gets mad and throws a stone at you. Stones don’t just come your way without someone wanting to inflict pain. When a rock comes tumbling at you down a mountain, someone must be doing that. When you’re sick, there has to be a reason—an evil spirit was sent into you by your enemy. Likewise, natural disasters are caused by gods who are displeased. This is basic cause and effect. But this also brings up another problem connected to Theory of Mind: Confirmation Bias. Studies in neuroscience have shown repeatedly that the conclusions we believe are the ones that taint our sense of the world. We have bias. We stand where we sit. To change the worldview one was born with takes monstrous effort and self-control. Science itself is based on the belief that humans are capable of such self-regulation, through the requirement of verifiable information and peer review. But a dispassionate look at phenomena does not come naturally, and in the course of human life on earth science has only existed for a relative split second. Most of the time humans have been incapable of divesting themselves of their own limited perspectives and the mythic systems they were born into.

Other Explanations

There are other explanations for religious thought, and these can further help to explain ways in which religion developed in our early ancestors. Even before stories of deities came into existence there were feelings that helped to drive a movement toward religious experience and cultural expression. Neural properties in the brain leading to shamanistic episodes, as well as the impact of dreams, visions, hallucinogenic drugs, and out-of-body experiences resulting from trauma or epilepsy could all have all played a part in affecting sensibilities that came to be thought of as occurrences operating from another plane. These forces are well documented in both religious and scientific literature and there is no doubt that they played an important role in establishing perceptions that helped to confirm early Man’s belief in the duality of the physical and spiritual worlds. In order to cross over to the non-material dimension, everything from fasting and not drinking water (as in the Vision Quests of traditional Plains Indian tribes) to drugs such as peyote (used in the Native American Church) are and have been utilized to facilitate visionary states. While spending forty days and forty nights in the dessert would probably entice anyone to see visions (as did Jesus); forty days and nights on a boat full of two-of-every-kind of animal might indeed make one take up drink, (as did Noah after the flood). Cannabis has been used for religious purposes in the Middle East; Psilocybin mushrooms are used in Mesoamerica; the Amanita Muscaria mushroom is still used in shamanistic practices of Siberia, and the list could go on and on. Even coffee has a legendry connection with Catholic monks who, in ancient times, discovered that the drink allowed them to keep awake during prayers.

From the recent perspective of neuroscience, there have been many questions raised about the brain’s role in seeing or creating god. The notion of the gene for God has been taken up by many more than Matthew Alper. Dean Hamer’s The God Gene, published a few years before Alper’s book, claims that religious thought is hardwired into our DNA to provide humans with “an innate sense of optimism” as they live with the awareness that death is “ultimately inevitable.”7 In 1997 Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran delivered a paper, “The Neural Basis of Religious Experience,” which said that the circuitry of the brain may have a good deal to do with religious thought: “If these preliminary results hold up, they may indicate that the neural substrate for religion and belief in God may partially involve circuitry in the temporal lobes, which is enhanced in some patients.”8 As Michael Shermer wrote in The Humanist regarding Ramachandran’s discoveries,

Using electrical monitors on subjects’ skin (a skin conductance response commonly used to measure emotional arousal), Ramachandran and his colleagues tested three types of “emotional stimuli”—religious, violent, and sexual—in three populations: temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients who had religious pre-occupations, normal “very religious” people, and normal non-religious people. In the latter two groups, Ramachandran found skin conductance response to be highest to sexual stimuli; in the first group the response was strongest to religious words and icons, significantly above the religious control group. Ramachandran considered three possible, but not mutually exclusive, hypotheses to explain his findings: that the mystical reveries led the patient to religious beliefs; that the facilitation of connections between emotion centers of the brain, like the amygdala, caused the patient to see deep cosmic significance in everything around him or her that is similar to religious experiences; that there may be neural wiring in the temporal lobes focused on something akin to religion. Other research tends not to support the first hypothesis, which leaves the latter two the likeliest explanations of the findings. Psychiatric and neurological patients who experience hallucinations, for example, do not necessarily exhibit religious propensities, but TLE patients, when shown religious words—as well as words with sexual or violent connotations—showed much higher emotional response to the religious words.9

Ramachandran’s research gives scientific credence to claims long made by a number of theological commentators that a good many religious saints, from Paul to Joan of Arc, were probably experiencing brain seizures when afflicted by acute religious visions.

Andrew Newberg, in Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, states his belief that an “evolutionary perspective suggests the neurobiology of mystical experience arose, at least in part, from the mechanism of the sexual response,”10 and indeed, in ancient times sexual practices were often associated with religious rituals. Michael Persinger in Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs11 has a theory based on trauma which causes the brain to misinterpret information as mystical or out-of-body. He has developed a device which is essentially a helmet equipped with electromagnets which produces a field that causes micro seizures from overactive neutrons in the temporal lobe of the brain giving people religious sensations that range from out-of-body experiences to experiencing angels or aliens. (Here it is quite obvious the ways in which culture dictates what kind of religious icons become available during a religious experience. A Lakota Indian in ancient times, on the Great Plains of North America, would not see the Virgin Mary, but rather the White Buffalo Calf Maiden.) Rick Strassman in The Spirit Molecule thinks that a single compound, DMT, found in the pineal gland in the interior of the brain can account for religious feeling.12

In all of these explanations, the brain is “tricked” somehow into interpreting senses that are skewed. These interpretations are visionary and usually occur only to individuals, not groups, but the main notion important to science is that the inner world of a person experiencing religious conversion does not match with the exterior world of an observer watching them. While mass hallucinations have been reported in history, they are infinitely rarer than the greater number of personal perceptions of religious transformation caused by a variety of physical and mental states—and some of them are known to have been initiated through ingesting fungi or molds in food that had hallucinogenic properties. (A similar instance of the brain being tricked is what occurs in cases of synaesthesia, where the brain sees colors that can be tasted and sounds seen—a genetic occurrence—which has been touted as another possible cause as an antecedent for religion.) Whatever the causes of religious states, many have attested fiercely to their validity, just as many others have attested to having seen ghosts, aliens, or other paranormal occurrences.

Whether religious mythology is seen and felt as verifiable truth or as metaphor, the stories stemming from the religious imagination have been the foundation of world literature. Religious literature has acted upon the minds of billions of people across the globe. Stepping back and looking at the trickster (Trickster almost always being a religious personage, a deity of some kind) tales from a global perspective, another aspect of these stories lies in their ability to shine a light on the mind from which religion sprang. Through a Cognitive Narrative critical approach to literature, stories can be examined from the perspective of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience in order to mine the brain for evidence of our ancient selves that is still a part of our psychology today. The trickster elements we see in gods around the world testify to the similar ways people have tried to confront the questions of our existence.