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Hard-wired for God?
by John
P. Pratt
Brain
scans taken during certain religious experiences indicate a detachment
from the physical world. What are the implications?
A new flurry of books, magazine articles and television documentaries
announces the discovery that the human brain is apparently ready-made
for spiritual experiences. One article on the subject was in Reader's
Digest last December entitled "Searching for the Divine."
It claimed boldly, "There is new evidence that humans are hard-wired
to believe in God." Let's take a brief look at that new evidence,
and then consider what it means in light of what the Lord has revealed.
The Evidence
The evidence cited in that article includes the results of research
done by Professor Andrew Newberg, a radiologist at the University
of Pennsylvania who teamed up with psychiatrist and anthropologist
Eugene d'Aquili. The latter proposed a theory that brain function
could produce a wide range of experiences, including the religious
experiences reported by those having what they believed to be communion
with the infinite, or being "one with the universe." They
came up with the idea of doing brain scans of Tibetan monks meditating
and Franciscan nuns engaged in deep prayer. And sure enough, they
got the pictures they wanted.
There is part of the brain's left parietal lobe which they call
the "orientation association area." It is apparently the
region which helps recognize where the line is between the physical
self and the rest of the universe. It requires a constant stream
of neural information flowing from the senses to maintain that distinction.
The scans showed that during the peak moments of prayer and meditation
the neural information flow was dramatically reduced. They reasoned
that with the brain deprived of information about the "real
world", the person would experience the sense of the limitless
feeling of unity with the universe, reported by those having the
religious experience.
The Implications
What are the implications of their discovery that physical changes
occur in the brain during spiritual experiences? As might be expected,
a wide range of conclusions have been drawn both by them as well
as other researchers and authors.
Preparing to do research for this article, I checked the Internet
for articles and books on this topic and found that there is no
shortage. The book which led to the above-cited article is entitled
Why God Won't Go Away. Other popular-level books have titles
like The "God" Part of the Brain, and Where
God Lives in the Human Brain. There are also several higher-level
presentations with titles that include words like "neuropsychology."
So I drove to my local bookstore to look these books over, thinking
to buy the best one as further source for this article. After perusing
several, there was no way I would spend money for any of them. Why?
Because they not only did not contain many more real results than
I have already reported, they all suffered serious drawbacks.
Results drawn
from these brain scans present two problems. One sentence from The
"God" Part of the Brain illustrates the first
problem: "God is a concept created by our brain, and therefore
has no external reality." Indeed, that sounds similar to what
the original researchers postulated, that changes in the brain function
would actually cause the perceptions of oneness with all things.
In other words, this is a rehash of the time-honored "religious
hallucinations" theory, cloaked in pseudo-scientific garb.
The second problem
is the other extreme. It appears equally unfounded to claim this
is a proof that God created the brain in such a way as be able to
experience the infinite. It may well be true that God did indeed
do such a thing, but this is certainly not a scientific proof of
that hypothesis. It is only a proof that physical body changes can
be photographed during a spiritual experience. Researchers could
also have monitored heart beat rates, or brain waves shifting from
beta to alpha to theta to delta waves. But human physical changes
don't prove God exists. I personally don't expect a truly solid
proof of God's existence to emerge before the Second Coming, because
at present we are here to have our faith tested. We probably shouldn't
expect a conclusive scientific proof of God just yet.
So what do these results prove? To me, they indicate that something
physical is associated with an experience which may have been thought
to be entirely spiritual or mental. For an atheist who assumed that
one professing spiritual experiences must be lying, these results
provide a rational explanation of why a person would indeed feel
detached from the physical world during meditation. So they provide
evidence for the mini-step in the spiritual enlightenment of the
non-believer that at least the religious zealot is not necessarily
lying. But this small step could be negated by a giant step backward
if one then concluded that therefore God has been discovered to
be nothing more than a temporary shortage of "reality"
data arriving at the needed place in the cranium! To me, the experiment
proves nothing about God at all.
On the other
hand, to the believer, these results could be encouraging. It may
mean that is not only great prophets who can have spiritual experiences.
Apparently all of us are "wired" in a way that, given
the right environment, such as a formal meditation or prayer setting,
God has provided a mechanism to block out the physical world long
enough for us to glimpse the eternal. That is an encouraging thought
which is what I believe I have learned from researching this article.
Brain or Mind?
To me, what appears to be at the heart of this and similar questions
has to do with a gross confusion of the two words "brain"
and "mind." What is the difference in meaning between
these two words? In principle, they have clearly distinct meanings.
The brain is, according to one dictionary, "the anterior part
of the central nervous system enclosed in the cranium of vertebrates,
consisting of a mass of nerve tissue organized for the perception
of sensory impulses, the regulation of motor impulses," etc.
It clearly has an important function in running our body and being
a central routing station for all the impulses coming in through
the nerves.
On the other
hand, the word "mind" is defined to be the "conscious
element, part, or process in a human or other being that reasons,
thinks, feels, wills, perceives, judges, etc." That is, it
is the part of us we think with. The distinction between it and
the brain is emphasized in one of the lesser definitions in one
dictionary: "the psychic or spiritual being, as opposed to
physical matter." The point here is that we have two distinct
words which need not be confused: the mind is what we think with
and the brain is the gray matter found in our skull. The confusion
arises when we assume that all thinking occurs in the brain. For
materialistic atheists, the equality of those two words is a "no-brainer"
because most don't believe in spiritual matter. But there is a mounting
corpus of evidence which implies that the mind and brain are not
the same at all. The many out-of-body and so-called "near death"
experiences indicate that the "mind" with which people
think and remember is not in the brain after all, which may be part
of a body lying lifeless on the operating table, but rather is in
the spirit which can be separated from the body.
I personally
try always to make a clear distinction between the concepts of "mind"
and "brain", and it is amazing to see how much the two
concepts are confused in everyday speech. We have been conditioned
to believe that we think with our brain and that thought is only
some sort of chemical reaction. Clearly chemicals and drugs can
influence our thought processes, and electric probes into our brain
can stimulate certain memories or actions, but there is still much
to be learned in the complicated interaction between mind and brain.
The two are clearly closely related; my only point is to attempt
to maintain a distinction between the two words, yet not be surprised
that atheist scientists tend to equate them.
What has God told us about the brain and the mind? It turns out
that the word "brain" is not found anywhere in the scriptures,
so we won't learn much about the brain there. The Lord tends to
use the word "mind" when referring to the part of us which
thinks. The word "heart" is also used, but that seems
to refer more to the "feeling" part of us, which is also
a kind of thought. Sometimes he uses both together, apparently to
emphasize two witnesses or aspects of the same truth. For example,
the Lord told Oliver Cowdery , "I will tell you in your mind
and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you
and which shall dwell in your heart." (D&C 8:2).
In conclusion,
it is wonderful that scientists are performing experiments which
provide clues to what occurs physically during spiritual experiences.
But surely any explanation will fall short which does not take into
account both our physical and spiritual aspects.
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