You've probably seen variants of this question in popular magazines and books over the years: is there a "God gene" that explains why human beings tend toward belief in the supernatural? Can the human impulse to search for the divine be traced to a specific, biological imperative?
Perhaps it's slightly heavy reading for the day after a long holiday weekend, but there's an interesting piece at Search Magazine which thoroughly examines the quest to determine religion's biological roots. The big question behind all this, of course, is what (if anything) such a discovery would mean for believers. Here's a rundown of the opposing viewpoints, from the article:
For many, the suggestion that religiosity has its basis in biological mechanisms implies its falsity. Daniel Dennett would certainly agree. Most of the prominent cognitivists, including Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran, and Stewart Guthrie, avoid this argument, but readers generally take them to be hostile toward religious belief. Jesuit theologian John Haught, whose own work champions a science friendly Christianity, concludes that “if Boyer and others are giving us the ultimate and adequate explanation of religion, then of course we should acknowledge that our piety is pure fiction.”Perhaps this is not necessarily true. Cognitivist Justin Barrett identifies as an evangelical Christian and has been an organizer for the youth ministry Young Life. “Why wouldn’t God,” he speculates in an interview, “design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?” His book
Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, a summary of cognitivist research, spends its concluding chapters suggesting that these theories make a naturalist case against atheism: “Belief in God comes naturally. Disbelief requires human intervention.” When the research is presented this way, believers receive it much more eagerly than either Dennett or Haught might expect. A review of Barrett’s book in Meridian, a Mormon magazine, expressed enthusiasm for his rhetorical openness to theism: “Neither coercion nor brainwashing nor special persuasive techniques need be invoked in order to account for widespread human belief in God or gods.”
What's your take? If it were shown that religious belief was a biological impulse—a mechanical function of our genetics—would that make you reconsider your faith? Would such a revelation kill your faith in Christianity (and all other religions)... or would it not shake your faith? Why?
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Comments (15)
"Indeed, we do know an awful lot now about what is happening in the brain, and this has become linked to theology in a new field called ‘neuro-theology’, which is all the rage in America. What you can do is ask Buddhist monks or Christian nuns to pray or meditate and then you observe their brains in an MRI image, and you find that—surprise, surprise—exactly the same part of the brain is lighting up in these people. Then some scientists have decided they’ve now discovered a "god module" in the brain. So god must have made us because there is a ‘god module’. And you can link all sorts of religious experiences with different levels of biochemicals in the brain. There was a study in Scandinavia where they took two congregations of Christians whose method of worship was rather different, some were more expressive than others were. They discovered that the more expressive ones had five times the concentration of 5-hydroxytryptamine than the others. In other words, their Christian experience depended on it.
But all they are doing here is just observing what is happening in the brain at that time,
and the fallacy of neuro-theology is as follows. Alan (Torrance) and I are very keen fly-fishers, and there’s a wonderful section from The Complete Angler that I sometimes quote and then ask people what sort of religious meditation they think it is referring to. "Wonderful!" they reply, "well, they were probably meditating on this or that", whereas actually they were just fishing. Then suppose Alan and I go fishing and both have our heads put in these machines, and surprisingly the same bit of the brain lights up. We all believe there are fish under the water, even though none of us have seen them. But because we all believe, we all have the same bit of the brain lighting up, this proves (a) that we have a fish module, and (b) that there are fish because we believe it. That may seem ridiculous but it’s exactly the logic of the neuro-theology module. So, we can in principle say which parts of our brain are working while we are, say, asking a question, but that will tell us nothing at all about the value of the question or the truth of the answer. Each of those has to be decided on the basis of the relevant evidence."
He makes this comment in a discussion of scientists following a lecture by N.T. Wright on the question, "Can a scientist believe in the resurrection?" You can find it here: http://www.jamesgregory.org/to...
Would it shake my faith? No. In fact, scientific proof of this nature would actually strengthen it. Actually, this perceptible need for humans to believe in something bigger than themselves is one of the key reasons I turned from agnosticism/atheism to Christianity. If we allow scientific findings of any nature to undermine our faith, our God is too small. We have to believe that God is bigger than any of this. Because He is.
One last thing: The fact that Jesus walked out of a tomb one Sunday morning trumps all of this.
On the other hand, my church tradition tends to teach that every sinner has a "vacuum" that is "God-shaped," so maybe there's an unscientific attempt of that phenomenon. Is that part of being created "in God's image"?
Overall, I'm just skeptical of trying to explain everything spiritual in biological terms.
Aside from this there is the more interesting backlash for naturalists and materialists. If a belief or idea is invalidated because of it's having arisen by natural causes, which beliefs or ideas are valid? The answer is of course "None" because they all arose that way (in the naturalists view). If my thoughts and yours are just the product of chemical and electrical impulses why should I trust them? All is nonsense.
Nevertheless I have no doubt that my belief arose because of supernatural intervention. No one in my biological family believes. If that were not the case and there were compelling evidence that I had "inherited" belief I would be concerned!
"Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end." Ecc. 3:11