NEW YORK (ABP) — If scientists could chart physical changes that happen in the brain during prayer, would it mean that prayer is something that happens only in the mind? And if brain scans show unique molecular activity during meditation, does that mean all religious belief is imaginary?
Scientists — and some theologians — are studying those questions using neurotheology, an emerging discipline that addresses the correlation between neurological and spiritual activity.
Some say neurotheology proves that God created the brain. Others believe “the brain created the god.” At the root of the debate, some say, is the threat that faith could be reduced to nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain.
The coupling of science and belief has become increasingly prominent in popular media. Time and Newsweek magazines have both recently run long stories exploring the newly recognized discipline. And current studies at Wheaton College, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania are using neuroimaging to locate brain regions activated during emotional or spiritual events.
The quest is to find a neurological basis for out-of-body or enlightenment experiences, including trances, time perception, oneness with the universe and altered states of consciousness. But neurotheology can also help explain the more mundane habits of a religious life: prayer, beliefs, meditation and senses of the presence of the supernatural.
Paul Simmons, a clinical professor of family and community medicine at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, said the brain is intimately related to relationships with and perceptions of God — so neurotheology is a good way to help theologians use all of their capacities to study God. The underlying question, the former pastor and ethics professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary said, is whether that experience is “just a mental state or have you gotten in touch with a transcendence?”
“Our brain is basic to all that we are, all that we understand, all that we perceive,” Simmons said. “We can't avoid that in theology any longer. At least, we must be aware of the fact that many of our claims made about religion are actually based on science.”
Theories about correlations between the brain and beliefs are nothing new. Historians have speculated that figures like Joan of Arc, Saint Teresa of Avila, Fedor Dostoevsky and Marcel Proust had aliments like epilepsy, which in turn led to their obsessions with the spiritual world.
Modern scientists differentiate between the brain and mind by defining the brain as physical and chemical, while the mind has to do with thoughts and ideas.
Plato's ideas focused on both the brain and the mind. Aristotle argued that God is pure mind, and since people have a brain they can think “God thoughts,” Simmons said. “Aristotle thought you could think pure thoughts and thus get right in touch with God.”
Beginning in the 1950s, scientists used electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to record electrical activity in the brain. By placing electrodes on the scalp, they could study brain waves concurring with elevated states of consciousness. In the 1980s, they stimulated different areas of the brain with a magnetic field, causing subjects to claim senses of ethereal presences in the room.
The first modern book published on the subject came in 1994. Called Neurotheology: Virtual Religion in the 21st Century, it was promoted in a theological journal called Zygon. And Newsweek recently citied a 1998 book — published by MIT Press, no less — called Zen and the Brain. Since then, scholarly journals have devoted issues to religion and the mind, including studies using data from meditating Buddhist monks and praying Franciscan nuns.
The reason for the renewed interest, according to neurotheology pioneer Brian Alston, is that the people writing about it have changed the terms of the field. This popular type of neurotheology focuses on beliefs, he said.
“In some ways, with neuroscience in pop culture, it sometimes seems more simple and basic than it really is,” said Alston, who is pursuing a doctorate in clinical psychology from Argosy University. “What bubbles up to the surface in culture may make it seem simple, but it's not. It's really complicated. In time, as people study it, they will see the complexity here. There's still so much we don't understand about the brain.”
Studies since the 1960s have consistently reported that between 30 percent and 40 percent of people have felt “very close to a powerful, spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself,” Newsweek reported. According to the Gallup Poll, 53 percent of Americans say they have experienced a “sudden religious awakening or insight” at least once.
But has the fascination with the brain and belief come from an oversimplified version of neurotheology? Some have criticized Time's article as equating science with Darwinism and religion with God — over-generalized definitions for such complex subjects.
“It's oversimplified, but at the same time, there's a large kernel of truth in there,” Simmons said. “The issue is whether a religious experience is a matter of brain circuits or God. Religiously inclined people will say, 'Well, that's God using our brain manifesting [itself] in brain activity.'”
Alston, who wrote What is Neurotheology?, said popular writing has certainly oversimplified the dialogue between science and theology. Theology does not just deal with the religious and the spiritual — it has much broader implications, he said.
The word “neurobelief” — instead of “neurotheology” — is a better way to characterize the discipline, Alston said. Neurotheology should represent beliefs that are broader than just religious and spiritual, he added. It should represent beliefs that are cultural and political as well.
“What neurotheology tries to do is say, 'Look, here are ways that all this works together. Instead of seeing these things as enemies, let's look at these as things that can relate,'” he said. Part of the issue, he said, is that, “in the Western world, we have created a dichotomy between what we consider to be physical and what we consider to be spiritual.”
That divide has been implicated in some of the criticisms of neurotheology. The key problem with neurotheology is its attempt to unify two strikingly different perspectives on human beings within one discipline, Alston wrote in a paper presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association last year.
Some critics believe that even if neuroscience and theology are brought together within the discipline of neurotheology, the differences will inevitably lead to one discipline — namely theology — dominating the other, Alston wrote.
David Wulf, a psychologist at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, has written that religious experience is actually normal brain functions happening under duress — not communication with God.
Another prominent thinker, Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has published essays questioning the discipline itself. In an essay titled “Neurotheology: A Rather Skeptical Perspective,” Pigliucci wrote that he had two problems with neurotheology: “First, it is no theology at all. Theology is the study of the attributes of God…. [T]he neurological study of what happens to the brain during mystical experiences cannot tell us anything about God because all we can do is to measure neural patterns….”
The other problem, Pigliucci wrote, is that it violates Occam's razor, the rule of logic that what “can be done with fewer…is done in vain with more. That is, when faced with multiple hypotheses capable of explaining a given set of data, it is wise to start by considering the simplest ones, those that make the least unnecessary assumptions.”
That logic would leave God out of the equation.
For scientists to conclude that “the self and the world at large are in fact contained within and possibly created by the reality of [an] Absolute Unitary Being” leaves the “boundaries of both science and philosophy to plunge into pure metaphysical speculation,” Pigliucci wrote.
If “we realize that mystical experiences originate from the same neurological mechanisms that underlie hallucinations … I bet dollar to donut that the reality experienced by meditating Buddhists and praying nuns is entirely contained in their mind and is not a glimpse of a 'higher' realm, as tantalizing as that idea may be,” he concluded.
Simmons called that criticism “on target.” Neurotheology doesn't deal with theology as it is traditionally done — trying to get religion and experience together with reasonable consistency, he said. Progress in the field will come mostly in mental health, he said.
Alston, who studied ethics and philosophy at Yale Divinity School, says criticism of neurotheology depends on who is receiving the information. Much of it has to do with the difference between the physical brain and the metaphysical mind. Some experts believe that ideas in the mind cause action, while others say chemicals in the brain cause action — and if chemicals are altered in the brain, behaviors will change, Alston said.
Either way of thinking is okay, since neurotheologists aren't interested in changing firmly held beliefs, he said.
“What I'm trying to do with neurotheology is to explain that each of these has a way with relating to the subject matter,” he said. “It once again depends on the standing point of a person in terms of if they're a biologist and what their tools are and if they are a psychologist and what their tools are.”
And with the stakes so high in this new and complex discipline, there's likely to be no shortage of opinions from either camp.
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