TruthBook Religious News Blog

Written by Clint Rainey
May 14, 2008 14 Comments

In his column yesterday, The New York Times’s David Brooks, lately on a neuroanthropological kick, tackles the religious implications of modern neuroscience, saying its research portends disaster for orthodox believers—Christians, Jews, Muslims—although perhaps accommodating a generalized belief in some non-God supreme being.

“This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism,” he writes. “Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.” According to Brooks, neuroscience is moving the atheism-theism debate from culturally entrenched—thanks to the tireless militancy (and bestselling polemics) of antitheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and the other Four Horsemen—to irrelevant.

Because neuroscientific advances take what Christians call religious experiences and demystify them physiologically into, say, an increase in blood flow and synaptic activity in one’s prefrontal and parietal cortices, a worldview informed by modern neuroscience doesn’t have to be averse to God per se—just to a personal, miracle-working God like Christianity’s.

These recalibrated emphases on neuroscientific studies could shift the atheism-theism debate from believer and nonbeliever to Bible (or Quran) believer and Buddhist (or Wiccan, or Scientology) believer. That is, writes Mary Martin at Animal Person, cognitive scientists are “merely explaining that the feelings associated with god might not come from outside us,” and, in turn, helping to validate nontheistic religions.

Brooks maintains that, right now, “[i]n their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God.” But that “was the easy debate”: He predicts the real challenge will come “from people who feel the existence of the sacred”—i.e., again, like Buddhist nontheists—“but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”

Though Jewish, Brooks demurs from joining the hand-wringing, saying he’s “not qualified to take sides” even though he is watching the neuroscience science community “joining hands” with mysticism “in unexpected ways”—by which he presumably means “any at all.” The result, he argues, is a new science-based movement that emphasizes “self-transcendence” over “divine law or revelation.”

Orthodoxy will be under attack more than ever, as a defense is laid for neural Buddhism. “Orthodox believers,” he says, are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. . . . We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.”

As proof of where this path leads, Brooks cites a prescient Tom Wolfe essay from Forbes in 1996, written well ahead of the curve, lamenting neuroscience’s Nietzschean move to bury God and make science soulless, sending “modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze”—the very move cheered by Hitchens and the anti-Expelled crowd, particularly Dawkins, who appears in the film.

Labels: David Brooks, God, neural Buddhism, neuroscience, religion, religious experience