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.
Is there a specific part of the brain for feelings of spirituality? Many lines of evidence suggests it is the temporal lobes. Dr. David Comings, a renown human geneticist, neuroscientist and physician proposes that spirituality is genetically hardwired into a specific part of the brain, is pleasurable, is critical to the evolution and survival of man, and will never go away. Understanding the biology of the spiritual brain can help us to develop a rational spirituality where are rational brain and spiritual brain can live in peace.
Brains Are Hardwired To Act According To The Golden Rule
ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2008)
— Wesley Autrey, a black construction worker, a Navy veteran and 55-year-old father of two, didn’t know the young man standing beside him. But when he had a seizure on the subway platform and toppled onto the tracks, Autrey jumped down after him and shielded him with his body as a train bore down on them. Autrey could have died, so why did he put his life on the line — literally — to save this complete stranger?
Donald Pfaff, the author of the new book The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule, thinks he has the answer. Our brains, he says, are hardwired to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Individual acts of aggression and evil occur when this circuitry jams.
“If it’s really true that all religions have this ethical principle, across continents and across centuries, then it is more likely to have a hardwired scientific basis than if it was just a neighborhood custom,” says Pfaff, whose laboratory at Rockefeller University studies various hormones and brain signals that influence positive social behavior.
In his book, Pfaff proposes a theory that explains, in a parsimonious way, how people manage to behave well when they do, and under what conditions they deviate from good behavior. He describes how memories of fear, as well as various brain hormones, can play a vital role in whether people choose to act ethically or violently toward others. One’s behavior is a balance, he says, between “prosocial” and “antisocial” traits — a balance shaped by early life experiences.
“You have some people who are prosocial, who face the world with a smile and are uniformly nice to other people,” says Pfaff. “Others face the world with a snarl and are routinely aggressive and thoughtless. Most of us are a balance — we are able to treat each other almost all the time in a civil and thoughtful way.” But nobody’s perfect, he adds. “Even those in the prosocial group have cheated on their taxes.”
Donald W. Pfaff, Ph.D., is professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and Behavior at The Rockefeller University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Rockefeller, where he has studied the brain and behavior for more than 30 years, he discovered the brain-cell targets for steroid hormones and proved that these chemicals, among others, could elicit specific behaviors when reaching the right brain areas.
Xerpi