More scientists have flocked to “neurotheology”, the study of neurobiology of religion and spirituality. Last year the American Psychological Association published “Varieties of Anomalous Experience”, covering enigmas from near-death experiences to mystical ones. At Columbia University’s new Center for the study of Science and Religion, one program investigates how spiritual expereince reflect “peculiarly recurrent events in human brains.” In December, the scholarly Journal of Consciousness Studies devoted its issue to religious moments ranging from “Christic visions” to “shamanic states of consciousness.” In the May book “Religion in Mind” tackling subjects such as how religious practices act back on the brain’s frontal lobe to inspire optimism and even creativity, in "Why God Won’t Go Away"the author and a late collaborator ,use brain-imaging data they collected from Tibetan Budhists lost in meditation and from Franciscan nins deep in prayer to…well .what they do involves a lot of neuro-jargon about lobes and fissures. In a nutshell, though they use the data to identify what seems to be the brains sprituality circuit,and to explain how it is that religious rituals have the power to move believers and nonbelievers alike. The reality is that it’s all in the brain weather or not that you believe in god . If there is a god then why did he make me so unatractive , why do I have to go through life alone with no one to love me or to start a family with…why? why does life suck?
Gee, and I thought that this was simply going to be the revelation that Pinky was God.
Hideous Looks sure didn’t hold back on his first post.
Life is only what you make it. 
So the brain is hardwired for God–so what? It neither proves not disproves the existance of God, because each side can use it equally well to support their side. I’ll take the side of a believer.
The first rule of creating anything is internal consistancy. Look at any good fiction with a created world–fantasy and science fiction come to mind. The best fantasy with magic for instance, has a specific set of rules that must be followed in order for the magic to work. It does not matter what those rules are, or if they are spelled out for the reader, but if they do not exist, the world is not believable.
So God creates this world, and He or She or They must create an internal consistancy–a natural order. All of this creation follows specific rules. We don’t know all these rules, but we’re having fun learning about them (this may be our purpose–we’ve been created as universe dectectives to learn the secrets of creation). Anyway, part of the internal consistancy involves our brains and how they work. We cannot experience anything without it having some effect on our brain–talking, daydreaming, reading, sex, sleep, etc.–the brain is never at rest, it reacts to everything. The experience of God is a natural phenomena (how could it be anything else?), therefore, the brain, to be internally consistant, must react ot the experience of God.
I saw something about this in Newsweek. Some scientist guy had a “revelation” but he explained it all by what happens in the brain.
Scientists already know what a near death experience really is, and now they are finding out what god really is.
And i think life is better for some people because they have more ceratonin (sp?) in their brain, the natural happy drug. Lucky bastards. It’s either that or something i don’t know.
Newsweek? Ah, yes, science’s most prestigious peer review journal. Was your scientist guy reporting in the same issue that carried the story, “Science Contra Darwin: Evolution’s founding father comes under new attack”?
That story talks about some scientist guy, what it calls a Darwinian: “So heated is the debate that one Darwinian says that there are times when he thinks about going into a field with more intellectual honesty, the used car business.”(Newsweek, April 8, 1985, pp. 80-81)
Some scientists have speculated about what they believe that some near-death experiences might be.
As one noted scientist guy, a neurologist, said, right above where you posted your unsupported nonsense, that neither science, nor its conclusions, have any bearing on God one way or the other whatsoever.
Everything in the universe is made of the same thing, we are part of god as is everything around us.
During meditation etc. you become more relaxed and at one with the rest of the universe and hence more at one with god.
The reason evolution & religion have problems is that you have to be as smart as god to understand it all and we are not at that level yet.
re: being pissed off at being ugly.
Exercise ( releases feel good drugs ).
Get loadsa porn !
It’s pod people. :eek:
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Libertarian *
**
Of course, the same can be said for Santa Claus, hobbits, compassionate conservatives, and all other mythical beings.
Also, Platonic idealist conceptions like good, evil, and beauty.
The ambiguity here is killing me.
I think you are playing down the role and benefits of science. NDEs are pretty well documented as far as pseudoscientific claims go, and we know what they are, along with similar claims such as Out of Body Experiences, Astral Projection, and so forth.
NDEs have even been triggered in labs using substances such as ketamine. It’s been proven that NDEs do occur, but they offer zero proof for afterlife, god, or anything else other than the process of dying, or brain functions simulating the process of dying. The majority of NDEs do not even share the common elements usually attributed to them by sensationalist (and generally false) pseudoscientific literature.
When you say that some scientists have speculated, etc., you seem to be smirking at the accomplishments of human knowledge. In this case, there is absolutely no reason to do so.
As for the entire brain/god debacle, neurotheology is a fairly new and controversial discipline, and I doubt it has been correctly evaluated yet.
In any case, if we are wired to believe in a superior being, I would hardly consider that evidence for the existence of God. Many animals, including humans, are wired to believe in a leader of the pack. The difference with humans is that we are able to speculate. It seems more logical to (tentatively, until more evidence is available) attribute human belief in the super-leader to our need for leadership and our tendency to speculate.
Esse quam videri.
I meant no dispersions on science by what I said any more than you likely did when you said “… I doubt [neurotheology] has been correctly evaluated yet.” Surely your doubts do not constitute disrespect for Ramachandran and other scientists working in the field.
Induction of a symptom is not necessarily production of a particular disease. Simply because I am able to make your nose run by blowing pepper in it doesn’t mean that I’ve discovered much about how colds are born. You’re right that near death experiences have not proved that God exists. But that’s only half the story. As a good scientist, I’m sure you would not want to sit on the other necessary implication, which is that they do not prove that God does not exist. The fact is that they have no bearing one way or the other.
It is remarkable that my statement “is killing” you while you leave the statement that it tempered unchallenged:
Do you prefer false statements about ambiguous data over ambiguous statements about ambiguous data?
Well, the ambiguity of the whole thread is killing me, not your one comment Libertarian. I have read into some of the work being conducted in Neurotheology–mostly I was just random sampling–and I was not convinced that all of this is good science (seemed to me like several people were starting out with some assumptive baggage). In addition, that section in (I believe it was) Newsweek on God and the Brain–which I read at my hairdresser’s-- was, IMHO, speculation more than an overview of the field. At the most it will make good conversation fodder at a cocktail party.
Sure, but there is more at work here than observing a symptom. To conclude that colds are caused by particles of pepper requires us to ignore a vast body of work that suggests otherwise. Researchers in the fields of OBEs and NDEs are concerned with studying and testing the mechanisms of these phenomena, not just the symptoms, and they have drawn conclusions that are supported by their and other evidence. That’s why we can say that OBEs are not in fact out of body at all, and that the claims about NDEs being related to afterlife or supreme beings are not in fact supported in any way.
I agree up to a point. I am not particularly interested in proving or disproving God, but I do want the straight dope on the investigation, not the kind of unnecessary perpetuating ambiguity offered by Newsweek and some of the neurotheologians. That’s where parsimony is useful. Newton put it like this:
“We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”
I have no problem with “the other necessary implication”, but I am interested in the truth and in a correct investigation of the truth, not in multiplying entities unnecessarily. So far, all efforts of neurotheology included, there is no evidence that suggests the existence of God. That doesn’t mean I preclude God, but it does mean that I like to see concrete work on the matter, not deliberate ambiguity in a fairly new field that has yet to be evaluated properly.
Not at all, I simply did not know where to start on that one! It’s not your or any other particular statement that was killing me. The second half of the statement you quote is clearly false, because no scientist has even identified God, much less examined him. So far God remains speculation.
As I said before, a large number of animals (humans included) are wired to organize themselves according to a hierarchy with a leader or number of leaders at its head. I see nothing unusual about this concept, given that forming organized groups presents distinct benefits over the group’s environment, and clearly confers an evolutionary advantage.
Neurotheologians are telling us we are wired to believe in God, God of course being the supreme and infallible leader of our pack. That information has been around as a working, supported hypothesis for the last 40 years or more. The neurotheologians are looking into the matter by scrutinizing the mechanisms of the nervous system, and by assuming what looks suspiciously like an either-or fallacy, being the theological portion of the discipline.
It once again boils down to what information we have. Work on neurotheology is providing some interesting information about the brain, but nothing about God. The end result is that we are presented with some new information about our circuits, and are then asked to consider it (rather ambiguously) as no evidence one way or another. This is frequently interpreted, sometimes even broadcast, as possible evidence for religion/God. We can consider many things as possible evidence for the existence of almost anything if we think in such loose terms.
In actuality there seems to be confusion in neurotheology between concepts, such as religion and spirituality, and experiences, such as spiritual experiences, prayer, etc. By positing God and religion as two necessary elements of the equation, other causes of such experiences could be ignored. A beautiful sunset could produce an effect indistinguishable from a religious experience of self-transcendence, as could works of art, trauma, pain, pleasure, drugs, etc.
This is hardly a well-defined field yet, and I think that neurotheology needs further evaluation before it can be accepted in the ranks of the hard sciences. I’m not saying it will not be, but at the moment there seems to be something lacking. And, as a member of the concerned public, I applaud those neurotheologists who conduct their science without rubbing ambiguity over findings, something that I suspect is a diplomatic move more than a scientific one.
Abe
A great post, thanks! I love the ambiguity of God. Ockhamly speaking, I can think of no better way to implement free-will than to place a consciousness in an amoral EMG spectrum and allow it to make whatever moral decisions it wishes, including whether or not it was placed there.
A great book is Phantoms in the Brain by VS Ramachandran, MD PhD. The simplicity of his approach is simply amazing. I ordered it and read it at the recommendation of an atheist who posts here and whom I admire. If you decide to do the same, I will appreciate your comments on the chapter titled “God and the Limbic System”. If nothing else, read the nearly thirty reviews at Amazon.
Haven’t read it, but thought I’d toss in another book on the subject: The God Part of the Brain by Matthew Alper. Carry on.
Thanks for the book recommendations Libertarian and Dijon Warlock. I am not familiar with these books but I will order them and inspect!