Neuroscience tells us that religion is not like other beliefs even if you are an atheist
I’ve been reading The Happiness Hypothesis lately by Jonathan Haidt, a professor at the University of Virginia and expert in positive psychology, the study of well-being.
Unlike most books on happiness which tend to fall on one or the other side, Haidt offers a mixture of science and ancient wisdom and looks to have science corroborate and enhance the teachings of the ancients from Confuscious and Buddha to the New Testament, Torah, and the Koran.
One of the interesting observations is that while the ancients could be fairly perceptive about the causes of human suffering and their solutions, science has both enhanced what the ancients said as well as provided physical, i.e., neurological backing to what the ancients could only talk about in metaphor.
A good example is self-control. Most would agree that self-control is important to happiness. The ancients, such as St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 7, recognized that while humans can easily develop control over their actions, they cannot control their thoughts. Indeed, attempts to control one’s thoughts can lead to obsessions which can in turn lead to compulsive behaviors to try to control them. St. Paul blamed this on our sinful nature, our “flesh”.
The reason why this happens, we now know, is because the human brain does most of its processing unconsciously and thoughts come largely from outside of conscious control. The autonomous systems that produce thoughts cannot be controlled but only trained to produce different thoughts or types of thoughts by changing how we respond to the thoughts it gives. This is the goal of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) for example which was only developed about 50 years ago.
Paul argued that the thing responsible for controlling the “flesh” is the “spirit” that one receives with faith. The outcome of the spirit is a metaphor for what we now know is the neocortex which is largely responsible for impulse control. When the neocortex is damaged or disabled, ordinarily upright people tend to act out their impulses, often in criminal behavior.
This doesn’t negate the spiritual significance of what St. Paul says. It only gives it a scientific backing. After all, nobody says that the “spirit” to which he refers can’t be represented by the neocortex any more than the story of the creation of the world in Genesis can’t be an extended metaphor for the Big Bang through a long period of evolution up until the beginnings of civilization. Such details are not relevant to the story.
One of the unfortunate conflicts of our time is between science and religion. This includes between, say, the hard sciences of physics, biology, and chemistry against stories of creation as well as between psychology and sociology versus ancient wisdom. This split is unfortunate because ancient wisdom, while often very perceptive, is steeped in easily misunderstood metaphors. People in our age, who have been raised after the Enlightenment, are apt to interpret these metaphors quite literally. If you ask them what a spirit is, they will give you a definition like the “living essence that returns to God upon death” as if that is a scientific answer rather than a metaphor for something we don’t really understand.
Because St. Paul uses the word “pneuma” which means “breath” in Greek for the actions of what science tells us is the neocortex, our minds balk and say, “well, it must be one or the other.” After all, how can the neocortex return to God when we die? (I’ll get to that in a minute.)
As we learn more and more about the world, people are apt to want to choose sides. They either take a dislike to all the metaphors of the ancients and want to talk about things in literal, physical terms, or they reject the physical nature of science and want to talk about things in terms of spirits, souls, chakras, or what have you. This has real consequences because it means that people tend to reject searching for meaning and become nihilists or they reject science and fail to benefit from, for example, modern psychotherapy, medicine, and the rigorous study of the past.
Science can tell us what is or is not factual but it can’t tell us what to care about. Likewise, religion can tell us what to care about but can’t give us new factual knowledge about ourselves and the world. We need both in our lives.
When there is an apparent conflict between a scientific theory and an ancient metaphor, there are a couple ways to look at it. The first is to recognize that ancient wisdom writings are attempting to explain concepts that are hard to express in a straightforward, prosaic way. Many of the stories that are being told are attempting to develop a philosophy, moral or metaphysical, about the human condition accessible to general hearers (who would hear these read aloud in pre-literate times), why do we suffer, how do we overcome suffering, how should we live, and what should we live for?
That isn’t to say that everything is metaphorical for some physical process. Not everything is physical. Ethical and rational principles are not physical. God is not physical. If you are a naturalist/physicalist/materialist philosopher you may think these are all illusions originating from physical processes, but that is certainly not the intent of ancient wisdom authors.
The second is to recognize that our own scientific understanding of what the authors are talking about may be beside the point. Evolution is beside the point of the Genesis story. I don’t want to get into Biblical exegesis but I will say that the Genesis story has nothing to do with how the world was created and a lot more to do with who God is and His relationship to the world and human beings. (I am using examples from Christianity because I’m most familiar with them.)
Likewise, our understanding of the human brain can enhance our understanding of what St. Paul says, but it is beside the point. He is making a point about what faith does to people when they accept Christ as their Lord and Savior. Does that have an effect on the neocortex’s behavior? Yes, and other parts of the brain as well, so I don’t mean to limit it to just self-control. If self-control were all it was about, we wouldn’t need faith.
The physicalist wants to say that the neurological basis for the metaphor renders it obsolete and indicts the whole of the ancient canon as useless. The literalist says that it is irrelevant to the higher reality St. Paul is talking about, a mere physical component having nothing to do with it. I reject both these interpretations and say that indeed St. Paul is talking about the spiritual manifesting in a neurological way.
Indeed, in a 2001 paper, a study of evangelical Christians found that, by reading Psalm 23 while in a PET scanner, the brain entered a “religious” state, “mediated by a pre-established neural circuit, involving dorsolateral prefrontal, dorsomedial frontal and medial parietal cortex.” This process creates a state of watchfulness or readiness to act or respond that is set up by a previously known set of religious schemas. In other words, a religious state is a unique neurological state, not an emotional experience nor an arousal state but a cognitive process.
A 2009 fMRI study found that when Christian and non-believer subjects are asked about religious subjects such as whether Angels exist, different regions (as well as many of the same ones) activated as when asked about ordinary things like whether Eagles exist. For example, for religious statements, the anterior insula, ventral striatum, and anterior cingulate cortex lit up. These are respectively associated with pain and disgust, emotional processing and planning, and cognitive conflict.
This is true for both believers and non-believers: “Despite the fact that religious believers and nonbelievers accepted and rejected diametrically opposite statements in half of our experimental trials, the same neural systems were engaged in both groups throughout.” The authors suggest that faith-based truth “is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict” than with memory retrieval, meaning that in our minds, whether we are believers or not, religion has a special status.
Basically, when people, believers or non-believers, make religious statements they are encountering additional internal conflict than with ordinary facts and they are making statements about their own identities. Meanwhile, they found that when presented with blasphemous statements, pleasure centers were engaged (Christians refuting blasphemies and non-believers affirming them).
A recent 2019 meta-analysis found very few studies of religious experience, only 25 papers across three decades of neuralimaging studies, but one of the main conclusions is that religious and spiritual experience differs from all other non-religious mental states.
These conclusions tell me three things: (1) faith is not like belief in facts and that atheists have faith in their non-belief in the same way that Christians do, (2) faith is a statement about the self, that is, religion is as much about who you believe you are as what you think in true, and (3) religious states are a state of readiness or watchfulness, perhaps of what is about to happen in the mind, rather than an emotional or aroused state.
If these studies were to find that religious experiences and beliefs were no different than, say, the experience of reading a good book or recalling our street address, then we might have a basis for saying that religion is a hoax. They show, however, that there is a difference between our spiritual and mundane lives that is built into us. Moreover, they show that atheists appear to have a religion. It is a religion based around not believing in other religions.
The most important point here is that the neurological basis of faith and religious experience no more negates what ancients spoke about than biology negates the stories of creation such as Genesis. Because to believe so is to misunderstand the metaphors and lose the meaning in a literalist or physicalist interpretation, which is useless.
Azari, Nina P., et al. "Neural correlates of religious experience." European journal of neuroscience 13.8 (2001): 1649-1652.
Harris, Sam, et al. "The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief." PLoS one 4.10 (2009): e7272.
Rim, James I., et al. "Current understanding of religion, spirituality, and their neurobiological correlates." Harvard review of psychiatry 27.5 (2019): 303.