Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth 
The Biology of Faith
By Sally Mayasich, May 6, 2007
As you might guess, there is a lot of overlap in the biology of faith and a topic I have previously addressed, the biology of the soul. This talk however, is not so much about the existence of the soul, or God, but the basis within human beings for our belief in the soul, God, and things infinite and unfathomable. How did people develop beliefs and faith in a supernatural being, or beings that created the universe, the earth, and all life, and belief in continued existence after our bodies die? Where did our diverse religious beliefs come from? Why do some people believe, and some people don't, some have strong, spiritual experiences and others don't? Why have humans always seemed to search for reasons for our existence? Do we need spirituality?
Based on the work of Abraham Maslow, a humanist psychologist, we do. He proposed a hierarchy of human needs illustrated as a pyramid (Hierarchy shown at Wikipedia). It has been criticized as being culturally specific towards America, but helps illustrate some points about human development. Our most basic physiological needs, like breathing, water and food, without which we will parish sooner than later, are at the bottom of the pyramid. Spirituality or self-transcendence, that is being able to feel connected to all things in a timeless universe, he discusses as being at the very top, which may only be accessed after all other needs are met. Religion actually fits into the middle, love-and-belonging level, as part of our social and cultural grouping. Although related, religion is different from spirituality or self-transcendence. Most people pretty much concede that our genes and biological structure dictate our most basic biological needs. But how far up the pyramid does biology go? How much of our behavior to meet our needs is dictated by biology?
We can formulate the basis for belief in the immortal soul and God into three general possibilities: (1) Biology goes all the way to the top of the pyramid: religiousness, or spirituality, is materially based, such as in our genetic material, and can be scientifically studied; (2) religious beliefs and spirituality are not related to our physical bodies, existing outside of the realm of science, and cannot be addressed based on laws of the known physical universe or; (3) religious belief and spirituality may be related to biological structures as a way for God to transmit His message. These possibilities are the subject of a number of recent books by some major heavy-weight philosophers and scientists. While the first possibility is usually asserted by scientists who are atheists or agnostics to indicate that no soul or supernatural entity exists, those possibly being illusions based on the workings of our brains, the second possibility is dichotomous. It may be either asserted by agnostic scientists who think it's just not something scientific methods will work to elucidate, or by non-scientist religious believers who consider God to have created and to exist outside of the laws of space and time. The third possibility has been postulated by scientists who are also believers in God.
The commonality in these possibilities, except for the non-scientist religious believers, is that all of the scientists consider evolution in some form to be involved in religiosity, faith, spirituality, and self-transcendence. After that, it gets complicated.
So first, a primer on evolution. Evolution is the process of continuous change in the biological assemblage of species on earth over a long period of time through the introduction of new traits via spontaneous gene mutation. According to Charles Darwin's theory, traits with the greatest "survival value" are naturally selected through environmental pressures and the processes of mating and sexual reproduction. Survival of the fittest, right? Only the strong survive? A common belief about evolution is that when a new trait or species evolves, the old one is "not as good" and should therefore be "de-selected" and lost. So why are there still alligators, and why are there detrimental traits like sickle-cell anemia or traits like altruism and homosexuality that don't make intuitive sense in terms of reproduction and the passing on of genes? What is the survival value of spirituality?
Well, actually, more and more scientists are thinking that the paradigm of evolutionary economy based on survival value doesn't make much sense. Because, according to revisionist, post-Darwinian Evolutionary theory, if only the strongest survive, this would limit the number of traits moving on in each generation--it would limit Biodiversity, and therefore limit the flexibility that each generation would have with which to adapt to the changing conditions on earth. The more tools you have in your toolbox, the more likely you'll be to have one that works when the need arises.
So, rather than genes being lost if they do not have an obvious and overwhelming survival value, a gene may persist if the trait it produces is not either lethal or physiologically preventative of reproduction. Hence, the diversity of not only physical traits but complex behavioral traits such as sexuality and spirituality, which lead to social and cultural diversity. So this evolutionary process might be responsible for our complex systems of religious beliefs, and/or our individual feelings of spirituality and self-transcendence.
Going back to our first possibility for the origin of our religious beliefs: The possibility that biology goes all the way to the top of the needs pyramid: that religiousness and spirituality are materially based, and can be scientifically studied. Proponents of this hypothesis include atheists Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and the late Francis Crick. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of our genetic material DNA and author of The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1995) sums up the genetic determinism view very succinctly in saying, that "'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
He and Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion (2006), believe free will is an illusion. Dennett feels free will is compatible with most behavior being biologically determined, but joins the other two in asserting that religion evolved as a behavioral and cultural phenomenon independent of the existence of a supernatural being. Dennett is a compatiblist (though he believes free will is limited), while Dawkins and Crick are hard determinists (see simple free-will hierarchy at Wikipedia).
These scientists also believe that evolution centers on the gene as the mechanistic level at which evolution operates, and so support the idea of the selection and de-selection of traits. Dawkins also wrote The Selfish Gene in 1976, in which he coined the term "meme" for the replication of social and cultural ideas such as religion to pass from one brain to the next, like genetic codes pass from one body to the next. Dennett uses memetics in his 2006 book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon to argue that religious memes that encourage group solidarity might be beneficial when human survival depends on cooperation, and that other groups seeing that success would imitate the religious behaviors. Memes have been dismissed by many evolutionary scientists as being pseudoscience jargon, because they are not materially-based like a gene. That aside, Dennett and Dawkins both feel that religious principles should be subject to scientific scrutiny. As Dawkins said in a recent interview on National Public Radio, "It's not a sort of poetic matter. It's a scientific matter, either there is or there isn't a God."
Dean Hamer, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health has been dedicated to finding genes that control certain behaviors. His ideas on religious origin follow along the lines of Dawkins, though he is an agnostic and believes genetic predisposition of behavior and free will are compatible. Before I go into his latest work, I'd like to note that Hamer was the scientist who in 1993 claimed to have found the "Gay gene" responsible for male homosexuality. Hamer is himself a gay man and activist. However, several including Stanford evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden who is transgendered and also supports LGBT rights have pointed out that his results were ambiguous, since not all of the men in the study had the gene on the X chromosome that Hamer claimed to be the gay gene.
Hamer has recently proposed, in his 2004 book The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes,that he has found what he called the "God gene," but immediately acknowledges that as a misnomer. The gene he localized, called VMAT2, was based on the subjects' scores on a previously-developed self-transcendence scale of spirituality, and he found that some of the most spiritual people turned out not to specifically believe in a supernatural deity, but more of a oneness with the universe and all living beings in it. The gene codes for brain chemicals called monoamines that appear to influence spirituality by altering consciousness. Many scientists have again questioned his methods and his interpretations of his data. Science journalist Carl Zimmer noted that the gene accounted for less than one percent of the difference between the scores on the self-transcendence scale, and stated, "He goes so far as to say that the God gene is, along with other faith-boosting genes, a product of natural selection," and speculates on the selective advantage of the gene without any effort to supply supporting data. Zimmer also questioned the publication of a book without having published the study, and with no replication or validation by other scientists.
So, he tends to sort of go off half cocked. But in fairness to Hamer, proving that a gene is associated with a specific behavior is extremely difficult and not tackled by very many researchers. One reason for this is explained when he is asked why he doesn't speculate on whether God exists. Hamer says, "There's a natural tendency for believers to see this type of data as evidence that there is a higher power who made people in such a way that they would believe. But there's also a natural tendency for disbelievers to say, ‘This proves that it's all just in your mind.' I really can't overemphasize that this kind of data can't really support either of those views."
In the book, Hamer also speculates that the gene has lead to religious memes, and that the brain chemicals may be those that have been seen to "light up" the brain in high-tech images of the brain studied in a new field called Neurotheology. Neurotheology is the study of the brain biology of religion and spirituality. The specific functions believed to be involved are activity in the amygdala, which monitors the environment for threats and registers fear; parietal-lobe circuits, which orient you in space and mark the distinction between yourself and the world outside of your body; and frontal- and temporal-lobe circuits, which mark time and generate self-awareness. Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania and his late collaborator, Eugene d'Aquili, use brain-imaging data they collected from Tibetan Buddhists lost in meditation and from Franciscan nuns deep in prayer to pinpoint which regions turn on or off during experiences that seem to exist outside time and space. Similar experiences can also be induced by certain drugs and by electrical stimulation. Spiritual experiences are so consistent across cultures, across time and across faiths, says psychologist David Wulff, that it "suggest[s] a common core that is likely a reflection of structures and processes in the human brain." Or, as some believers would argue, supports their faith that there is a God outside of us that creates these experiences. In either case however, only about 10% of people have these experiences naturally, a rough correlation with the number who have the "God gene."
Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould who died in 2002, was a proponent of the second possibility, that religious beliefs cannot be addressed based on laws of the known physical universe. Gould was an agnostic who often disagreed very strongly with both Dennett and Dawkins, and E.O. Wilson, believing that science and religion are what he calls "non-overlapping magisteria." This was the basis for his 1999 book, Rocks of Ages, in which he states that science and religion have separate interests. Questions of nature, such as the origins of matter and life, can be answered by science, but the questions of morality and why we exist are in the realm of religion. Holding this view would seem to require one to at least acknowledge the possibility of God's existence. Gould has written extensively on evolution and favored a multi-level explanation, with natural selection occurring at the gene, cell, individual, and species levels, but believed speculating on how these processes have shaped religion is not a scientific question.
Somewhere between the agnostics and the evangelicals are scientists like physicist Albert Einstein and Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson.
Einstein said, "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
In a recent interview about his 2006 book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, Wilson said, "I am not an atheist, because I don't know if there's a god or not. I'm not an agnostic; I don't think it's unknowable. So I come down to being what I call a provisional deist…, in the sense that there's the possibility of a god who started it, but don't call me a theist, which is a person who believes in a personal god. I've never seen any evidence of [a god] influencing any human being or the fate of humanity." This makes sense to me, and I'll come back to it later.
Our third possibility was that religious belief and spirituality may be related to biological structures as a way for God to transmit His message. Francis Collins, a geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project believes that religion and science can coexist. His recent interview on NPR was the counterpoint to Richard Dawkins. In his 2006 book The Language of God, he writes, "The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome." Collins is an evangelical Christian who believes that God used evolution as His mechanism of creation, and the fact that humans are moral beings is, he says, "a compelling signpost to His existence."
The thing is, there is strong evidence for morality and even spirituality as traits in animals that could have evolved into humans. Also, Collins tends to lean on free will as the reason bad things happen, because people can use their free will to do evil. He acknowledges that natural disasters cause problems too, but shies away from explanations as to why God would allow those things to happen. His explanation of how he came to know there was a God, actually a Trinity, was that he was hiking back in the 70's and saw a trinity of frozen waterfalls. He seems to me a bit of a "cafeteria Christian." I don't want to make fun--he is a very intelligent man and has some very good ideas, and agrees that heredity has influence over certain behaviors and personality traits. I hope he can convince the 50% of Americans who don't believe in evolution to do so, and not to be so mistrusting of science and scientists.
I was a little surprised to find out that Stanford evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden is an evangelical Christian as well, having been raised an Episcopal. In her 2006 book Evolution and Christian Faith, she points out Biblical passages that support her evolutionary theory.
So in looking for more studies to push the weight-of-evidence one way or the other, I had to look again at near-death experiences, which are increasingly being studied by credible researchers. The problem is, they are all still anecdotal, relying entirely on the memory and perception, and honesty, of the experiencers. I found that they are truly not cross-culturally similar, as had been asserted by some researchers, because NDEs varied considerably between Eastern and Western, developed and undeveloped cultures. Thailanders not exposed to outside cultures did not see a light or Jesus, or a tunnel. Netherlanders did not see Buddha or Mohammed.
There are only a very few cases reported in which something seen by the experiencer was verified by others. Also in some cases, as discussed by Dr. Peter Fenwick, flashcards were put up on top of instruments in the hospital rooms where out-of-body NDEers should have been able to see them, but they did not. It has been asserted that NDEs occur when there is no brain activity, but that is according to an instrument, an electroencephalogram, that may not be able to measure all types of brain activity. Again, NDEs are only reported by about 10% of patients who are revived after being clinically dead.
The thing to me that is believable about NDEs is that connecting factor, of oneness, love and peacefulness. Homosexuals, atheists and suicides have had the same positive experiences that straight religious people reported. In fact, very few NDEs are negative or "hellish."
The presence of many religions and competing religious texts is one point of argument that religion is a cultural phenomenon that is not derived entirely from spirituality. The religions of the world all originated in specific geographical areas, within a race or ethnic group. Because of colonization, missionary work and wars, Christianity and Islam have "out-competed" the rest of the religions for converts, but as was stated by Giordano Bruno as he was about to be burned at the stake in 1600 for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun, "The truth does not change because it is or is not believed by the majority of the people." In other words, at least in their specific incongruent details, 2.1 billion Christians, and 1.3 billion Muslims, could be wrong. If you take out all the "noise" that people have added to the religious texts, with personal agendas, false translations, perpetuated rituals and anecdotes that were products of their times and cultures, you would find the commonalities of promoting peace and love, connectedness, the importance of all nature and doing no harm to anyone or anything; the absolutes of religion. And this is at the core of self-transcendent and near-death experiences. So maybe, as alluded to by Einstein and Wilson, that core is a Being who started it all and exists, benevolent, peaceful and distant, in another dimension; or in your brain; or both.
I've only scratched the surface of this subject, but one thing is sure: if all these heavy-weight thinkers can have such opposing opinions, then I don't have to know the answer, and I can feel satisfied that though they might claim to, no one else does either.