Can Science and Religion Co-Exist in Harmony? - Pew Research Center - The Diigo Meta page

• 23 Jul 09
  

  Robert Maguire

  religion science reference brain psychology dna image church window

• 10 Jul 09
  

  Clay Burell

  Obama NIH appointee and Human Genome Project leader/evangelical Christian on the compatibility of faith and science. AND NPR reporter on connections between the temporal lobe and religious experiences.

  science religion christianity creationism evolution

  • You all probably have seen the Gallup Poll that gets asked every year -- given the choice among three options, what do people say? That first option, that God guided a process that happened over millions of years -- 38 percent; the second option, that God had no part, that being a deist or an atheist perspective -- 13 percent. But the largest number -- 45 percent, almost half -- choose the third option, that God created human beings in their present form in the last 10,000 years. You can't arrive at that conclusion without throwing out pretty much all of the evidence from cosmology, geology, paleontology, biology, physics, chemistry, genomics and the fossil record. Yet that is the conclusion that many Americans prefer.

    
    

    There are a lot of forces trying to encourage that view. If you've been to the Creation Museum -- I haven't, but I gather some of you have -- it will show you this perspective of humans and dinosaurs frolicking together in a way that's consistent with the 6,000-year-old Earth. Again, many children going to see this are probably walking away thinking, yeah, that makes sense.
    I get e-mails practically every week from people who were raised in this tradition -- many of them home schooled or schooled in a Christian high school where young Earth creationism is the only view that they're exposed to. Then they get to university and they see the actual data that supports the age of the Earth as 4.5, 5 billion years old, and they see the data that supports evolution as being correct, and they go into an intense personal crisis.

    
    

  • We've set those folks up for a terrible struggle by what we're doing right now in this country.
    It seems to me that atheism is, of all of the choices, the least rational because it assumes that you know enough to exclude the possibility of God. And which of us could claim we know enough to make such a grand statement? G.K. Chesterton says this quite nicely: "Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, the assertion of a universal negative."
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  • • The intelligent design perspective, which is so prominent now in the evangelical church and, of course, is a flashpoint for debates about the teaching of science in schools, is basically that evolution might be OK in some ways, but it can't account for the complexity of things like the bacterial flagellum, which are considered to be irreducibly complex because they have so many working parts and they don't work with any of the parts dropping out, so you can't imagine how evolution could have produced them.

      
      

      This is showing severe cracks scientifically in that the supposedly irreducibly complex structures are, increasingly, yielding up their secrets, and we can see how they have been arrived at by a stepwise mechanism that's quite comfortable from an evolutionary perspective. So intelligent design is turning out to be -- and probably could have been predicted to be -- a God-of-the-gaps theory, which inserts God into places that science hasn't quite yet explained, and then science comes along and explains them.

      
      

      I think I would also say intelligent design is not only bad science; it's questionable theology. It implies that God was an underachiever and started this evolutionary process and then realized it wasn't going to quite work and had to keep stepping in all along the way to fix it. That seems like a limitation of God's omniscience.

    • I think we need only go back before Darwin and see what theologians thought about Genesis to have a better conversation about this. Go back all the way to Augustine in 400 A.D. Augustine is writing here specifically about Genesis: "In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it." And is that not what is happening in the current climate with, in fact, insistence that the only acceptable interpretation for a serious Christian now is a literal acceptance of the six days of creation, which, again, Augustine would have argued is not required by the language?
    • The first concrete evidence that there was a connection between the temporal lobe and spiritual experience was made by a Canadian neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield. Back in the 1940s and '50s, he began mucking around in the brains of patients as he operated on them. There aren't any pain receptors in the brain, so he'd go in and he could take an electrode and prod a part of the brain -- keep them awake -- prod a part of the brain and see what part of the body corresponded with that part of the brain. Well, when he prodded the temporal lobe, something very strange happened. People reported having out-of-body experiences and hearing voices and seeing apparitions. He hypothesized that he might have found the physical seat of religious experience.

    • So science figured out that one way to try to explore spiritual experience and look at the brain mechanics of religious experience is to look at people with temporal lobe epilepsy on the theory that the extreme elucidates the normal. Temporal lobe epilepsy is basically an electrical storm in the brain where all the cells fire together. Usually seizures are really horrible things. I went to a Henry Ford hospital to the epilepsy clinic and it was just -- it's a horrifying experience to watch a seizure. But in a few rare cases, people have ecstatic seizures, and they believe that they are having a religious experience. They may hear snatches of music or words, presumably from their memory bank, and they interpret it as a message from God or the music from the heavenly spheres. They may see a snatch of light and think that that's an angel.

      
      

      Today a lot of neuroscientists have kind of retrofitted a lot of major religious leaders with temporal lobe epilepsy. Like Saul on the road to Damascus -- was he blinded by God and heard Jesus' voice or did he suffer, as one neurologist said, "visual and auditory hallucinations with photism and transient blindness"? Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, did he see a pillar of light and two angels or did he suffer a complex partial seizure? What about Moses and the burning bush, hearing God's voice?

      
      

      Now I've got to say, I have a little trouble with this kind of retrofitting, because it's hard to imagine something as debilitating as epilepsy being helpful in writing, say, the bulk of Christian doctrine, as did Paul; guiding a nation through the wilderness for 40 years, as did Moses; or founding one of the three monotheistic religions, as did Mohammed. But I do think that scientists are onto something. I think the temporal lobe may in fact be the place that mediates spiritual experience.

    • One of the people who convinced me of this is a guy named Jeff Schimmel. Jeff is a writer in Hollywood. He was raised Jewish, never believed in God, had no interest in spirituality. Then a few years ago, nine years ago, when he was 40 years old, he had a benign tumor in his left temporal lobe removed. The surgery was a snap, but a couple of years later, unknown to him, he began to suffer from mini-seizures. He began hearing things and having visions. He remembers twice lying in bed when he looked up at the ceiling and saw a kind of swirl of blue and gold and green all settle into a shape, a pattern. He said, then it dawned on me, it was the Virgin Mary. Then he thinks, why would the Virgin Mary appear to a Jewish guy? But a few other things began to happen to Jeff. He became fascinated with spirituality. He found himself weeping at the drop of a hat when he saw pain in other people. He became fairly obsessed with Buddhism.

      
      

      But he began to wonder, could his newfound spirituality have anything to do with his brain? So the next time he visited his neurologist, he asked to see a picture of his brain scan, the most recent one. And, in fact, the temporal lobe was very different before and after the surgery. It had kind of pulled away from the skull. His temporal lobe was smaller, a different shape, it was covered with scar tissue, and those changes had begun to spark electrical firings in his brain. He essentially developed temporal lobe epilepsy. But there was no question in his mind that his faith, his newfound love for his fellow man, all of that, came from his brain.

    • Are transcendent experiences -- not just Jeff Schimmel's, but Teresa of Avila's -- are they merely a physiological event or could it possibly reflect an encounter with another dimension?
      I want to propose that how you come down on that issue depends on whether you think of the brain as a CD player or a radio. Most scientists who think that everything is explainable through material processes think that the brain is like a CD player: The content, the CD with the song on it, for example, is playing in a closed system, and if you take a hammer to the machine, you know, destroy it, the song is not going to play. All spiritual experience is inside the brain, and when you alter the brain, God and spirituality disappear.
    • Now there is some scientific support for this line of thinking. These days scientists can make transcendent realities, or God, disappear or appear at will. It's kind of a party trick. Recently a group of Swiss researchers found out that when they electrically stimulated a certain part of the brain in a woman, she suddenly felt a sensed presence, that there was another being in the room enveloping her. A lot of people describe God that way: a sensed presence, a being nearby enveloping them. So they could conjure up God just by poking part of the brain.
    • Peyote like other psychedelic drugs, including LSD and magic mushrooms seem to prompt mystical experience. Scientists have discovered recently that these psychedelic drugs have a couple of interesting things in common. Chemically, they all look a lot like serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter that affects parts of the brain that relate to emotions and perception. Now scientists at Johns Hopkins University have discovered that they all target the same serotonin receptor, serotonin HT2A. So what that receptor does is, it allows the serotonin or the psilocybin or the active ingredient of these psychedelics to create a cascade of chemical reactions, which then create the sounds and sights and smells and perceptions of a mystical experience. Essentially, they've discovered a "God neurotransmitter," in a way.
    • [D]oes that mean that God is just a chemical reaction? Roland Griffiths, who's the researcher at Johns Hopkins, doesn't think so for a couple of reasons.

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        Clay Burell on 2009-07-10

        important.
• 30 Jun 09
  

  ricklo
• 23 Jun 09
  

  ken meece

  ReadItLater

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Clay Burell on 2009-07-10
  important.

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