© 2003 VNN
|
WORLD  Religion Versus Science FROM THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD AUSTRALIA, Apr 28 (VNN) — Religion versus science might be all in the mind By Chris McGillion - April 29 2003 For years now, one small branch of science has been chipping away at the foundations of religious belief by proposing that "otherworldly" experiences are nothing more than the inner workings of the human brain. Many neuroscientists claim they can locate and explain brain functions that produce everything from religious visions to sensations of bliss, timelessness or union with a higher power. These claims have been strengthened by the work of the Canadian neuropsychologist Dr Michael Persinger. By stimulating the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, Persinger has been able to induce in hundreds of subjects a "sensed presence" only the subjects themselves are aware of. This presence, Persinger suggests, may be described as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Muhammad or the Sky Spirit - depending on the name the subject's culture has trained him or her to use. "Neurotheology", as this line of inquiry has been dubbed, has its critics. Some say it fails to distinguish between experiences that contain a moral or spiritual dimension (such as visions of God) from those that don't (such as ghostly perceptions). Others point out that none of this research can ever establish whether our brains have been designed to apprehend religious experiences or whether these are simply the by-product of bad wiring. But all agree that the approach is far too simplistic. "Where reductionist brain science fails," wrote John Cornwell, director of the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge, earlier this month in The Tablet, the British Catholic weekly, "is in its failure even to mention, let alone give an account of, human imagination. "This is not to claim that imagination is some kind of Cartesian spooky stuff, or to deny the theory of evolution, or to suggest that imagination is somehow outside the realms of biology, but simply to reflect on the consequences that flow from our ability creatively to compare things in one domain with those in another." This is the objection addressed in a paper, Hallucinating God: The Cognitive Neuropsychiatry of Religious Belief and Experience, to be presented at a conference on evolutionary psychology in the United States in August. The paper has been written by Ryan McKay, a researcher at Macquarie University's Centre for Cognitive Science. McKay says delusional beliefs may arise from so-called religious experiences when two factors are in play: first, a brain deficit that gives rise to an aberrant perception of some kind and second, a belief pathology that interprets (or imagines) this perception in ways inconsistent with what is scientifically plausible or otherwise generally regarded as acceptable. The second factor represents a breakdown - or dysfunction - in the way the human belief evaluation system normally operates. Put simply, we tend to evaluate whether a belief is credible in light of everything else we know. By contrast, when someone experiences an unusual sensory perception and also suspends well-known and widely accepted logical, physical or biological principles in their explanation of the perception, a belief pathology is involved, says McKay. Significantly, one can occur without the other. Persinger, for instance, claims to have had a mystical experience of "encountering a God-like presence" - the result of stimulating his temporal lobes electromagnetically - without developing a religious belief in God. He thus represents what McKay calls a "mystical atheist" - someone who experiences paranormal sensations but is able to override the evidence of their senses when forming beliefs about them and accepting instead a rational explanation. Clearly, many adherents of religious doctrines develop and maintain their beliefs in the absence of direct religious experiences. An obvious reason is quite simply the effects of socialisation. But McKay's argument goes to the origin of how such beliefs are generated in the first place. "Individuals with the 'second factor'," he says, "would tend to be misled by untrustworthy sources of information, and/or tend to be prone to having their belief formation systems derailed and overridden by their motives [wish fulfilment being chief among them]. Motives thus help to explain what maintains delusory beliefs once they have been generated by first-factor sources." The jury is still out on whether such religious experiences are mere delusions and whether God might be nothing more than a hallucination. But the argument for both has just become a lot more interesting. Copyright The Sydney Morning Herald Contact VNN about this story  Send this story to a friend
|
