Last year I put a sermon up for auction at our annual Goods and Services Auction, which Fred Sawyer bought after about twelve seconds of fierce bidding. This is the sermon Fred bought. Any reactions you have to this sermon can be shared with Fred. And if you really don't like what you hear, all I can tell you is there's a sermon up for auction this coming Saturday and I encourage you to bid on it. The Goods and Services Auction is a fun event and a great fundraiser for the congregation.
Fred asked me to preach on the book, Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, and Vince Rause. This is one of a number of recent books that look at some aspect of human spiritual experience or religious belief and argue, given what we now know about how the brain works, about neurology, about genetics, that human beings are hardwired to have spiritual experiences or hold certain beliefs. They also argue there are evolutionary reasons why spiritual experience or believing in a certain way would be beneficial to human survival. As illustrated by the story of the starving Neanderthal hunter who finds hope and reassurance in his experience of a Great Stag deity, belief in God is something the human brain developed over time to enhance the odds of survival. Though it is highly debatable whether such belief is necessary for survival today, our neurological and genetic hardwiring is such that it is still very difficult as a species to stop having spiritual experiences, or to stop believing, or to stop being drawn into religious communities seeking answers to life's ultimate questions.
A popular book in this field is Dr. Dean Hamer's The God Gene, published last fall and featured as a cover story in Time Magazine. Hamer's research shows that people who tend towards strong belief in God, or who feel deeply connected to the universe, or who have many mystical experiences, also share a version of the gene known as VMAT2. Hamer found that having a deep spiritual life is more highly correlated with the presence of this gene than with other factors such as being raised in a religious family. As you may expect, secular communities, atheists, some scientists, and many religious liberals have received these books as an affirmation of their view that God is not real but something humans have created; and that faith in God, as mandated by most organized religions, serves at best as an unnecessary crutch and at worst as an opiate dulling individuality and crushing self-reliance. As you may expect, many conservative religious communities have received these books as the latest attack on religion from the godless halls of liberal, modernist, scientific, secular academia.
Most of these people, liberal or conservative, atheist or theist, whether they praise or condemn these books, have never actually read them. Most are responding solely to the titles and possibly to book reviews, many of which are biased. The titles are really just clever marketing meant to exploit the tension between the godless and the god-fearing. And while the books do document how spiritual experience and belief in God are produced in the brain, none of them make any claim about the existence of God. These writers understand the discovery of spiritual hardwiring does not prove anything about God. Hamer says it may be yet one more testimony to the creative genius of God that a gene exists that enables one to experience God. The authors of Why God Won't Go Away point out that if you argue God doesn't exist because a certain neurological state leads the brain to perceive God, you then have to argue nothing exists because all the brain's perceptions require a certain neurological state. They also maintain that if God exists, and if God is responsible for Creation, God easily could've created this neurological hardwiring so that humanity possessed a tool with which to recognize its Creator. In the end, these books are not as threatening to traditional religion as their jacket suggests, and they are not as affirming of atheism either.
Here's a brief review of the science in Why God Won't Go Away. There's a small lump of gray matter in the top rear section of the brain, officially known as the posterior superior parietal lobe. The authors of Why Won't God Go Away call it the Orientation Association Area or OAA, because it's primary job "is to orient the individual in physical space-it keeps track of which end is up, helps us judge angles and distances, and allows us to negotiate safely the dangerous physical landscape around us. To perform this crucial function, it must first generate a clear, consistent cognition of the physical limits of the self. In simple terms, it must draw a sharp distinction between the individual and everything else, to sort out the you from the infinite not-you that makes up the rest of the universe…. To do its job well [it] depends on a constant stream of nerve impulses from each of the body's senses. [It] sorts and processes these impulses virtually instantaneously during every moment of our lives. It manages a staggering workload at capacities and speeds that would stress the circuits of a dozen super computers."1
Scientists monitor brain activity with the help of a special camera called SPECT, an acronym for Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography. Under normal conditions, SPECT shows the Orientation Association Area to be the site of furious neurological activity. Remember, it is constantly processing millions of impulses. When the SPECT camera scans the brains of people in peak moments of prayer or meditation, that activity is greatly diminished. Upon closer inspection, the OAA is still functioning, it is still looking for neurological impulses to process, but for a variety of physiological reasons, the flow of impulses subsides during spiritual experience. And the authors ask the question, "what would happen if the OAA had no information upon which to work?" "Would it continue to search for the limits of the self? With no information flowing in, the OAA wouldn't be able to find any boundaries. What would the brain make of that? Would the OAA interpret its failure to find the borderline between the self and the outside world to mean that such a distinction doesn't exist? In that case, the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real."2
An endless sense of self. An experience of oneness with all there is. I'm reminded of a passage in the Basic Writings of the Taoist master, Chuang Tzu, in which the character of T'ien Ken approaches the character of Nameless Man and asks him an annoying, worldly question. Nameless Man blows him off: "I'm heading out beyond the six directions, wandering in the village of Not-Even-Anything and living in the Broad and Borderless field." T'ien Ken doesn't understand and asks his question again. Nameless Man responds, "blend your spirit with the vastness."3 Nameless Man is inviting T'ien Ken into spiritual experience, into an endless sense of self. Blend your spirit with the vastness. Religion and science speaking to the same phenomenon.
The authors of Why God Won't Go Away speculate it is the brain's capacity to experience an endless sense of self in peak spiritual moments-what they call a unitary experience, an experience of oneness-what Unitarian Universalists refer to in our statement of principles as an experience of transcending mystery and wonder-it is this kind of experience that first led humans to believe in gods and goddesses. This is the point of the story about the Neanderthal hunter in our reading this morning. He becomes so focused on the deer as an object of contemplation, his longing and hunger become so strong, that he has one of these unitary, mystical, transcendent experiences. Brain science would say his posterior superior parietal lobe stops receiving its regular flow of neurological impulses. Taoism might say his spirit blends with the vastness. Though he's never had such an experience, it is not frightening, but peaceful, pleasant. He imagines some power causing the experience, a Great Stag deity, who cares about him and his people. In this way, mystical experience, attributable to a specific neurological state in the brain, becomes the ground for theism.
I'm also reminded of a passage from the Christian mystic, St. John of the Cross, perhaps most famous for Dark Night of the Soul, his treatise on the spiritual practice of contemplation. In guiding those who would follow this path he writes, "it behooves such a soul to pay no heed if the operations of its faculties become lost to it."4 He seems to be suggesting exactly what Newberg, D'Aquili, and Rause have documented with their study. Spiritual practice inhibits the normal functioning of the brain, and allows for an experience of God. "For contemplation," he writes, "is naught else than a secret, peaceful and loving infusion from God, which … enkindles the soul with the spirit of love."5 Those of you who have knowledge of the mystical aspects of religious traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and many others will make similar connections. So many spiritual practices require us to quiet or focus the mind or engage the body in some kind of repetitive, often aerobic ritual, so that an experience of connection, transcendence, holiness, or enlightenment becomes available to us.
Even if all we're talking about is a neurological phenomenon, a quirk of our brain chemistry, why would evolution favor those who developed practices to elicit this experience, or who based their belief in God on these experiences? The authors of Why God Won't Go Away return to the Neanderthal deer hunters. The clan "might begin to think of themselves as the Clan of the Great Stag and to draw upon their common beliefs as a source of identity and social cohesion. Ritual behaviors would also have a more direct effect upon survival rates, by stimulating the body's autonomic system. Slow rituals, for example, would stimulate a quiescent response, which could lead to various health benefits. Vigorous rituals would produce the beneficial advantages of exercise and even hone their crucial hunting skills. Their religion would serve to strengthen the bonds between individuals and to encourage more peaceful and productive interaction in the community at large. Stronger social groups, of course, would mean better lives for clan members, which might ultimately result in higher rates of survival as well."6 This seems highly plausible to me. Religion confers survival benefits upon its practitioners. After countless generations, it makes sense that our desire for spiritual experience, or belief in God, or our longing to be among others in religious communities seeking answers to life's ultimate questions, has become hardwired in the human brain.
There is a challenge here for Unitarian Universalists. We often say ours is a religion of reason, of intellect, a religion of the head. Why God Won't Go Away says religion is in the head, but of the body. This is an important distinction. We often think first about religion, and enter into spiritual practice later, after we've decided it seems like a reasonable thing to do. But this book informs me human spirituality is first and foremost a bodily experience, and that our most effective, most reliable way of discerning spiritual truth is to have the bodily experience first, and then reflect on its meaning.
For so much of my life I resisted claiming a specific spiritual practice because I didn't think it made sense. It didn't seem reasonable, even though I had never actually engaged my body in the practice. Learning about the relation between spirituality and neurology has helped me to shift my thinking about spiritual practice. I say, engage in spiritual practice, whether it is prayer, meditation, contemplation, yoga, or some kind of daily exercise, dance, music, art, or an intentional experience of nature, whether you whirl like a Dervish, or wander free and easy like the Taoist masters, or prostrate yourself on the earth, or pursue social justice. Engage in a spiritual practice without expectation of discovering any truth that has ever been thought by anyone ever before. Follow that longing beyond words, like the starving Neanderthal hunter, searching for a deer to feed his family. Engage in a spiritual practice with the faith, grounded not only in intuition but also in scientific data, that through consistent, repeated engagement there will come a moment when you blend, heart, mind, and soul, with the vastness. And in that moment, that beautiful, precious, and fleeting moment of transcending mystery and wonder, see for yourself what truth emerges.
You may not find the answer to the question, is there a God? But you also may discover it wasn't the question you needed to be asking, that your body asks a different question. May you engage in spiritual practice. May your spirit blend with the vastness.
Amen. Blessed Be.