To appreciate the cultural impact of the “cognitive revolution” discussed by David Brooks in his New York Times op-ed column “The Neural Buddhists” (May 13, 2008), we need to be clear about what has and has not been revolutionized by neuroscience. Brooks gets the research essentially right, but he overlooks some key issues raised by “neural Buddhism” that make me question his view of its future effects on religion and culture.
To begin with, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg’s brain-imaging studies of meditation, highlighted by Brooks, can easily be used to confirm rather than disprove a materialist worldview. Newberg’s finding that people who are meditating have measurable decreases in parietal lobe activity fits perfectly with the idea advanced by Richard Dawkins and others that religious experience is a product of altered or abnormal brain functioning. Contrary to the popular view that Newberg’s research supports religion, it can readily be taken as supporting the “militant atheism” Brooks wants to reject. The mind may, as Brooks says, have “the ability to transcend itself,” but we didn’t need Newberg’s SPECT scanners to tell us that.
Scientific research on “universal moral intuitions” is sure to appeal to a social conservative like Brooks, and he’s correct that evolutionary psychology has made big advances in our understanding of attachment, bonding, and pro-social emotions. Of course, these were the staple themes of early 20th century psychoanalysis, so I’m leery of calling this a “revolution” (for more on “disciplinary amnesia” in the psychology of religion, see Jeremey Carrette’s essay in this collection). In fact, Brooks leaves out the other half of the psychological equation, which Freud and Jung understood all too well: the anti-social instincts of aggression and xenophobia. In addition to showing that “love is vital to brain development,” contemporary neuroscience is also revealing how deeply primed humans are to react with hostility toward those whom we view as “other.” Given that most religions have been, and continue to be, guilty of prejudice, discrimination, and violence against perceived outsiders, I find only modest theological comfort in the latest findings of cognitive science. Brooks betrays perhaps too much confidence that the atheist cause is doomed to irrelevance.
This leads to the boldest claim made by Brooks, that “the cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.” From my perspective, he’s got it exactly backwards. Our growing knowledge about the nature and functioning of the human brain-mind system is revealing the importance of cultural influences (like the Bible) in the development of our “highest” mental faculties, while at the same time challenging traditional monotheistic belief in a single universal deity.
Regarding the Bible, I imagine Brooks means that a fundamentalist belief in the literal meaning of scripture can no longer be held. Once again, we didn’t need neuroscience to tell us that. Setting aside Creationism and other scientifically invalid claims in the Bible (and in the Qur’an, for that matter), what remains is a valuable collection of teachings about history, morality, and collective meaning-making. This is where cognitive science becomes relevant, because researchers are finding that the most sophisticated aspects of human mental functioning (language, memory, reason, imagination) are dependent on cultural influences shaping our minds from the very beginning of life. Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, a leader in the study of cognitive science and religion, has taken to speaking of “embedded cognition” to emphasize the dynamic interplay of cultural and psychological factors in the growth of each individual mind. In sum, the cognitive revolution is giving us new ways of understanding why people’s faith in a cultural system of meaning-making like biblical religion remains so strong and is sure to continue despite its apparent incompatibility with modern science.
And what of God? Brooks speaks eloquently of God as “the unknowable total of all there is,” a formulation similar to Newberg’s “absolute unitary being” as the apex of all religious experience, whether it be Christian, Buddhist, or secular. There’s a superficial appeal to this kind of “neurotheology” (Newberg’s term), but it founders on one problematic fact: Religious experiences are more different than they are the same.
Consider the research of Nina Azari and colleagues, who performed PET scans of evangelical Christians praying to the words of Psalm 23 and found, contrary to Newberg, heightened activation of a frontal-parietal region of the brain associated with sustained reflexive evaluation of thought. Consider, too, the research of Hans Lou and colleagues, who used PET to study the brain functioning of a group of highly experienced yoga teachers during a relaxation meditation called Yoga Nidra, which includes a series of visualization exercises. Their PET results showed heightened activation in exactly those brain systems corresponding to the guided imagery tasks, which are different than the brain systems involved in praying to Psalm 23 or the types of mind-emptying meditation studied by Newberg.
The point is that there is no single model for religious experience. Humans are capable of many different modes of being religious, and the brain subserves them all in predictable and measurable ways. Brooks may follow Newberg in advocating belief in a single totalizing deity, but the actual findings of neuroscience are pointing in the opposite direction. What’s emerging is a new appreciation for the radical pluralism of religious experiences that humans are capable of generating. As better brain imaging technologies come online, we will begin to study a wider variety of spiritual phenomena (not just what occurs when people are sitting perfectly still in a laboratory), revealing new multiplicities of cognitive processing involved in different modes of religiosity. This research will not support traditional monotheistic faith in God, though it may spark a renaissance of spiritual exploration by researchers of a poly- or pantheistic bent. That’s the cultural-scientific revolution we may yet live to see.
It seems that the research you cite could equally lead to the conclusion that both you and Brooks are mistaken, and that there are in reality more forms of prayer (and therefore, more differences in PET scans). It’s analogous to taking a PET scan of someone dreamlessly sleeping and someone in dream sleep – they are but different stages of the same thing. Yet, if one did not know what one was dealing with (a sleeping subject), would one argue that something entirely different was going on?
In The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymouse 14th c. Christian mystical work, the author distinguishes between “Lesson, Meditation, and Orison: or else…—Reading, Thinking, and Praying.” Another writing by St. Francis de Sales on prayer states that “Four operations pertain to our understanding: simple thought, study, meditation, and contemplation.”
Until brain-imaging studies take such understandings into account as much as they do, say, different levels of sleep or sexual arousal, mistaken conclusions are sure to follow.
It seems that the fetish-like interplay between religion and science in the modern context just won’t go away. Scientists are looking for ways to “once and for all” do away with the “backwards” practices of religious adherents. Likewise, many religious peoples, who feel a certain pressure to indulge the modern religion of scientism, try to offer up explanations of their religious traditions and experiences that are not only compatible with the zeitgeist of scientism but make it seem as if religion has kept pace in the rat race all along.
From a religious point of view, science seems ill-prepared to look for God. The skills and methodologies by which science acquires data leaves it unequipped to find God. If one were to perform a socio-historical look at the science’s search for God, one would have to conclude that science has not found it and in my opinion, the search ought to be abandoned. I simply do not believe one can find God through empirical data. Nonetheless, I fail to see the disunion of science and religion, as if the world can be split into such Manichaean dichotomies. Science shouldn’t be used the primary tool for understanding religion. Similarly, the Qur’an and the Bible are not books of science. If they were, post-revelation societies would have evolved very differently. As a student of the social sciences I find this kind of research to be not in the best interests of either religious or non-religious people (you may or may not lump atheists in that group).
I will conclude with this – in Bulkeley’s above remark about the scientific invalidity of a certain religious claim, what’s not being asked is whether this claim has any other kind of value whatsoever. In other words, because there’s no scientific value to Creationism, is it therefore irrelevant to the human experience? Can science function as a be-all and end-all regulator for what constitutes value? If we were to examine love, for instance, and its validity to the human experience (I would challenge any sane man or woman to disavow the validity of love in the human experience), we might find no empirical data of, say, my mother’s love for me and my siblings. Yet, it is very real, manifest, and pertinent. Science should be left to scientific matters and religion to its domain. And while there doesn’t have to be a glass pane that separates the two (i.e., one can still believe in God and practice science) there needs to be a new manner of engagement in this discussion between the two in order to move beyond this stagnant argument.
The Bulkeley response to Brooks and the Brooks piece itself are both quite interesting. However, I doubt very much that brain research has the direct effect on what people believe that they both seem to think. Also I would push beyond what even Bulkeley says about the importance of culture, which is embedded in brain physiology to be sure, but has evolved with the brain in a kind of coeveolution such that culture can never be reduced to biology and the brain cannot function without culture, as Clifford Geertz in his 1962 essay on culture and mind, reprinted in The Interpretation of Cultures, showed long before this got wide attendion. Geertz was much less an extreme culturalist than he has often been portrayed. Bulkeley is also right to balance the rosy view of “the evolution of cooperation” with the darker side that evolutionary psychology has also disclosed. Here again is where culture can be significant. Though it cannot override genes directly it can shape their consequences.
Robert Bellah’s helpful reminder about Geertz underscores my concern about what exactly is and is not “revolutionary” about current research in neuroscience. The same point could be made about the even earlier writings of William James, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung, all of whom anticipated, and actively worked towards, a greater integration of biology, psychology, and culture. Cognitive science has certainly generated a tidal wave of new empirical data in recent years, but it’s unclear if that data is leading to any insights that qualify as radical departures from previous theories. Animus toward psychoanalysis and postmodernism does not a revolution make.
If I understand Marc Manley’s comment correctly, I believe we’re in accord on the idea that religious traditions should not be measured by a single standard of scientific validity. Religion’s contribution to human welfare has more to do with shaping cultural and interpersonal dynamics than explaining natural phenomena.
I also agree with Jonathan Watson’s general point about the variability of human psychological experience (contemplative, sexual, oneiric, etc.). In light of this multiplicity, the manifest limitations of current brain imaging technologies (involving small numbers of participants in highly artificial settings) should make us much more cautious in using neuroscience to generalize about religion or any other complex aspect of mental functioning.
The commentaries about brain imaging and the cognitive revolution only offer insights about the mechanics of the brain during intense religious experience, as well as meditation. However, I would suggest that most religious experience is mundane: average people go to church, pray, send their kids to religious training classes, contribute to the collection basket, and in some cases, enjoy the process of giving and receiving mutual aid through their church. When people don’t get anything out of this experience, they quit participating.
For most of us, divine revelation and intense mysticism is not part of the experience. I agree with Mr. Bulkeley in this regard – that religion’s contribution to human welfare has more to do with shaping cultural and interpersonal dyanamics.
Similarly, the day to day life of most of our religious leaders is mundane: their days are filled not so much with heightened states of mind of one sort or another, but with the vibrant life of their religious community. This ranges from the simple drudgery of church administration, to ministering to the physical needs of the afflicted, and leading religious services.
Some time, we hope, is spent in study – I for one do not favor the super meditational , internally focused kind of study that seems to get so much attention; what seems to me of value are the intuitive contemplations of the issues of the day, with commentaries as to the appropriate religious response to these issues.
I believe that Western religions were more successful and practical when this kind of issues-related counsel was the meat of the experience, when it constituted the text of the homily.
It is these kinds of contemplations which produced, for example, monogamy. Monogamy did not evolve – it was the product of a remarkable logic and leadership. To label its development as a product of evolution is grossly misleading – evolution is a process in which no choices are made; it is the product of of random genetic variation. No one plans it; no goals are set. It is a product of physics.
I doubt very much that the leadership, the logic, and the struggle, which produced monogamy was the product of mystical brain phenomena.
The leadership which established monogamy understood at some level that a culture in which men are paired, however imperfectly, with one woman, and vice versa, is better than a society in which more dominant men possess more women, and a number of men are left without. This leadership regarding monogamy caused more genetic diversity, which may have caused an acceleration in our evolution. However, this leadership in itself was a product of cognition, logic, and choice – to say it was a product of evolution is simply an impoverishment of language.
One could write a book about this particular example and its implications – look up the words “bipolar” and “Mennonite” to begin with.
What does the cognitive revolution have to say about the stance of our religious groups toward insurance policies which deliberately exclude high risk individuals, on the basis of age and medical history? My observation is that our religious commentators have nothing to say about this issue. Likewise, I have seen no religious commentary about that faith-based system of thought called “the free market,” in which we are urged to believe that if we just allow the “creativity” of an unregulated market do its thing, the “invisible hand” will work its magic.
The entire language of faith in the marketplace is similar to religious language.
Why do today’s religious groups not discuss the practices of these giant insurance conglomerates, and the proponents of market wisdom? Are the wrong parts of the brain lighting up? I don’t think that is the problem.
Perhaps rather than focusing on the extraordinary mystical experience of religion, which is often a once in a lifetime phenomena, the PET scans ought to examine which area of the brain lights up when the study of these difficult issues is hampered by conflict, such as the fear of the loss of funding, or the fear of the loss of social standing which occurs when we criticize the powers that be,
These are the the kinds of issues that are the day to day text of religious life, not the fantastic “ah-ha” experiences which our PET scans examine.
I would second Andrew’s sentiments about science’s insights solely into the mechanics of brain imaging as well as religion’s role in shaping the interplay between human beings. I would use a simple analogy that one could examine a sports car, analyze all of its components, determining its horsepower and thrust capabilities. But in the end, these factoids do not transcend to, “This car is fun to drive.” It takes the human experience to transcend the individual mechanics of horsepower, steering and so forth to come to that conclusion.
I would also comment on Andrew’s words regarding “the day to day life of most of our religious leaders is mundane”. It may be true that administering a church or a mosque might be filled with boring, repetitive activities and yet, when reading on mysticism, one finds many authors stating that the mystic is one that strives to find the “extra”-ordinary in the very ordinary things of life. Because they may seem mundane to you, or in admittance from your pastor or priest, does not mean that they are boring for all religious practitioners. In fact, one could argue that this is the difference between the lay member and the student who has set out on the mystic’s path.
I would however offer a word of caution as it pertains to logic and monogamy. To deduce that religious thought in the West made a move towards monogamy as a simple matter of logic would dictate that any articulation of religion that permits polygamy is illogical, let alone excluding any other Western articulation of religion that did include polygamy as valid. Rudimentary studies of logic show it to not be a closed system. And therefore statements such as the one above feel more like projection than a simple matter of logic. Because a certain strain of religious thought opted to do away with polygamy should not dictate that all other practices that wish to include polygamy should be banished to the realm of the illogical.
Again, with Andrew’s comments about insurance conglomerates, we have to be careful not to project. Because it has not come to light in the form of media commentary by religious groups does not mean that it is not getting the attention of religious groups. In other words, because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And second, religious groups may or may not be concerned with insurance agencies and their practices as a religious group. Christians may not Biblically analyze or critique their practices solely on Christian terms but that doesn’t mean that Christians aren’t concerned with the practices of insurance agencies especially given the health crisis that so many people face [Jew, Christian, Muslim or otherwise]. We must be careful of projecting our own stances and opinions as meta-narratives—what works for us may not for another and likewise it plays out in reverse. Otherwise, we run the risk of condemning those who do not think, act or respond to the world in the way in which we do as being illogical, or worse, backwards, barbaric and so forth. The slope is slippery from here.
What defensible claims, if any, can neuroscience make about God Experiences? Indeed, what kinds of veridical claims can be made of any experience of God?
It seems that neuroscientific claims about the God Experience couched in terms of the existence of one God (theism), many gods (polytheism), no god (atheism), or the Void/Sunyata (Buddhism) fall prey to the same ills that afflict traditional assertions about the experiences of transcendence, be they mystical or mundane.
The problem lies in the claim making process. First, all aesthetic, that is, sensible experiences of the Godhead—from Otto’s mysterium tremendum to an unordinary feeling of the extraordinary in everyday life—is but an interpretation of a much thicker experience that may involve felt cognitive and affective elements as well as unconscious components. (See Geertz, Giddens, Taylor, Damasio, and a host of others on this point.) Interpretations are notoriously contestable. Second, these interpretations are discursive formations made in terms of linguistic and conceptual frames of reference that are embedded in contingent cultural contexts. (See the post-positive critiques in Quine, Sellars, Kuhn, Davidson, et al.) Therefore, neurotheological claims—like all other claims about the God Experience—suffer from an unavoidable and fatal linguistic, and thus cultural, contamination, unless one is to proclaim some sort of immaculate perception that could be communicated without distortion. But this would have to take place in an alien and not a human culture.
Further, any such claim that the experience of God is thus and so, and that therefore God is thus and so, becomes a metaphysical assertion about God’s existence or properties that exceeds its evidential support. Insofar as neurotheology jumps from the seen to the unseen, it must contend with the problem of induction and thus with fallibilism.
“To begin with, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg’s brain-imaging studies of meditation, highlighted by Brooks, can easily be used to confirm rather than disprove a materialist worldview. Newberg’s finding that people who are meditating have measurable decreases in parietal lobe activity fits perfectly with the idea advanced by Richard Dawkins and others that religious experience is a product of altered or abnormal brain functioning. Contrary to the popular view that Newberg’s research supports religion, it can readily be taken as supporting the “militant atheism” Brooks wants to reject. “
Brooks says Andrew Newberg’s work shows ” that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain “. He doesn’t say this disproves the materialist worldview. And as far as I know, neither does Newberg. By the way, correlations between mental and neurological states are evidence only of the correlation not of a causal (or phenomenal/epiphenomenal) relationship in one direction or the other. And not all religion takes a dualistic view of the relationship between mind and body—Buddhism in particular rejects any sort of soul or independent self teaching instead non-separation or interdependence without stating what the ultimate nature of reality is.
“And what of God? Brooks speaks eloquently of God as “the unknowable total of all there is,” a formulation similar to Newberg’s “absolute unitary being” as the apex of all religious experience, whether it be Christian, Buddhist, or secular. There’s a superficial appeal to this kind of “neurotheology” (Newberg’s term), but it founders on one problematic fact: Religious experiences are more different than they are the same.”
But the examples you give to make your point do not compare experiences of “the unknowable total of all there is.” They compare the correlates of experiences of praying with those of visualization meditation.
I have been invited to comment on this post and I am glad to discover an amazing blog, with rich and articulate interventions.
Concerning the views of Mr. Brooks and Mr. Bulkeley, I think they are both wrong to assume that the current MRI craze will be of any consequence regarding the way people think about religion.
When Marie Curie discovered radioactivity, there was a radiography craze in Belle Époque Paris. Everyone wanted to have a radiography of their lungs put into a frame above the chimney. Radium was a music-hall attraction; there were shows about it, and it was the talk of the town. An imaginative historian might say that Belle Époque Parisians were making deep and interesting statements about their bodies, the relations between science and intimity, and the stammering beginnings of the Atomic Age. One might even try to show that these people framed the way we think today about interiority, atoms, and the very nature of matter and organs. Maybe so.
But perhaps they were just having fun with radium.
fMRI is nothing but a marvelous technique that can yield great results, when it is put in the hands of scientists trying to test a particular prediction. It may also be toyed with by people who have no real hypothesis in mind and just want to get media coverage. This, I think, is the case of most “neurotheological studies”.
What these studies can prove is the robust fact that something happens in the brain when we have some mental activity—for example when we pray, meditate, or think about something religious. No doubt this is a great piece of news for a handful of people who, so far, were convinced it had everything to do with the liver.
The locus of activation seem to vary a lot, which is not surprising given the tremendous varieties of religion-like activities that have been put into the scanner. No serious person believes that fMRI studies have found a specific “religious cluster” or “religious network” that would be common to all these activities. Which leads us to another resounding conclusion: different things happen in the brain of people who think different things. Again, if we put aside the most stubborn of fanatics (who do not read fMRI studies anyways), I hardly see why anyone should make a fuss about this idea.
Atheists, born-agains, right-wingers, left-wingers, litteralists, mystics, Buddhists, Christians soft and hard, New-Agers, Darwinians, etc., have all taken to the neurotheology craze and celebrated it as a paradigm-shifting advance. If neurotheologists had put forward genuine scientific theories, debatable propositions and non-trivial predictions, would their success be the same ?
As Bulkeley points out, neuroscience (and perhaps the burgeoning field of neurotheology) does not “prove” that atheism is irrelevant in the way that Brooks triumphantly declares. Nor does it empirically support the idea that traditional monotheistic faith is the singular, default mode of religiosity for human beings. In contrast, Bulkeley claims (in an excellent fashion) that there is a “new appreciation for the radical pluralism of religious experiences.” To add to this conversation, I also think it useful to look to the work of cognitive science. The core argument of this discipline, it seems to me, involves the evolved predisposition of humans towards positing “religious” or free agents (also called “non obvious beings”). That is, humans have the propensity to project agents generally.
Arguments advanced by scholars in the cognitive science of religion, Todd Tremlin and Harvey Whitehouse for example, thus do not support monotheism as foundational to the evolved cognitive structures. Instead, two of the central arguments about the human cognitive architecture—that of the Agency Detective Device (ADD) and the Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM)—address an evolutionarily based predisposition for humans to intuit (and therefore protect against) agents in the world and also to ascribe types of intentionality to the agents. The plurality of agents is what I want to emphasize over and against a cognitive predisposition towards intuiting/believing in one master agent. As the cultivation of agency detection was advanced on the plains of the Sahara, it would make more sense that intuiting multiple agents/threats would prove more evolutionarily efficacious since this trait would increase the likelihood of survival.
Perhaps, then, the cognitive revolution should not be declared in terms of either an emphasis on monotheism (not the case from the evolutionary analysis of the cognitive architecture) or on a poly- or pan-theistic bent (given the influence of cultural variation in permutations of all three varieties). The cognitive revolution may not fall on the side of advocating either for monotheism or for polytheism, but in terms of clarifying why and how humans are predisposed to believe in god/s at all. As there is no single model for religious experience, there is certainly no single model for permutations of the divine figured in such experience. However, what cognitive science provides are articulations of how evolutionarily constrained the cognitive architecture is, giving us a solid bedrock for further inquiry.