The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

Jen and I have been watching a really nifty debate called "Beyond Belief" on an internet movie site. It's a long series of panel lectures and subsequent discussion about science and religion, and has gone everywhere from astrophysics to quantum mechanics and from neurobiology and psychology to microbiology and ecology. It's a pretty interesting discussion for its science alone, let alone the charged topic.

Something in the most recent segment we watched really got me thinking, though. Everything I write from here is entirely imaginary, not based on any scientific background. One of the speakers, Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, brought up a point that made it almost sound as if there's a... for lack of a better term, a "mode" in the brain for people to be religious. It is tripped when people undergo certain experiences, like epileptic seizures or mescaline hallucinations, and probably by other things as well. Interestingly, people may have varying susceptibility to perceiving trips of this mode as religious.

In other words, if I followed it right, some people may just be predisposed to seeing particular events as religious epiphanies, while other people lacking this "mode" don't get any religious experience from it, if they feel anything at all.

To get closer to my point, the well-known, extremely hard-line atheist Richard Dawkins once underwent a scan where he and a vicar were both tested with exposure to one of these religious mode "tripping" agents (not sure what. A drug? I missed it when they said.) Dawkins didn't feel anything, while the vicar - though he actually denied feeling anything - felt an extensive response of fear and all kinds of other strong emotions according to brain scans.

This could mean - and I am by no means saying it does - that there is a part to the brain that literally defines whether or not a person is capable of religion. It could be a neural pathway formed by behavioural exposure and personality - nurture, not nature - or it could be genetic. Either way, this could mean that certain people literally, in a neurochemical sense, need religion. It is part of their brains. Others, in an equally neurochemical sense, cannot believe based on blind faith. Note, that is not the same as saying that some people are hard-coded theists and atheists: very different, in fact. If this were the case, I would hazard to say that many so-called atheists still believe their atheism based on faith rather than reasonable argument, and so fall into the former category. Likewise, particularly in history when the answers were unavailable, many non-faith thinkers would have used religion simply because they were unaware of alternatives. However, it's likely (I'd even say certain) that a lot of scientists in antiquity had a far more pragmatic view of their religion than was considered normal, even if they were faithful. Nevertheless, for ease of discussion I will be treating the faith-based brain as religious in the rest of this.

To digress for a moment, I'd also like to say another interesting point raised in the show. Dr. Ramachandran has done experiments on people who've had their right and left brain hemispheres disconnected from each other. After the right side of the brain is trained to communicate, it became possible to talk to both sides of the brain of one individual as if they were different people (the right side communicated by pointing at answers on a piece of paper). The right side was capable of lucidly answering questions and even making jokes: "Are you at the university?" "yes." "Are you on the moon?" "No." "Are you a woman?" (to a man) "Yes." (chuckles)

When asked if he believed in god, the right-brain pointed to yes, while the left brain responded no. Dr. Ramachandran asked the audience what this would mean when the patient dies. Would the left brain go to hell and the right brain to heaven? Heh. But what this means in a more pertinent sense to what I'm talking about is that there seems to be some kind of actual neurological basis, again, to believing in a god.

This could be part of why religious debates between atheists and scientists are so damned awkward. One side would be literally hard-wired to feel unequivocally the presence of a divine / the need for faith. The other would be just as hard-wired to be unable to feel that presence or need. While the non-religious mode brain feels it is self-evident to any reasonable being that there is no need for a divine presence, the religious mode brain cannot grasp how the non-religious can miss this obvious god (or these obvious gods) all around us. Each side thinks the other simply needs to have its eyes opened to the right way of thinking, but the truth would be that each side is simply not wired to think the way the other side does!

My analogy for this is sexuality. Some people just are homosexual, and most just are heterosexual (yes, I know, this is still very open to debate). The latter can argue to the former until his face turns blue over how nice girls are, how soft and smooth and the way they walk and... I am getting distracted. Unless the former is a girl, though, the arguments are pointless. The homosexual individual is simply not wired to find the opposite sex appealing.

I emphasise again this is all imaginary. It's a thought exercise: I don't understand Dr. Ramachandran's and others' research nearly well enough to draw these kinds of sweeping conclusions. Now, let's try to think of what value it could have for a species to produce two kinds of individuals - faith believers and reasonable thinkers (and possibly a gradient in between). I don't know enough about the culture of early man to work out a good system yet. However, once we have civilisation - some time around the agricultural revolution - this becomes viable. It seems from the modern proportion of religious vs. atheist individuals that most people are inclined towards faith-based thinking. That would imply that, similar to homosexuality, reason-based thinking is something handy in small amounts but dangerous to primitive humanity as a whole when found in too much quantity. Why?

I can hazard a couple guesses. First, reasonable thinkers, as they get together, tend to erode gods and try to kill them. We work towards finding answers that make gods unnecessary. However, for primitive man, those gods were vital to creating a backdrop to society: moral, scientific, and artistic rules were initially derived from gods, and only fairly recently did our science and philosophy advance enough that the gods are superfluous to human development. Had the reasonable thinkers been in the majority, human culture would probably have spun down to nihilism before we'd developed enough philosophy to help us understand why that's unnecessary.

Second, faith-based thinkers are far more able to set aside the "big questions" and just get their job done. Once they understand that the gods made everything and that life is the way it is because of the word of the gods, they can get back to word growing crops or looking for berries or whatever it is they do. That doesn't mean they are stupid people, just faith-based thinkers just as we have in our world today. As most scientists understand almost intuitively, faith-based thinking precludes scientific research. Once you have the answer, there's no need to keep studying. Thus, the relatively small percentage of reasonable thinkers may be to keep their pondering in check. While a reasonable thinker is perfectly capable of being productive, as a whole I think we do have a tendency to get distracted by debating the nature of reality and other silly stuff. Likely this hasn't changed since the stone age, we just have more complicated words to debate with.

It's time for me to get ready for work. Hope this little thought exercise has been interesting.