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“Neural Buddhism” as religion’s future
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In his column yesterday, The New York Times’s David Brooks, lately on a neuroanthropological kick, tackles the religious implications of modern neuroscience, saying its research portends disaster for orthodox believers—Christians, Jews, Muslims—although perhaps accommodating a generalized belief in some non-God supreme being.
“This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism,” he writes. “Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.” According to Brooks, neuroscience is moving the atheism-theism debate from culturally entrenched—thanks to the tireless militancy (and bestselling polemics) of antitheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and the other Four Horsemen—to irrelevant.
Because neuroscientific advances take what Christians call religious experiences and demystify them physiologically into, say, an increase in blood flow and synaptic activity in one’s prefrontal and parietal cortices, a worldview informed by modern neuroscience doesn’t have to be averse to God per se—just to a personal, miracle-working God like Christianity’s.
These recalibrated emphases on neuroscientific studies could shift the atheism-theism debate from believer and nonbeliever to Bible (or Quran) believer and Buddhist (or Wiccan, or Scientology) believer. That is, writes Mary Martin at Animal Person, cognitive scientists are “merely explaining that the feelings associated with god might not come from outside us,” and, in turn, helping to validate nontheistic religions.
Much of Brooks’ thinking appears predicated on his belief that people are hardwired “for fairness, empathy and attachment”—a belief, he suggests, that flies in the face of the theory that genes are wholly “selfish.” But few researchers subscribe to a genes-aren’t-selfish belief. Most of them, explains National Review’s John Derbyshire, a Hitchens-caliber antitheist, believe “deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment” are simply “‘cold’ survival strategies” passed directly from those selfish genes.
Derbyshire agrees with Brooks for different reasons. “We are more and more accustomed to high evidentiary standards in our work and leisure—if only from watching courtroom dramas on TV or doing quality control and evaluative work,” he writes. “It’s hard to believe the average hasn’t been creeping up, and will continue to do so. This saps away at faith in the magical and miraculous . . . Reflective people will indeed turn to a sort of ‘neural Buddhism,’ some kind of organized system of spirituality that doesn’t require us to believe in incredible occurrences in the remote past, or in the individual personality surviving death.”
Brooks maintains that, right now, “[i]n their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God.” But that “was the easy debate”: He predicts the real challenge will come “from people who feel the existence of the sacred”—i.e., again, like Buddhist nontheists—“but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”
Though Jewish, Brooks demurs from joining the hand-wringing, saying he’s “not qualified to take sides” even though he is watching the neuroscience science community “joining hands” with mysticism “in unexpected ways”—by which he presumably means “any at all.” The result, he argues, is a new science-based movement that emphasizes “self-transcendence” over “divine law or revelation.”
Orthodoxy will be under attack more than ever, as a defense is laid for neural Buddhism. “Orthodox believers,” he says, are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. . . . We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.”
As proof of where this path leads, Brooks cites a prescient Tom Wolfe essay from Forbes in 1996, written well ahead of the curve, lamenting neuroscience’s Nietzschean move to bury God and make science soulless, sending “modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze”—the very move cheered by Hitchens and the anti-Expelled crowd, particularly Dawkins, who appears in the film.
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Christian apologists who haven’t been reasoning from a specific theological framework were having problems long before neuro-science came into play. And for those who have been reasoning from a specific theological framework, the game hasn’t significantly changed, just the opponents. I find it arguable to say that the presence of modern neuro-science promises a greater paradigm shift than what happened during the enlightenment or what happened during peak of the hellenistic era.
Because neuroscientific advances take what Christians call religious experiences and demystify them physiologically into, say, an increase in blood flow and synaptic activity in one’s prefrontal and parietal cortices, a worldview informed by modern neuroscience doesn’t have to be averse to God per se—just to a personal, miracle-working God like Christianity’s.
This “demystification” is more apparent than real. Relating a religious experience to a neurophysiologic change should not detract from the reality of that experience at all. Knowing that the sight of a rose stimulates the Vitamin A/Retinol cycle in the retina doesn’t make the rose less real, or less beautiful.
What’s more, people like Derbyshire are essentially Modernists or Rationalists but we live in a post-modern or post-post-modern era. Using reason to oppose the supernatural is an argument from another age.
Much of Brooks’ thinking appears predicated on his belief that people are hardwired “for fairness, empathy and attachment”—a belief, he suggests, that flies in the face of the theory that genes are wholly “selfish.”
I wonder why … maybe because God created us for a relationship with Him.
Knowing that the sight of a rose stimulates the Vitamin A/Retinol cycle in the retina doesn’t make the rose less real, or less beautiful.
But the enjoyment of its beauty surely goes beyond the physical into the soul … if it doesn’t, then we’d have to admit that every emotion boiled down to a mere chemical reaction, and we were but sophisticated science experiments.
As an avid reader of everything to do with with neuro-science, both old and new research, I have noticed this recent trend to try to explain away anything that doesn’t seem to fit in the neuro-scientists self-imposed boxes.
Neurologists tend to look at the new wave of neuroscientists like astonomers look at astrologers. It seems to me that some of the modern neuro scientists come to the subject with a preconceived idea that there isn’t a God that made them and to Whom they are accountable.
When they aren’t busy trying to explain away the actual Creator of the brain, they actually have been making some useful discoveries.
These guys have cause and effect issues.
The neural responses may be the effect of the actual religious event, rather than the religious feeling being the result of essentially autonomous chemical activities.
That whole ‘it’s all chemical’ thing was the Marquis de Sade’s base philosophy, and we saw where that sort of thinking led.
These guys have cause and effect issues.
Exactly.
We aren’t talking about the Evangelical Manifesto again are we?
I can handle religious experiences being traceable in the brain. What I wonder, as someone who doesn’t read in neural sciences, is how they do these tests? An important part of my Christianity are some of the encounters with God that I’ve had. I haven’t heard much from believers of other religions who have reported these kinds of religious experiences, save a fringe New Age Transcendental out of body experience here or there. What Brooks seemed to be saying was that they could catch someone during these experiences in different religions, and monitor similar brain activity, and even manufacture such an epiphany with a “magnetic helmet”. So I’m trying to figure out, with Jesus being the only way to God, what have they tested, how are we to understand it as believers of Christ, and how does it relate with my own experiences? C. S. Lewis had explains moments like this before he was a believer in “Surprised by Joy”, and they lead him to Christ. Are we to believe that non-Christian’s transcendental moments are for that purpose, or that they are different than truly encountering God tangibly? Is there any serious Christian book out on neural sciences yet?
Enderson - One could not set up an experiment to measure such things (as one doesn’t know when they will happen) nor could one duplicate any results if something happened to occur while takng measurements.
It seems to me that some of the modern neuro scientists come to the subject with a preconceived idea that there isn’t a God that made them and to Whom they are accountable.
This isn’t a preconceived idea. It’s merely the absence of your preconceived idea.
Spinoza - It can indeed be a preconcieved idea.
It may be a preconcieved certainty as to there being no supernatural realm - held without conclusive, objective proof as to same.
A truely neutral starting point would be much more agnostic (and thus equally open to any possibility).
you have two options if you wish to change the cause and effect. First you push God one step further back and simple state he is the originator of the chemical processes that cause the mystical experiences. However this has the quality of a simple add-on and shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone who wants an all powerful god. A second option is to become more man centered. The chemical processes of the brain produce our experience, our need and desire of and for god. In this case, its a small step to declare we create god.
neural Buddhism is the conclusion any good agnostic reached long ago as an agnostic wouldn’t pursue questions that need not be answered.
Two comments, even though I haven’t followed neuroscience closely over the years:
1. Science Fiction author Arthur C. Clarke was saying a similar thing 50 years ago in his novel Childhood’s End, in which the only religion that survived after a superior alien race revealed itself to humans was Buddhism. I wasn’t convinced when I read Clarke, I’m not convinced now.
2. Much of “religious experience” might be threatened by advances in our knowledge of how the brain works, but that is not the same as saying that Christianity as a whole is threatened. If your Christianity is based on personal religious experiences, such as feelings or thoughts that pop into your head (”I felt moved by God to _________”), then neuroscience might be a threat to your Christianity. If your Christianity is based on something more solid and objective, such as God’s revelation of himself in his word and in his son, then your faith is less likely to be shaken by the latest threat that comes down the road.
“You ask me how I know he lives, he lives inside my heart.” — Not a solid basis for faith.
Grace and Peace