Science and Transcendence

For individuals, this pioneering research brings bad news and good news. Some people, it turns out, are probably less open to these experiences for genetic reasons. But the brain is more like a muscle than a computer. The spiritual facility can be developed -- and it changes over our lifetime, as our brain ages. In this narrow sense, prayer and meditation work, in the same way that aerobic training works on the heart muscle.

For societies, this biological basis for spirituality provides an explanation for the universality and persistence of religion. Human beings routinely have experiences that are not normally associated with normal consciousness, yet seem more real than normal consciousness. "There is something in the brain that facilitates and rewards that type of experience," says Newberg, "and our brain desires to make sense of it."

This leads some, of course, to reductionism -- the assertion that a physical basis for transcendent experience proves there is no such thing as transcendence. It is an evolutionary joke on mankind -- perhaps useful, but not accurate -- because everything explainable is thus illusory.

But this view is not more "scientific" than other views. It involves a philosophic materialism that is entirely faith-based. We know, for example, that a complex series of physical, hormonal changes helps bond a mother to her newborn child. Does this mean that parental love is a myth? Only according to the philosophic claim that chemicals exhaust reality. Is it not equally possible that a cosmos charged with transcendence might organize itself in such a way that human beings can sense transcendence?

We have seen this debate before. Sigmund Freud believed that a deep, psychological desire for God proved that God is an illusion -- merely the projection of our deepest wishes into an empty universe. But the intensity of a desire or an experience does not make it a lie. And perhaps the frontal lobes and the thalamus and the parietal lobes are responding to a reality, not conjuring it.