Reducing belief
Saturday, 25. March 2006, 10:46:23
Lewis Wolpert is a professor of biology who, after suffering from severe depression over several years, wrote one of best books on the subject (Malignant Sadness: An Anatomy of DepressionMalignant Sadness: An Anatomy of Depression). Now he has turned his attention to religious belief with Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
I’ve not read it yet, but the reliable John Carey, reviewing the book in the Sunday Times, provokes me to fear the worst and to expect some unhealthy doses of reductionism.
Wolpert argues that our ancestors, having discovered how to make and use tools, soon cottoned on to the idea of cause and effect. And then they started to wonder what caused unpleasant and inexplicable events (illness, death, natural disasters etc) and – hey presto! – we got religion. Somewhere in the brain, it is argued, is a “belief engine” that encourages us to seize on causal explanations for events, whether or not these accounts have any basis in reality.
He’s not the first to argue that, whether true or absurd, religious belief seems to confer benefits on believers and surveys are cited showing that religious people are happier, more optimistic and less scared of death than non-believers. Next step in the argument is that this means religious belief confers an evolutionary advantage. Next step is that therefore the ability to have such beliefs must be partly determined by our genes.
Line of argument seems reasonable. Although there an awful lot of assumptions here and one does require an almost religious belief in Darwinism to buy the whole bundle. But then we come to the real reductionism. To quote Carey’s review:
Mystical raptures, similar to those reported by the devout, can be produced, he points out, by mental illness or hallucinogenic drugs and this, too, indicates that religion depends on neural circuits in our brain that accident or malfunction can activate. Some neuroscientists now link spiritual experiences with specific brain areas. Stimulating the brain of subjects with electromagnets causes tiny seizures in the temporal lobes that induce the subjects to believe they have spiritual experiences. The visions of St Teresa, it is suggested, may have been symptoms of temporal-lobe epilepsy.
Well, I’ve also read that St Teresa’s accounts of her visions match the DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia. And that she was fond of munching a herb that grew in her convent garden that had hallucinogenic properties. So what to make of this? Do we reduce all the wisdom and insight of Teresa’s writings, her depiction in detail of a seven-stage path towards perfection (in The Interior Castle), her reform of the Carmelite Order, merely to the effects of an illness (or maybe two at the same time?).
We are in “Flatland” territory here. The interiority of the person experiencing “spiritual experiences” is denied. So it matters not to the reductionist whether the vision of Christ is a genuine one – one that confers grace, wisdom, moral insight and spiritual growth – or a delusional one – one that generates mania, delusions of grandeur and illness. St Teresa of Ávila not only had some wild experiences that involved the stimulation of her neural circuits, she also took on the Inquisition and reformed one of the main religious orders of the church, founding convents across the breadth of Spain. A tough task for anyone, but for a woman of suspected Jewish ancestry to have achieved this in C16th Spain is almost beyond belief. Not bad for an epileptic, schizophrenic drug addict (if we may combine the three reductionist theories I’ve cited).
I can claim to have experienced all three of the separate states mentioned here. Mental illness, hallucinogenic drugs and “mystical raptures”. From the inside, I can tell you that there are indeed similarities between the experiences and from this it would not surprise me to learn that they all involved similar kinds of neural activity. But I can also say that they are totally different experiences. Each with its own “taste”. And each with its own very different content. I have enjoyed a classic “peak experience” that involved a sense of union with nature and with the divine. I have also suffered a psychotic episode laden with religious imagery and the voices of saints and angels. They are emphatically not the same thing at all.
Wolpert and Co. may be conflating the medium and the message. The genuine spiritual vision à la St Teresa might possibly be experienced through the same wiring system as a drug-induced hallucination or a psychosis. But that does not mean that it is the same thing. A scientific observer, measuring the binary code, the Mbits and the MPEGs, the pixels and the codecs, might conclude that there is no difference between my watching online a video of the Dalai Lama teaching in Dharamshala or the porn movie Debbie Does Dallas. Same bit rates, same codes, same resolution. But somehow, that seems to me rather missing the point.
We get back to the core issue of needing to avoid pathologising spirituality while, on the other hand, not falling into the trap of spiritualising pathology. What I call the “R or R trap” – Reductionism or Romanticism.
The important things in assessing “mystical raptures” and “spiritual experiences” are the content of the experience and the understanding of the event on the part of the experiencer. And these are both beyond the measuring machines of the flatland reductionists.
Some people have had visions of Christ and undergo profound “conversions” or inner transformations and then act in the world in a way that is clearly highly evolved spiritually – St Teresa, St Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton among others. Some people have visions of Christ and then lead armies into battle and kill those who don’t believe as they do. Others have visions and end up thinking that they are Jesus Christ and finding themselves in psychiatric wards.
All three kinds of event may involve the same bits of the brain, may all stem from the same “belief engine”. But there do seem to be some not insignificant differences!
These comments are based only on a review of Wolpert’s book. So are very much provisional until I get round to reading the book itself.
I’ve not read it yet, but the reliable John Carey, reviewing the book in the Sunday Times, provokes me to fear the worst and to expect some unhealthy doses of reductionism.
Wolpert argues that our ancestors, having discovered how to make and use tools, soon cottoned on to the idea of cause and effect. And then they started to wonder what caused unpleasant and inexplicable events (illness, death, natural disasters etc) and – hey presto! – we got religion. Somewhere in the brain, it is argued, is a “belief engine” that encourages us to seize on causal explanations for events, whether or not these accounts have any basis in reality.
He’s not the first to argue that, whether true or absurd, religious belief seems to confer benefits on believers and surveys are cited showing that religious people are happier, more optimistic and less scared of death than non-believers. Next step in the argument is that this means religious belief confers an evolutionary advantage. Next step is that therefore the ability to have such beliefs must be partly determined by our genes.
Line of argument seems reasonable. Although there an awful lot of assumptions here and one does require an almost religious belief in Darwinism to buy the whole bundle. But then we come to the real reductionism. To quote Carey’s review:
Mystical raptures, similar to those reported by the devout, can be produced, he points out, by mental illness or hallucinogenic drugs and this, too, indicates that religion depends on neural circuits in our brain that accident or malfunction can activate. Some neuroscientists now link spiritual experiences with specific brain areas. Stimulating the brain of subjects with electromagnets causes tiny seizures in the temporal lobes that induce the subjects to believe they have spiritual experiences. The visions of St Teresa, it is suggested, may have been symptoms of temporal-lobe epilepsy.
Well, I’ve also read that St Teresa’s accounts of her visions match the DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia. And that she was fond of munching a herb that grew in her convent garden that had hallucinogenic properties. So what to make of this? Do we reduce all the wisdom and insight of Teresa’s writings, her depiction in detail of a seven-stage path towards perfection (in The Interior Castle), her reform of the Carmelite Order, merely to the effects of an illness (or maybe two at the same time?).
We are in “Flatland” territory here. The interiority of the person experiencing “spiritual experiences” is denied. So it matters not to the reductionist whether the vision of Christ is a genuine one – one that confers grace, wisdom, moral insight and spiritual growth – or a delusional one – one that generates mania, delusions of grandeur and illness. St Teresa of Ávila not only had some wild experiences that involved the stimulation of her neural circuits, she also took on the Inquisition and reformed one of the main religious orders of the church, founding convents across the breadth of Spain. A tough task for anyone, but for a woman of suspected Jewish ancestry to have achieved this in C16th Spain is almost beyond belief. Not bad for an epileptic, schizophrenic drug addict (if we may combine the three reductionist theories I’ve cited).
I can claim to have experienced all three of the separate states mentioned here. Mental illness, hallucinogenic drugs and “mystical raptures”. From the inside, I can tell you that there are indeed similarities between the experiences and from this it would not surprise me to learn that they all involved similar kinds of neural activity. But I can also say that they are totally different experiences. Each with its own “taste”. And each with its own very different content. I have enjoyed a classic “peak experience” that involved a sense of union with nature and with the divine. I have also suffered a psychotic episode laden with religious imagery and the voices of saints and angels. They are emphatically not the same thing at all.
Wolpert and Co. may be conflating the medium and the message. The genuine spiritual vision à la St Teresa might possibly be experienced through the same wiring system as a drug-induced hallucination or a psychosis. But that does not mean that it is the same thing. A scientific observer, measuring the binary code, the Mbits and the MPEGs, the pixels and the codecs, might conclude that there is no difference between my watching online a video of the Dalai Lama teaching in Dharamshala or the porn movie Debbie Does Dallas. Same bit rates, same codes, same resolution. But somehow, that seems to me rather missing the point.
We get back to the core issue of needing to avoid pathologising spirituality while, on the other hand, not falling into the trap of spiritualising pathology. What I call the “R or R trap” – Reductionism or Romanticism.
The important things in assessing “mystical raptures” and “spiritual experiences” are the content of the experience and the understanding of the event on the part of the experiencer. And these are both beyond the measuring machines of the flatland reductionists.
Some people have had visions of Christ and undergo profound “conversions” or inner transformations and then act in the world in a way that is clearly highly evolved spiritually – St Teresa, St Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton among others. Some people have visions of Christ and then lead armies into battle and kill those who don’t believe as they do. Others have visions and end up thinking that they are Jesus Christ and finding themselves in psychiatric wards.
All three kinds of event may involve the same bits of the brain, may all stem from the same “belief engine”. But there do seem to be some not insignificant differences!
These comments are based only on a review of Wolpert’s book. So are very much provisional until I get round to reading the book itself.
WIDGETIZE
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