The brain and religion: followup
As a commenter pointed out, my last post was a severe conflation of several ideas. Bad philosophy blogger. Bad. So, to make up for it, I’d like to clarify who the players are in the “brain and religion” discussion that has been seeping into the mainstream media. There are two major branches, really: cognitive anthropology and what’s being called “neurotheology.”
Slate.com is running a series on the brain, and you can read an article discussing the latter branch. It’s called “God in the Dendrites” and discusses the work of Andrew Newberg, one of the most visible neuroscientists doing studies of nuns, monks and other religious people. There are others–and have been for decades–but Newberg’s books, written for the layperson, have made him a spokesman.
In contrast to Newberg’s approach, which measures brain states, cognitive anthropologists like Pascal Boyer and Todd Atran are theorizing beyond PET scans or fMRIs, and draw upon psychology research. Their field is focused upon explaining the evolutionary origins of religion. They draw upon neuro-imaging (see Boyer’s Memory and Development Lab, his articles on fMRI studies of causality) but make larger connections between culture and evolution.
One way to understand these two approaches is by looking at the questions they ask.Boyer is asking about the origin of religious concepts in humanity as a species (although individuals are implicated), and how it has been adaptive, or has resulted as a byproduct of adaptive cognitive processes. Newberg is asking about the origin of religious experience in individual humans and how parts of the brain are involved in generating peak mystical phenomena.
Boyer’s view of religion is primarily concerned with gods as agents, as socially adaptive phenomena. He is critical of neurotheology’s efforts to pinpoint a “god module” in the brain, as well as its focus upon mysticism, prayer, speaking in tongues, etc. Newberg is focused more upon the phenomenology of peak religious experience, which he sees as being the same across divergent theological beliefs. Despite these differences, both seem to agree that what professional theologians think matters–beliefs–doesn’t really divide religions. These nuances are almost an accretion on religious experience (Newberg) or religion as social phenomena (Boyer).
Finally, in my earlier post, I said that certain debates form background to discussions of religious belief. I spoke pretty loosely, based on hunches I have about issues that do tie into these investigations–but those connections may or may not be part of the literature (I will admit ignorance on that point). For example, the debate about free will and the debate about natural language are not part of Boyer and Newberg’s concerns. That much is true.
I do, however, think that materialism is an important problem to consider. The evolutionary approach to religious belief assumes a naturalistic explanation. Zombie World is a thought experiment generally held to cast doubt on materialism about the brain–if we have something “left over” to explain, that is, consciousness, after we’ve described all physical states, then maybe the mind is not the brain. (Loosely.) An evolutionary model of religious belief, then, would need to work in Zombie world. Does it? A similar problem is implicated in Newberg’s analysis of neural correlates of mystical experience. Would god-believing Zombies in Zombie world, “experiencing” peak mystical brain states, appear in every way as we do?
This question is what I’m working on now. I’m approximately halfway through a paper sorting out some preliminary questions on the topic.
My suspicion is that other questions are pertinent in ways we haven’t yet uncovered. I could be wrong–that’s what the rhetorical thrust of the last post was meant to be. I could be spending my time on the rules of chmess.
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