Fingerprints Of God
I forgot to mention that I read Fingerprints Of God a while back. It is a sincere look by a NPR journalist at religion and new empirical science dealing with religion. I found the science parts fascinating, but was less interested in the parts about God and individual stories of coincidences. She kept trying to bring the discussion back to God and the scientists would tell her that science has nothing to say about God. She concluded that science cannot disprove god and is completely consistent with God. Well, it’s completely against the very essence of science, but they humoured the journalist who is writing about their research, so they let it slide. The science of religious experience stops being science once the god talk come in. What she suspected they believed when they weren't humouring her is that “neuroscience will soon relegate ‘God’ to the ash heap of history” [141].

On the science side, there is a lot of interesting research being done. William Miller says that since psychology came out of religion, the field has worked hard to intentionally avoid anything that might appear like religion. Psychology is mature enough now that they don’t have to push away its past [29]. Another change is that the Post-Timothy Leary restrictions on psychedelic drug research have been relaxed, so that type of research can go on.

There was interesting research by Roland Griffith and also Franz Vollenweider dealing with serotonin and stuff the brain thinks is serotonin like LSD, psilocybin, and peyote. Serotonin is the main neurotransmitter for spiritual experience. The analogy used was that serotonin is the bouncer that lets you into the religious experience party. Other neurotransmitters are involved after that including dopamine and glutamate.

Michael Persinger’s God helmet sounds promising. Instead of using drugs, Persinger stimulates area of the brain magnetically to evoke religious experiences.

He also had a great quote:

If we look at the trend in the history of science, first we thought we were the center of the universe, and Copernicus modified that. Then Darwin removed the illusion that we were a special creation. Freud ripped apart the concept that we were logical animals and shows that that was only a veneer, that actually we were still a primitive animal.

So the next big question is: What is the last illusion that we must overcome as a species? That illusion is that ‘God’ is an absolute that exists independent of the human brain. That somehow we are in His or Her care. We have to realize that ultimately that may not be true, but what we may learn from it may take us much further than we ever imagined. [141]

Andrew Newberg takes spiritual virtuosos – such as Tibetan Buddhist monks, Franciscan nuns, Sikhs, and Pentecostals – and scans their brains. There are two types of spiritually virtuoso brains: contemplative and rowdy ones. Contemplative spiritual brains, with monks and nuns for example, are lit up in the frontal lobes and darkened in the parietal lobes. In the rowdy spiritual brains, from techniques such as glossolalia, the frontal lobes shut down and the parietal lobes light up. All of the virtuosos have thalami asymmetry in the rest state, where normal people have fairly symmetric thalami.

That’s a good quick look back. I’m intentionally skipping the stuff on out-of-body-experiences and coincidences. She looked at a lot of interesting stuff in the book that unfortunately got filtered through some irrelevant concerns she had. I now have the names of some of the scientists doing work here, so I’ll look at them instead.