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A Review of "God and the Temporal Lobes of the Brain (BY Dr. V.S. Ramachandran)"[/SIZE]
"The God Module" -- "NOT?"
The final piece of the physiology of the self exhibited by Ramachandran was one that he had to preface with a disavowal of the headline given it by press reports. It cannot (he says) be called "The God Module." It is not the final reduction of God to mere neurophysiology; but he does admit that the finding provides strength to the suspicion that belief in god is "largely protoplasmic."
Certain kinds of epilepsy have long been noted to be associated with a heightened sense of religiosity. After having one of their brain electrical storms, patients may actually speak of having had a "religious experience," or say that they now "know why there is a cosmos." Other symptoms of some temporal lobe epileptics can be hypergraphia (writing large, complicated tomes, often of mystical or personally religious significance) and frequent conversions (to several different religions in sequence). A known feature of epilepsy is what is known as "kindling," the strengthening of neurophysiological connections, often involving the limbic system.
Ramachandran now reports three patients in which he claims that a kindling of connections (to the amygdala, I believe he said) is associated with a specific and selective heightening of response, as measured by galvanic skin response, to religious words and icons. He believes that this can be interpreted as a change in part of the brain leading to either a heightening of religious emotion, or alternatively, perhaps to an enhancement of other emotions or perceptions which lead, incidentally, to to a heightened religious belief (everything feels weird, so the individual "wants to believe in something" to provide an explanatory context for the weirdness).[/COLOR]
Reviewers Conclusions and Commentary [/COLOR] [/SIZE]
Ramachandran is undoubtedly correct to caution against taking observations involving only three patients to be indicative of finding the physiology of the long-hypothesized "God-shaped hole in the human psyche." But those who are committed to the scientific enterprise, and believe in exhausting all possible material explanations for "transcendence" before considering any "other worldly" possibilities, will find no surprise in the suggestion that brain neurophysiology can alter perceptions, both of the physical world and of the "transcendent." On the other hand, those who place the importance of belief higher than that of physical understanding of a material world may be taken aback for a moment; (but only for a moment).
Ramachandran, putting a Hindu "spin" on the situation, concludes that none of this should really bother us. He sees this as just another in the chain of findings from cosmology to evolution that have served to disabuse humanity from the folly of taking themselves too seriously. All the "great discoveries," Freud concluded, were of this kind, in some way "debasing or humiliating humanity", removing them from yet another supposed position of privilege in the cosmos. For some reason, Freud said, we seem to like to do that to ourselves.
Finding that our perceptions of God are neuro-physiological may mean that God doesn't really exist. It may also mean that our left arm that was amputated in a streetcar accident, but still hurts, doesn't exist either. Maybe the left side of our dinner plate doesn't exist. Or maybe it does. The point is, we can't really know for sure.
The reason this shouldn't bother us is that we haven't really lost any privileges. We never had such a privileged position in the first place. The Earth has always gone around the sun, our bodies always have been an evolutionary derivation from something like an ancestral bonobo, and our ideas of God are and always have been an emotional reaction to life in an uncertain, but socially significant world. And our best bet for an honest understanding of the real world has always been through the cooperative social enterprise of science, rather than in the cosmic meanings suggested by the psychic (or psychotic) subjective experiences of some isolated individual human brains, and the credulous reactions to them encouraged by religious faith. As Bronowski said, "Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible."
None of that stops Ramachandran from seeing it all as the eternal dance of Shiva, the creator and the destroyer. If you never were really a "self," separated from the unfolding drama of the universe, then there is nothing really to mourn when death pulls us back into that drama which continues to unfold.
But there is nothing here, either, to prevent the Christian, contra Ramachandran, to conclude that all of this neurophysiology is just a material reflection of God's true plan for our lives and the mode of interaction of our immaterial souls with the mere matter of this material existence. If you really want to believe in a spiritual reality, no amount of demonstrations of material-world, neurophysiological, genetic, or cosmological facts, however probable and compelling, will ever swamp such a belief.
That's the trouble with most dialogue between science and religion -- it turns out to be monologue rather than dialogue, in the course of which the findings of science are swallowed whole by theology, while the ethical core of science goes begging[/COLOR]. |
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