This post is an abstract from a longer article that originally appeared on The Templeton Foundation’s website, bigquestionsonline.com. Dr. Graziano is a neuroscientist in the Psychology Department at Princeton University; his new book is God, Soul, Mind, Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Reflections on the Spirit World; and he’ll be joining The Pages & Pages Book Expo with copies of the book avaiable for sale.
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Scientific anti-theism began, arguably, with Thomas Huxley, the 19th-century champion of the theory of evolution who styled himself “Darwin’s bulldog.” Huxley advocated improving the Bible by removing “statements to which men of science absolutely and entirely demure.” Since then, the view that science should correct people’s mistaken religious beliefs, and even more so that science is fundamentally antithetical to religion, has grown in popularity. It is now championed by influential public figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. A primary basis for scientific anti-theism is that much of religion can potentially be explained by science.
I’m a neuroscientist and also an atheist, but I’m not an anti-theist. I find religion to be a fascinating human psychological and cultural phenomenon and see no reason to try to eradicate it (not that it could be eradicated). Nor do I believe that science — and neuroscience in particular — can somehow persuade people that religion is nonsense. To explain something is not the same as to explain it away.
Neuroscience may indeed explain, in a general way, some widely shared aspects of religious belief and behavior. Special-purpose machinery in the human brain, that evolved over millions of years to make us socially intelligent animals, results in our perception of other people’s minds, in our perception of our own consciousness, and in the perceptual illusion that disembodied minds fill up the spaces around us. Without that specialized machinery, we would be socially blind. We would be oblivious to other people’s conscious minds. With that social machinery in place, we are prone to see minds everywhere — in ourselves, in other people, and floating in the spaces around us as ghosts and spirits. Factually speaking, spirits are projections of the brain. They are information packets instantiated on the neuronal hardware.
Much of the modern clash between science and religion focuses on the hot questions about whether God exists independently or is a construct of the brain and whether the soul lives on after the body or ends when the brain dies. Are these crucial religious questions? I would argue that they are not. For the vast majority of people, religion is a way of life. It is about community and music, place and food, comfort and emotional support. It is, like all of human culture and experience, a function of our peculiar neurobiology, and we should try to appreciate it as such.