Deepak Lal: The endurance of religion: Faith vs Reason

We can make our social and cultural environment a bulwark against the seeds of destruction humans carry

A great paradox of modernity is that even as the power of Reason embodied in the marvels of science and technology has spread into all our lives, the expectation of the sages of the Enlightenment that its universal triumph would undermine the irrational passions of religious Faith has been belied. As the mullahs of Iran, and the Taliban clutch their mobile phones and use the Internet to co-ordinate their religious slaughter and send out their poisonous messages of hate, whilst the suicide bombers moved by an inexplicable religious passion wreak havoc worldwide, it would appear that Faith has triumphed over Reason. The hope that with the spread of scientific education, religious passions and hatred would be tamed is belied by the continuing hold of religion in the most advanced country""the US""where Darwin is again on trial, whilst in a Europe increasingly renouncing its Christian God, various forms of "New Age" religions (including eco-fundamentalism) are on the rise. It almost seems that Faith is hardwired into our brains. That this may no longer be mere idle speculation is the subject of this column.

All religions depend on myths going back to the Stone Age (as Karen Armstrong shows in a brilliant book A Short History of Myth, Canongate, 2005). They arose for a very simple reason. Homo-sapiens, unlike their other animal cousins, were not only conscious, they were self-conscious. Unlike a dog or a lion they could reflect upon their experiences and draw lessons from them. A major part of this difference was due to the human animal alone having complex emotions hardwired into their brains. As Darwin saw clearly in his less well-known work The Expression of Emotion in Men and Animals, unlike other animals our self-consciousness gives us the capacity to lead a truly examined life. Darwin saw humans as the only moral animal. He wrote: "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions and motives, and of approving or disapproving them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity". This self-consciousness is mediated through various brain chemicals which arouse the emotions, including the moral emotions of shame and guilt.

For a self-aware animal, the fact of death would need some explanation and rationalisation. "Animals watch each other die but, as far as we know, they give the matter no further consideration. But the Neanderthal graves show that when these early people became conscious of their mortality, they created some sort of counter-narrative that enabled them to come to terms with it," writes Armstrong. This is the origin of the myths which have become religions. But all religions have also promised some form of self- transcendence as well as some myth "to conquer death". Finally, all religions have offered some form of healing of the illnesses (including physical) of the temporal world through Faith. But now science proclaims that our universe began with a "Big Bang" and will probably end in a "Black Hole". Witch doctors relying on Faith are being replaced by practitioners of modern medicine relying on scientific Reason. How can rational, scientifically literate people then continue to believe in religion? Unless of course the irrational need for spiritual Faith is also hard-wired into our brains.

It is this intriguing possibility which the US National Institute of Health geneticist Dean Hamer explores in a fascinating book (The God Gene, Anchor Books, 2005). He reports on recent neuro-scientific and genetic research which has tried to identify a specific gene for spirituality. Using the well-known method of studying identical and fraternal twins to separate the effects of nature versus nurture, researchers have been able to identify a specific gene which controls the transmission of particular brain chemicals controlling the emotions""monoamines""found amongst those twins who score highest on a "self- transcendence" index measuring spirituality developed by Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist at the Washington University medical school in St. Louis.

But, if there is a "God Gene" which predisposes its bearers to self-transcendence, why would it have emerged through evolution? Hamer argues that its role in natural selection is to provide an innate sense of optimism to keep on living and procreating despite the inevitability of death. At the physical level this optimism promotes better health and quicker recovery from disease. Here he cites evidence which shows the power of faith to release brain chemicals which can cure certain diseases. The strongest evidence is the placebo effect documented in controlled clinical trails from the use of sugar pills in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. This is a disease caused by the loss of a brain chemical-dopamine. The placebo sugar pills, which the patients believed were treating their Parkinson's symptoms, worked better in these controlled trials than conventional drugs. They worked in the true believers, it was found, by producing more dopamine in the brain than other conventional drugs. Dopamine is one of the monoamines controlled by the "God Gene". So here Faith heals, and for a scientific reason!

The other evolutionary advantage provided by "the God gene" is that "it provides us with a sense of purpose beyond ourselves and keeps us from being incapacitated by our dread of mortality" (Hamer, p.144), and allows us to attain the self-transcendence which seems to be the essence of spirituality. This capacity to reach beyond ourselves is typical of all those who are moved by various abstract causes. As this "spirituality" reflects the emotional rather than the rational parts of our brain, Reason cannot transform Faith.

We can link this neuro-biological basis for self-transcendence with the origins of myths in the Stone Age, when evolutionary scientists believe our basic instincts were honed. Armstrong states that the first great flowering of myths arose "when homo sapiens became homo necans, "man the killer", and found it very difficult to accept the conditions of his existence in a violent world ...Their chief prey were the great mammals, whose bodies and facial expressions resembled their own. Hunters could see their fear and identify with their cries of terror. Their blood flowed like human blood. Faced with this potentially intolerable dilemma, they created myths and rituals that enabled them to come to terms with the murder of their fellow-creatures" (pp. 29-30).

It would appear therefore that there is a God gene which predisposes their bearers to self-transcendence- including self-immolation. To deal with the horror of death we have religious myths which allow true believers to overcome their natural fear of death and pity for their victims with rationalisations for the murder of their fellow creatures. This is probably an explanation for the suicide bombers plaguing us today. This neuro-biological theory also suggests that whilst these darker irrational impulses are hardwired in our brains they require the myths of religion to trigger them. The mania of the suicide bombers would then be like bird song, studies of which have shown that, while the "basic species-specific skeleton of the song is hardwired in the genes, it requires the environmental clue of being able to hear its own voice to be triggered" (Hamer, p. 8). Thus, while the Enlightenment hope that Reason would vanquish Faith is unlikely to be fulfilled, we can mitigate the chances of our destruction by religious mania by ensuring that our cultural and political environment does not trigger the more malevolent equivalent of birdsong.