Neuroscience and Religion | W.R. Klemm

Well, as you can see from this opening slide, I'm going to talk about the conflict between science and religion. In the conflict, actually, I've had a lot of time to think about this, by the way, because I've been a scientist for over 50 years, and I was baptized as a Methodist when I was 12. So, over the years, it's caused me to think deeply about these issues. The conflict, of course, actually began in 1859, when Charles Darwin wrote his famous book, Origin of the Species. But since that time, we now have neuroscience presenting a challenge to religion, because neuroscience is showing that mind and brain are the same functional substance. Actually, this conflict was originally framed by a philosopher named Rene Descartes. Well, that slide's missing for some reason. But anyway, Descartes is the Descartes who created Cartesian geometry. But he was also a philosopher, a religious philosopher, and he argued that brain and mind are separate. And in fact, if they'd known about electromagnetic fields back then, he probably would have thought of the brain as some sort of antenna that picks up the mind out of outer space. However, science is showing that brain and mind are the same functional substance, as I said. And this leads many people, especially some scientists, to become atheists. Now, I'm not an atheist, and I'm not an agnostic. In fact, the more I've learned about science, and the more I've learned about life science in particular, convinces me that the laws of chemistry and physics are so sophisticated, so elegant, magical even, that they could not have created themselves. So the issue arises, well, why should we link neuroscience and religion? And the obvious reason is that our religious beliefs come out of the brain. And we have created, as a culture, some 4,200 religions today, all of which differ in many ways, and all of which have really been generated by human minds. Notice I'm calling science as a domain of faith. We all know that religion is. But science is too. This is what theories and hypotheses do. These are beliefs based on incomplete evidence. Well, that's what religious faith is like too. So that is the definition of faith, namely, believing certain things in the absence of complete evidence. And that's what the real world is like, whether it's in the domain of faith or in the domain of science. So to summarize the rationale for making this linkage, you can see that we have several elements, one of which, by the way, is the fact that neuroscience is a very hot science these days. The decade of the 90s was declared the decade of neuroscience. And a lot of exciting new things are happening in neuroscience, which have religious implications. Now, one of the key factors is that all of us have innate tendencies to believe certain things in the absence of complete evidence. We would have to, or otherwise we'd be paralyzed into inaction if we couldn't make certain assumptions and beliefs, because that's the way the real world is. We don't have complete evidence for many things. We also know that beliefs are learned, and they are created by the experiences we have, and what we're taught, and how we're raised, and that sort of thing. But in my experience, people don't think very deeply about science or religion, and certainly not in the same context. Now, I'd like to point out that science and religion, especially neuroscience and religion, have shared values. And you can see that from reading this list, that these are basic needs that people have that both neuroscientists and people of faith are trying to address. They do it in different ways and for different reasons. Maybe a good analogy would be like policemen and social workers. They're both trying to help people, but they do it for different reasons and in different ways. So this brings me to the issue of the scholarship of neuroscience and religion. What scholarship? I don't know of any university that teaches both subjects in the same course. There are, of course, universities that have religious studies programs. We have that here at Texas A&M. And most universities have courses in psychology, but psychology is not equivalent to neuroscience. So for those reasons, I decided to create a course, a college course for upper level undergraduates in neuroscience and religion. Now, this course is not designed to teach students answers to put on a multiple choice exam. This is an essay course. And the course is designed to require students to find research papers, either in neuroscience or on religious topics, and then write essays on them and present them to the class and lead class discussion and debate. I first taught this course last fall, and in the post-class surveys, the students on a scale of zero to ten rated two items that they liked the best, and that was writing the essays and leading the class discussion. And they rated those at 9.3 on a 10-point scale, with a range of 8 to 10. That's a new experience for me. One student, by the way, wrote, he was a senior science major, and he said, of all the science courses I've ever had, this is the one where I learned the most about what matters most. And that sort of gave me goosebumps, because I did the same for me. So why don't colleges teach this kind of a course? I don't know, maybe they didn't think about it, but I think it'd be a good idea. In this course, it's a 15-week course, and we have a lecture, one lecture each week on different topics. Here's some examples of the topics. We begin with evolution, but in this case, evolution of the brain. It's what I want to focus on. And then there's a topic on how the brain works, how it processes information, and learning and memory, sleep and dreaming. You can see these, and I won't take the time to tell you all 15 topics, but it should be fairly apparent that these topics are basic to our humanity and have overlap with religion. So what do the students write about? As I said, they find a scholarly article, and there are far more of them than I thought. They don't have any trouble finding relevant papers to write about. And each week, each student either writes an essay on his scholarly paper, or he writes a summary. And the assignment rotates each week, so that they're not overburdened with too much writing, and so that I'm not overburdened with too much baiting of papers. Their objective when they write the essay is to introduce the topic and briefly summarize what the paper is about, but they have to show how it informs either religion or neuroscience, as the case may be. And I'm looking for new ideas and creative thinking and critical thinking, which they present in the essay and we discuss in class. So the ground rules for this process is that it has to be academically oriented, and it must not proselytize. It turns out that wasn't a problem. Nobody really tried to do that. They have to explain the data in the cited article, and they have to incorporate neuroscience concepts, whether the paper was neuroscience or a theology paper. And they have to show how they relate, the two domains of thought relate. And of course, I want the student's voice. I want to know what the student thinks, not what the author of the scholarly paper thinks. And then they have to formally cite the paper that they got the information from. I was surprised that most of them who would provide four or five or more citations, although only just one was required, and that tells me that they were really engaged with these topics. And I think they're engaged because it's personal. You know, they're writing about things they care about. Here's some examples from the different topics, and you can check these. We won't take the time to discuss them in detail, but when we were talking about the neuroscience of agency, I would present these topics in lecture. You can see what some of them are, and at the same time show some corresponding related ideas that come from religion. And this would help students get an idea about what to write their essays on. Here's an example when we were covering sensation, the neuroscience of sensation. And you can see that there are related religious topics. Here's an example from the week when we were talking about neural drives and emotions. And again, the overlap is pretty self-evident. When we covered consciousness, you can see on the left-hand side the topics that we covered in the neuroscience lecture, and then you can see what corresponding topics are in religion. And likewise here in the case of social neuroscience. Well, we did this for 15 topics, and I won't show them all to you, but I hope it makes the point clear that there are areas in both neuroscience and religion that should be informing each other, and they're not usually. So what about people that can't take this course? I wish everybody could. In fact, I would like to see seminaries offer such a course. I'm not sure they're ready for that yet, but I certainly suggest it. And I'm trying to structure this course so that I can transport it to other neuroscience professors here at Texas A&M, but also professors elsewhere. Now at this point, I would like to bring up a topic that neurosciences needs to deal with, and is starting to recognize that they have to deal with this. And science does not have an explanation for this so-called near-death experience. Several hospitals around the world have reported that about 10 percent of the people who die on the operating table and are resuscitated have this experience of dying, and what happens when you die. And since they survived, they can tell us about it. And they all have the same report. They see themselves hovering over their body. They see bright lights. Very often, as they're going through a tunnel and, you know, they emerge into a bright light. And they have this overwhelming feeling of being loved. Two research groups, and you see in this slide, are currently studying this, and they too show about 10 percent of the survivors of dying report these experiences. And they all have the same report. Now, by the way, I haven't defined what near-death is. Near-death is when your heart stops, your breathing stops, and your brain electrical activity stops. You know, in a hospital setting, they're usually monitoring your brain waves at the same time. And when all this shuts down, you're technically dead. And in some cases, physicians and surgeons can resurrect you, so to speak, and you survive. And about 10 percent of these people have these same reports. Now, a skeptic will say, well, these are just hallucinations. But there's a problem with that. If the hallucination is occurring before death, the memory of it can't consolidate. That's the way memory works. The brain has to be electrically active to consolidate a memory. And since the brain is shut down in this near-death experience, it can't form a memory of this hallucination to be recalled when they recover. If the hallucination is occurring after they've been revived, why is it they all have the same report? These are independent reports. You know, these people don't even know each other. Well, there's some spooky things in science, too. You remember, Einstein was the one who said that quantum mechanics is spooky physics. Well, some of Einstein's stuff is pretty spooky, too. Like having wormholes where people can, in theory, go from this universe to another universe at faster than the speed of light through a wormhole. Quantum mechanics has spooky ideas like entanglement and tunneling. And even the advocates of quantum mechanics say we don't really understand it. Richard Feynman, who was a pioneer in this field, says, not only do my colleagues not understand it, I don't understand it either. Then there's string theory, which is designed to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics. Now, the problem with string theory is there are no observables. It's all math. Anyway, that's pretty spooky to me. And in the last decade or so, they've discovered what's called dark matter. In this colored photograph, they've color-coded it to reflect a big area of space that is bending light. But you don't see anything there. And yet, to bend light, you've got to have a terrific amount of mass. And so they call this dark matter. We know it must be there because it's bending light. It's also, by the way, the explanation for why galaxies spiral. And they can't explain it. We also know that the universe is expanding. And the galaxies, even though the galaxies are staying intact because of their own gravity, they're being pushed further and further apart. And the most astonishing thing is it's accelerating. That means the energy that's pushing it is accelerating. Where's that coming from? Nobody knows. They call it dark energy. Well, the point is that of all the stuff in the universe, we only know about 4.6% of it. Everything else is dark matter and dark energy. So I think you can see that there are a lot of things yet to be discovered. And maybe a lot of things that we call spiritual are actually material things we just don't understand. So I conclude with these two final questions. And Socrates made the statement that the unexamined life is not worth living. Well, I would remind you that both neuroscience and religion are legitimate ways to examine the truth of one's life. And I'll conclude with the statement of Jesus of Nazareth, who said, seek the truth and you will find it.