Religion as a Brain Phenomenon

I find this report from Wired Science to be interesting:

Brain scans of people who believe in God have found further evidence that religion involves neurological regions vital for social intelligence.

In other words, whether or not God or Gods exist, religious belief may have been quite useful in shaping the human mind’s evolution.

“The main point is that all these brain regions are important for other forms of social cognition and behavior,” said Jordan Grafman, a National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist.

In a study published Monday in Public Library of Science ONE, Grafman’s team used an MRI to measure the brains areas in 40 people of varying degrees of religious belief.

People who reported an intimate experience of God, engaged in religious behavior or feared God, tended to have larger-than-average brain regions devoted to empathy, symbolic communication and emotional regulation. The research wasn’t trying to measure some kind of small “God-spot,” but looked instead at broader patterns within the brains of self-reported religious people.

This ties in with the fact that temporal epilepsy can create religious experiences, i.e. there is something in the brain that drives religion. Now, if only the religious people could understand the science and reform their religion to be more people-friendly, then I would be a happy camper. What drives me crazy are the religions that want to kill "unbelievers" and who want to condemn those unlike them to "hell fire and damnation". Also, I find that fixation on ancient texts to be dysfunctional when so much useful knowledge is being created by science. If only there was a way to reform religion -- kind of like the Protestant Reformation which rebelled at the corruption of the Papacy and triggered the Counter-Reformation which helped to reign in the worst excesses of the Catholic hierarchy.

I like this bit in particular:

Grafman suspects that the origins of divine belief reside in mechanisms that evolved in order to help primates understand family members and other animals. “We tried to use the same social mechanisms to explain unusual phenomena in the natural world,” he said.

The evolution of our brains continues, said Grafman. “The way we think now is not the way we thought 3,000 years ago,” he said. “The nature of how we believe might change as well.”

When I was a kid, the orthodoxy was that humans were beyond the reach of evolution. But current science is seeing far more evolutionary change and at a speed not envisioned by traditional evolutionists.

And I like this previous article in Wired Science that makes the point:

Whether or not God exists, thinking about Him or Her doesn’t require divinely dedicated neurological wiring.

Instead, religious thoughts run on brain systems used to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling.

The findings, based on brain scans of people contemplating God, don’t explain whether a propensity for religion is a neurobiological accident. But at least they give researchers a solid framework for exploring the question.

“In a way, this is a very cold look at religious belief,” said National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist Jordan Grafman, co-author of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We’re only trying to understand where in the brain religious beliefs seem to be modulated.”

Though scientific debate about God’s existence has transfixed the public, Grafman’s findings fit into a lesser known argument over why religion exists.

Some scientists think it’s just an accidental byproduct of social cognition. They say humans evolved to imagine what other people are feeling, even people who aren’t present — and from there it was a short step to positing supernatural beings.