God-spots

It seems that the search for the “God-Spot” is in the media again. Some weeks ago I stumbled across an article on the “God-Spot” and a few days ago someone send me a link to another article on the same topic.

The idea of a “God-Spot”, or cluster in the brain that is responsible for religious experiences is not new. I have read something about it already a couple of years ago. At that time a single spot in the brain was identified as the culprit behind encounters with the divine. This recent study disproves the previous, instead claiming that there are not a single God-Spot, but rather a bunch of God-Spots spread over various parts of the brain and interacting with each other during a religious experience.

It would seem that science can now explain the religious experiences of the devoted. (Much like a connoisseur can guess the ingredients in a dish of exquisite food.) And scientists are also quick to add that religious experiences are therefore nothing more than “misfirings” in the brains neurological pathways – similar to epilepsy.

They are also working towards artificially duplicating religious experiences chemically. The supposition, by some, is that if we can create religious feelings artificially then the Real McCoy must be fake too. What a strange supposition? I offer four examples to highlight the illogic in this way of thinking. (1) It’s like saying our ability to make artificial light disproves the validity of sunlight. (2) We have known for a long time now that all our emotions are seated in the brain, and caused by neuro-chemisty, but does that make love unreal. Just because I can explain love in chemical terms, does not mean that real Love, in a platonian sense, does not exist. (3) Explaining life as a biochemical phenomenon does not diminishes the wonder of Life. (4) Our understanding of mathematical laws and our harnessing of numbers did not make the logical validity of “1 + 1 = 2” any less true.

From an atheist-scientific model religious experiences must be seen as “misfirings”. Clearly one cannot interpret them to be real spiritual encounters, because the basic premise is that that there is no divine. Hence divine experiences cannot be caused by anything supernatural.

This shows again the problem with science trying to explain anything metaphysical. If the basic premise starts with the assumption that God does not exist, all researched conclusions have to leave a metaphysical impetus out of the equation.

The real problem is that one science is trying to give answers in another science. It’s like a mathematician trying to explain the richness of Shakespearean poetry. The mathematician plainly does not have the correct set of tools to do so. Mathematical laws cannot explain the aesthetics of good metaphor. Neither can a literary scholar truly extrapolate metaphoric value from a scientific equation. The two sciences should be appreciated within their own fields. There’s room for overlapping, of course. But one should tread softly where there be dragons.

However, science is proving now that a religious experience is a complex event, involving many parts of the brain – not just a single spot. A religious experience, like many other complex experiences cannot be shot off (excuse the pun) as misfirings, just as little as sentience can be diminished to “misfirings” or singled-out spots.