Review of Discover Magazine’s: “The God Experiments by John Horgan”

January 17, 2007 | Filed Under Book Reviews, Gregory Stewart, History, Publius Contributor, Religion, Science, Society/Culture, Uncategorized |

-By Greg K. Stewart

This story has been in and out of the news last few years. Can one measure the existence of “God,” or “Spirituality” via the scientific method? That has been a question that has haunted science for years.

In the beginning of the article by John Horgan, he advocates science desire to answer the ineffable question, he says

“The science of religion has historical precedents, with Sigmund Freud and William James addressing the topic early in the last century. Now modern researchers are applying brain scans, genetic probes, and other the physiological causes of religious experience, characterize its effects, perhaps even begin it explain its abiding influence.”

Understandably, religion and science has considerable influence on the social paradigm over the past centuries. Horgan use of the word “perhaps” misleads his audience, the scientific method must always be followed not perhaps be deployed. He later redeems himself by providing case studies for each camp of the debate.

In Horgan’s first case, Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist, I tend to agree with his approach but not the intensity of the language. Simplified by the article writer, he states “Gutherie argues that the belief in supernatural beings is a result of an illusion that arises from our tendency to project human qualities onto the world.” This perspective by Gutherie, I refer to in my own thesis as DVND, in which, “we,” as a species, “displace,” “validate,” “narrate,” “(re)deploy” our existence and our world. Gutherie purports, “Religion may be best understood as systematic anthropomorphism (Horgan quotes from Gutherie’s book—‘Faces in the Clouds’).”

This anthropomorphism, as relayed by Horgan for Gutherie, is “the entire world of our experience is merely a show staged by some master dramatist.” Well, that bit sounds like Victor Turner, another anthropologist, to me. He discoursed on the sum of cultural experiences as “acts” that are “betwixt and between” meaning, those items which are transitory or “liminal” but has an impact. In essence, it is the moment “within” the crossover change, into the “next” moment, “act” a perspective change occurs from the inside out. And, which in turns is viewed from the interior, if you will.

From example, in the act of getting married, the participants are in the “interior,” living in the moment as they participate in the action. They are on stage. So are the participant viewers, they become part of the action; and, within the process of this “act”—it’s a perspective change occurs. In so being that, the “act” itself transforms the participants and the viewers into a new perceptional “reality”—they have completed, essentially, a “normative act,” has been performed, a cultural ritual to indicate that the participants and viewers have accepted the hegemonic culture overall.

Nonetheless, Gutherie’s perspective simply reminds us that religion and God, no matter what shape, is “human” made. This I understand.

Andrew Newburg, a neuroscientist, tries to record the “act of belief” with technology. He tries to illustrate with brain scans the “connection” of the religious experience. He does this by having the participants, with a pull of a rope that, they are within that moment of deep connection. Horgan report,

“Newberg’s scans showed that the subjects’ neural activity decreases in a region at the top of and near the rear of the brain called the posterior superior parietal lobe. He, [Newburg], refers to this region as the orientation-association area, because it helps orient our bodies in relation to the world. Patients whose posterior superior parietal lobes have been damaged often lose the ability to navigate through the world, because they have difficulty determining where their physical selves end and where the external world begins.”

In a real sense, if you will, this may be of the brain that performs the “action” of “displacement,” or “sets asides,” or even “delineates” that, partitioning of perceptional reality. It simply helps us separate the physical world from the illusory word. Using machines to the “adherent….practices…” of varying religious beliefs and measured may seem non-sensical but practicality of testing, verifying, and establishing database of data may seem logical to that extent of verifiable proof.

The Newburg experiments as pointed out by the Horgan article asks the pivotal question,

“…what his brain scans are really measuring, since his subjects must remain self-aware enough to pull a string when they reach what is allegedly their deepest state of spirituality”

(hmmm?)

Michael Persinger and his “god machine” only obfuscate the issue of testing the reality of god or spirituality. Since his perspective tries to answer, according to Horgan, the Aldous Huxley question, “Is there, one wonders, some area in the brain from which the probing electrode could elicit Blake’s Cherubim…?” His experiment is an extension of a Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, who studied epileptics in the 1950’s (Horgan 2006).

Dean Hamer’s postulation, of the National Cancer Institute, that there is a “specific gene” to religion. Well, what does one say to that? Read the article for this perspective, it would take too much space for me to explain, support, rebuff, or even find the time to examine such a perspective; then, there is the reductionist Rick Strassman’s tracing of a chemical found within the human body. His perspective does have some empirical data, such as it is, and known as dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is secreted from the human brain. Okay, from my point-of-view, this may be physical connection I need to prove out my thesis, will see. This may be a trigger that sets into place our “displacement” or the key to the door that may be adjoined by Newburg’s brain scan technology. Turns Strassman’s idea and turn it on its head and look from within the perception that idea can be understood. However, from a DVND explanation, it may indicate that t the point of how the displacement begins chemically.

In all the Horgan article does a good, and tries to answer, or at the least, tries to answer the important questions—and then scares you with a plausible what if? Those are the questions scientists and science should always explore.

To contact Mr. Stewart email by using this link:Greg K.Stewart

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