God delusion or God bias?

Visualization of a DTI measurement of a human brain. Depicted are reconstructed fiber tracts that run through the mid-sagittal plane. Especially prominent are the U-shaped fibers that connect the two hemispheres through the corpus callosum (the fibers come out of the image plane and consequently bend towards the top) and the fiber tracts that descend toward the spine (blue, within the image plane) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The premise we will be exploring here today is that peak experiences, a sense of the numinous, the health benefits of spirituality and religious faith in a higher power,  and so forth can potentially be explained solely in terms of human biology.

A few caveats first, though.  I am not claiming to represent the cutting edge of neuroscientific research or to speak for that scholarly community. The hypotheses and conjectures are based on general models and speculations about brain function and evolutionary theory.

Second, I am not attempting to prove or disprove the existence of God.

Third, I am not suggesting that the rough sketch of a model presented here is superior to other explanations. Sometimes people think that if an alternative to a view they don't like or find implausible that it is better or more correct. This is just a thought experiment. Others can judge what value it may hold and to who.


It's always good to have as many provocative yet reasonable and supportable models as possible to stimulate creativity and to challenge other models in a robust way, and I really like formulating new models within a set of interesting parameters.

The Numinous

The numinous is considered here to be a powerful sense of the sublime which can include a feeling of non-dual unity with the universe, possession by absolute acceptance and bliss, or an overwhelming sense of wonder and awe generating a sense of connection to a larger mystery. It is used in describing mystical experiences which are attributed to a vast conscious awareness which includes and subsumes reality in its entirety. This conscious awareness is sometimes referred to either as ultimate reality or a sentient being's perception of same, and in theistic religions this in turn is associated with God.

Such experiences can also be combined with claims about the association of spirituality and a sense of an overarching purpose for existence with improved mental, emotional, and physical health as evidence for the existence of higher states of reality beyond conventional material models of the universe and in some cases for the existence of God. These claims provide the empirical grounding for many arguments in favor of such higher states, which in some models are seen as different levels of awareness and integration with the divine.

Left Brain, Right Brain -- Doubt and Opening the Heart

Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever wondered why some people seem to have no sense of "depth" to reality beyond the general appearance of phenomena? This depth is sometimes referred to spirituality, or a sense of the numinous, or by some similar terminology, including cosmic awareness or mysticism or transcendent consciousness.


Those who work in the religion of psychology, a field I confess to not being well acquainted with, have as I understand it tried to come up with scales and measures based on self-reporting and self-scoring of experiences which are associated culturally with transcendent phenomena, including what are known as peak experiences, and the effects of those who have such experiences. Ralph Hood at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga and his M-scale come to mind.

There are also students of the brain such as Andrew Newberg who have tried to identify the neurological structures and processes related to such experiences, not to mention the accounts of trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor and her shift in consciousness after having a stroke. Dr. Taylor's stroke impaired activity on the left side of her brain, in particular the areas that discriminate and label experience as a part of our capacity for language.

While none of the work or insights by these and other researchers has come to any firm conclusions about the nature of the spiritual experience, and while the left-brain vs. right-brain dichotomy may be over-generalized, over-exploited, and potentially misleading, there does seem to be evidence for distinct ways of shaping conscious experience corresponding to neural process and structure.

And this does match some accounts by contemplatives and mystics about the nature of transcendent consciousness. Not only does this have the potential to validate the experiences of such spiritually oriented people as healthy brain function rather than delusion, it may also help shed light on why some people seem to have difficulty in recognizing, generating, or maintaining such states.