Is It All In Your Head?
"Newsweek's look at Neurotheology. Plus: God is an abortionist ads rejected, Dyan Cannon's faith and faith healing, and other stories from mainstream media sources around the world."
Ted Olsen | posted 4/01/2001 12:00AM
Neurotheology, Shmeurotheology
Usually when a major newsmagazine runs a cover story about religion, it's by the magazine's religion editor or similarly titled specialist (Time's David Van Biema, U.S. News's Jeffery Sheler, Newsweek's Kenneth Woodward). But when a magazine decides to hand off the assignment to someone else, it's very rare for that religion editor to publish a rebuttal in the same issue. That's exactly what happened in this week's Newsweek, as Woodward gets a page to deflate the eight-page piece on "neurotheology."
In that cover story, senior editor Sharon Begley, who specializes in science stories for Newsweek, explores "the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experience." Neurotheology researchers, she says, are
uncovering the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experiences—for discovering, in short, what happens in our brains when we sense that we 'have encountered a reality different from—and, in some crucial sense, higher than—the reality of everyday experience' … Although the field is brand new and the answers only tentative, one thing is clear. Spiritual experiences are so consistent across cultures, across time and across faiths, … that it 'suggest[s] a common core that is likely a reflection of structures and processes in the human brain.'
Begley is quick to throw in plenty of disclaimers that researchers aren't clear whether the "spiritual" brain functions are the cause or effect of spiritual experiences. "It's no safer to say that spiritual urges and sensations are caused by brain activity," she quotes one researcher as saying, "than it is to say that the neurological changes through which we experience the pleasure of eating an apple cause the apple to exist." But the overall tone is that folks with religious experiences got something funky going on in the head. "Dostoevsky, Saint Paul, Saint Teresa of Avila, Proust and others are thought to have had temporal-lobe epilepsy, leaving them obsessed with matters of the spirit," she writes.
Kenneth Woodward's piece is a wonderful dismissal of the article it follows. "Whether this evolving 'neurotheology' is theology at all is doubtful," he begins. "It tells us new things about the circuits of the brain, perhaps, but nothing new about God."
Woodward's critique is multifaceted—and familiar. "The chief mistake these neurotheologians make is to identify religion with specific experiences and feelings. Very few believers have experienced what Christian theology calls mystical union with God." Furthermore, "Neurotheologians also confuse spirituality with religion. … Religion comprehends a whole range of acts and insights that acknowledge a transcendent order without requiring a transcendent experience." In other words—though Woodward only hints at the conclusion—neurotheology is an inevitable effect of today's muddleheaded, selfish "religionless spirituality."
Woodward also reiterates the need for distinguishing between causes and effects and between ends and means in spiritual experience, but notes that spiritual rapture must never be the ultimate effect—changed lives characterized by charity toward others is.
(Other articles on the neurotheology boom were recently published by The Boston Globe and Knight-Ridder. Sharon Begley also took part yesterday in an online chat, in which she lamented, "I've gotten so much hate mail on this story.")
Christian colleges nix "God is an abortionist" ads
Perhaps you've heard of the recent controversy about the attempts of conservative provocateur David Horowitz to run "10 Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea for Blacks—and Racist Too" as a full-page ad in about 70 college newspapers. If you haven't been keeping up with the debate, there's really no reason to start now. It's gotten way out of hand and there are way too many articles to catch up with. Weblog wouldn't mention it except that now there's a religion aspect. In a kind of retaliatory strike, Salon.com's David Mazel decided to try to get conservative and Christian colleges to run ads saying "God is an abortionist." His finding? The Bob Jones University Collegian, Liberty University Champion, Abilene Christian University Optimist, and other such newspapers wouldn't run it. Shocking, eh? Mazel tells Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, "My methodology was crude, as was my goal, which was basically just to be able to say, 'So's your old man!'" But he says his pranking has a purpose: on conservative campuses, free speech "is not only not being honored, it has never been a high priority at all. … All campuses that dishonor it deserve to be ridiculed."
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