Science and the Mystic
What are we to make of the variety of spiritual experiences?
Review by Mark Galli | posted 5/26/2009 09:29AM
Michael Hughes was 22 years old when he had a mystical experience at a Maryland Catholic church. "It was almost as if I had wandered into the magical place," he recalls. "I sat down and felt a really strong sense of sacredness." He said he encountered "Something"—"an intelligence to be sure, but it felt like an intelligence that imbues everything."
That this religious experience was prompted by Hughes's ingesting some psychedelic mushrooms gets to the heart of the issues Barbara Bradley Hagerty discusses in Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality (Riverhead). Do mystical experiences point to God or to mere brain chemistry?
Hagerty, an award-winning religion correspondent for National Public Radio, wrote the book because she wanted to understand her own spiritual experiences. The ex-Christian Scientist began asking questions like, "Is there a spiritual world every bit as real as the phone ringing in my kitchen?" and, more specifically, "Are spiritual experiences simply electrical storms in the brain, or do they indicate contact with a spiritual world?"
She pursues this self-admittedly ambitious topic by interviewing mystics famous (like writer Sophy Burnham) and not, and scientists who study genes, the brain, and spiritual experiences. She says she wanted to research this like an investigative reporter who backs up "every line of every story … with hard evidence," but it's clear that her personal passions at times reign supreme.
For example, in trying to discern whether genes play a role in spiritual sensitivity, Hagerty interviews Dean Hamer, author of The God Gene. She notes that many scientists severely criticized Hamer's 2004 book for being "shallow, sensational, and published without the scrutiny of other scientists." But after noting this, she goes right ahead and interviews Hamer, never seriously questioning his methods or conclusions.
She does give equal time to one of Hamer's critics, Francis Collins, author of The Language of God and onetime director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He doesn't think there is a God gene because spirituality "is much too complicated and interwoven with every aspect of your personality, of your consciousness, of your sense of who you are."
Hagerty even acknowledges that Collins has the better argument: "Why does Hamer's view of science seem intriguing, while Collins's view of the world seems true?" she asks. Still, she pushes her project forward.
It slowly becomes clear that there is little hard evidence to prove that mystical experiences are of divine origin. Even pinpointing the specific areas of the brain that manufacture such experiences is difficult. In the book, conclusions are regularly qualified with "probably," "likely," "some scientists speculate," and "one could argue." Hagerty's search is fascinating but, in the end, a bust. It turns out Hagerty is less interested in hard evidence and more in exploring a tantalizing idea.
Still, Fingerprints of God does reinforce the reality that the brain and spiritual experiences are connected. Mystical experiences are so dependent on the brain, it fact, that we can manufacture them with psychedelic drugs. Materialists conclude that mystical experiences are nothing but the product of brain chemistry. But Hagerty rightly objects: "If there were an 'Other' who wanted to communicate with us, of course He or She or It would use the brain to do so. … Of course God would use the chemistry of our brains to create visions."
May 2009, Vol. 53, No. 5, Page 61
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