Neural Buddhists?

[maxjay]

I thought this was an interesting read:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/13/opinion/edbrooks.php

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Neural Buddhists

By David Brooks The New York Times

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called "Sorry, but Your Soul

Just Died," in which he captured the militant materialism of some

modern scientists.

To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might

exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises

from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior.

Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion.

Human beings are "hard-wired" to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

In this materialist view, people perceive God's existence because their

brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic

helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having

a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they

will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain

tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.

Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of

thinking: Everything is material and "the soul is dead." He anticipated the

way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate.

They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God

exists.

Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists

has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued

about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the

death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away

or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution

can change public culture. Just as "The Origin of Species" reshaped

social thinking, just as Einstein's theory of relativity affected art, so

the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see

the world.

Yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The

cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God,

it's going end up challenging faith in the Bible.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from

hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not

operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem

to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings.

Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms

of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal

moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people

seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew

Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent

experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people

experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us

in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and

merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the

form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call

neural Buddhism.

If you survey the literature (and I'd recommend books by Newberg,

Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and

Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that

certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of

relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people

around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped

to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when

they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best

be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the

unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the

faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy

debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the

existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just

cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It's going to

come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and

reinforcing each other. That's bound to lead to new movements that emphasize

self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation.

Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and

particular biblical teachings. They're going to have to defend the idea

of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides

for behavior day to day.

I'm not qualified to take sides, believe me. I'm just trying to

anticipate which way the debate is headed. We're in the middle of a scientific

revolution. It's going to have big cultural effects.