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“I agree that stress and distress and pain and suffering can certainly lead to spiritual experiences,” he said. “But in my experience, interviewing lots of people, and working with lots of different patient groups and reading the literature, I think the thing that consistently leads to spiritual experience is a concerted effort on behalf of the individual to grow in the spiritual life.”

He took a deep breath. “In other words, spirituality or religiosity is not simply a response to stress or brokenness or pain or suffering or joy, or any particular emotion. It can be a goal.”

This suggests another intriguing catalyst for spiritual experience, one that differs radically from gnawing stress and sudden pain. It is not a state but a journey. It is the search for meaning.

“The human creature is built to need a purpose in life,” observed psychologist Ray Paloutzian at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. “And if someone doesn’t have one, they’re going to invent one. And one of the ways that humans do this is by adopting a religious worldview, or some kind of spiritual approach to the world. If they don’t have it already—or if they’re not comfortable with the one they have—then, because it’s a need, they’re more prone to spiritual experience.”

You might think that spiritual experience should be in the same category as, say, fantasy football or learning Italian—a hobby to brighten one’s otherwise dull routine. Or you could conclude that spirituality is a mild psychosis that one develops to cope with reality. However you view it, one of the most powerful triggers for dramatic spiritual events is the desire for it, the kind of search that keeps one up at night, wondering about the universe.

When I began this book, I instinctively knew that my search would reveal a multifaceted “Other,” one perhaps more defensible than a list of attributes I memorized somewhere in my Judeo-Christian upbringing: God is love and spirit, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, to name only a few. It took no more than a few weeks investigating spirituality to stumble upon three surprising characteristics of this “Other” not found in any catechism: God as master craftsman, God as chemist, and God as electrician. The next leg of this journey, then, leads through the hard, sometimes reductionist, science, which in my opinion does not dismiss the notion of God but informs it.

By “God as master craftsman,” I mean the one who organizes a person’s genes into an astonishingly intricate code. Those genes give a person blue or hazel eyes, make him shy or extroverted, literal-minded or spiritual. God as craftsman helps me with a puzzle that has gnawed at me for years. Many people suffer traumatic experiences, but only some encounter what they believe is another reality. On the flip side, some people experience another reality without a psychological trigger. Why are some people predisposed toward God and others not?

Enter the “God gene.”

CHAPTER 5

Hunting for the God Gene

DON EATON TOLD ME he was born wondering about the universe. But he traced his first conscious memory of this passion back to his twelfth birthday, when he received a telescope.

“It was a little five-inch telescope. And I remember the first time I took it out the back door and actually saw Saturn, with the rings on it,” he said. The immensity of space—of God—overwhelmed him. “And even at twelve years old I was thinking, How can you capture spirit? This is way too big for words and thoughts, it’s just all mystery.”

Don was in his fifties when I spoke with him. His face was weathered, and laugh lines framed his wire-rim glasses. His goatee was flecked with gray. Don’s smile came easily, quietly, the smile of a man who knows a secret, which he would be glad to tell you if only you asked. And his lineage had a mystical strain. His father served as a minister in the United Church of Christ.

“My father’s ministry was more a ministry of asking the question rather than coming up with answers,” Don told me.“I’d go to