Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [47]
Does God Play Favorites?
As for scientists like Boston University’s Pat McNamara, he’s thrilled the chase is on.
“There’s going to be a specific biology involved in religiosity,” he predicted expansively. “There’s going to be specific brain systems that are always involved in religiosity. There’s going to be specific neurochemistry. There’s going to be drugs that selectively influence religiosity. There’s going to be a specific cognitive neuroscience of religiosity. And on and on and on! But that doesn’t mean that religiousness is nothing but the biology of religious experience. It just says that religiousness is one of the innate capacities of human beings, like a host of other traits.”
“So maybe there’s a Coder, so to speak?” I asked. “I mean, if there’s a genetic code, is it possible there is a Coder, or a Higher Power, or a Creator?”
“Theoretically, if God wanted to communicate with us, then He, She, or It would create a biology that allows us to communicate,” McNamara stated. “So it makes sense that there is specific biology that allows for that sort of relationship. But the fact that there is a specific biology of religiosity does not rule in—or rule out—God.”
While the findings in this realm are preliminary, they do suggest that some people have a greater propensity to respond to God than others. But, I sputtered, feeling acutely my own spiritual mediocrity, what if there is a God who writes His language in our genes unequally—apportioning to some a bounty of spiritual gifting and to others a meager gruel? Isn’t that a bit of deistic favoritism?
“For some people that could be troubling,” observed Ron Cole-Turner, a bioethicist at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. “It’s not for me, but it could be for some. If you thought God is going to send some people to hell on the basis of a lack of response and the lack of response is hardwired in our genes—that would be troubling.
“But,” he added quickly, “don’t read ‘genetic’ as deterministic. Because genes don’t create hardwired, deterministic outcomes. They create a range of possibilities that might incline you one way or another. It’s by no means determined that if you have a certain gene sequence you are spiritual and if you don’t have a certain gene sequence you can’t be spiritual.”
In other words, nature (genes and biology) plays some role, but so does nurture (one’s environment and life events).What genes do is create a sort of tipping point for spiritual experience. If you are genetically inclined toward spirituality, a relatively small event can flip your Sunday mornings from sitting on the couch watching the Sunday talk shows to sitting in a pew watching a preacher. But if you are born with a genetic predisposition to think religion is complete bunk, then it’s going to take an enormous dose of environment to push you to religion.
It’s a little bit like automatic air-conditioning. For some people, a relatively modest rise in temperature—breaking up with a boyfriend, for example—can flip on the cooler system. Those people are genetically inclined to be spiritual. Others may sweat it out to 90, 95, 100 degrees; only then will their God-switch flip on. And some would rather die of heat than turn to “God.”
Those explanations worked well for psychiatrist Robert Cloninger for many years. Cloninger, who developed the self-transcendence scale, heartily believes that genetics is at play. He has conducted some of the studies himself. He also believes that life events push a person toward or away from spirituality. But the more people he worked with and the more studies he performed, the more he felt he was missing a piece: the soul.
“I realized there were other differences that we didn’t measure with temperament or character or genes, that were really spiritual differences,” Cloninger said. “There was a whole dimension here that was basically unexplained. Like how do you explain free will? You can’t do that from a materialistic standpoint. How do you explain intuitive