How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [32]
Even the atheists I queried gave pause. Some laughed, and many responded by saying that God didn't feel like anything. For these individuals, God was nothing more than an abstract idea. However, one of my nonbelieving friends, who doesn't even like to discuss religious issues, replied in all sincerity that God felt “warm and fuzzy.” It was the same answer that an evangelical colleague had given me the previous day.
“But you do not believe in God,” I said to my atheist friend.
“No, but I do believe in transcendent experiences—you know, those moments that reveal a deeper dimension of life.” His answer reminded me that spiritual experiences can be defined in either religious or secular terms.
Only two people responded to my informal survey in less than five seconds, and both were Catholics who felt abused by their religious upbringing. For them, thinking about God brought back disturbing memories they preferred to avoid. Traumatic memories are retained longer and are rapidly recalled, which would explain why my two interviewees responded so quickly with negativity.1 And when the brain records a traumatic experience, neural circuits will be connected to related memories as well. Let's say, for example, that you tripped on the steps of a church and broke your hip. Although the event had nothing to do with your religious feelings, your concept of God could become neurologically fused with your pain.
A large percentage of the people I queried said that God felt like love. But when I asked them what love felt like, they again paused for a long time.∗1 Love may even be more difficult to describe because it can be used as either a noun or a verb. The brain processes each of these semantic expressions in different ways, but studies have shown that ambiguous words like “love” involve greater neurological activity—and thus more time to process—than simple nouns and verbs.2 Thus, if you think about God as a feeling, as opposed to an entity that exists in the universe, it will take more neural time and energy to process. It also suggests that people who spend a great amount of time contemplating God are more likely to perceive God in more sophisticated ways.
It is easy to describe the qualities of a concrete object like a table or tree, but for many people, God is as real as anything else you can see or feel in the world. Why, then, is God so difficult to describe? If you search through the volumes of religion surveys, theological texts, and psychological theories, you'll find enough definitions of God to fill a book. Different believers see God as a friend, guide, teacher, father, mother, creator, or judge. Some envision God as a lawgiver, miracle worker, or a distant observer of humanity's fate. Others refer to God as spirit, hope, inspiration, life, love, or truth. Others equate God with everything, nothing, a higher power, a delusionary fantasy, or one's innermost self. In traditional psychoanalysis, God is sometimes equated as a symbolic projection of one's parents, a necessary illusion, or a moralistic ideal.
Most people have multiple meanings and perceptions of God, but if you simply ask average Americans if they believe in God, more than three-quarters will say “yes.”3 However, if you tie yourself to a stricter definition, and a specific group of people, as Edward Larson and Larry Witham did when they queried a thousand randomly selected members of the National Academy of Science, you will come up with very different results. They defined God as an entity that engaged “in intellectual and affective