How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [48]
Fifty percent of adult atheists left their pictures blank, compared with 8 percent of the Religious Science church attendants and 17 percent of the agnostic college students (only one atheist student left her picture blank). In addition, 50 percent of the adult nonbelievers refused to make any comments about God in the space provided on the form. And yet there was far less hostility than what we found with our atheist/agnostic college students, or what Hanisch found with his East German children. Instead, the comments were mostly neutral and civil. A few intimated that God was equivalent to beauty, energy, and the unknown, but most saw God as an outdated idea reflecting biblical notions of a powerful immortal being. For these individuals, God imbued no personal meaning to their lives.
THE PICTORIAL MEANING OF GOD
Our ongoing research continues to demonstrate that all human beings develop multiple images of God, many of which are largely hidden from consciousness. Yet these images affect the way we think and feel. We also believe that asking people to “draw a picture of God” encourages children and adults to articulate spiritual values and concerns that are often difficult to convey. It's a fun exercise to do in classrooms, churches, and family gatherings, and it generates the kinds of conversations that help people of all persuasions to appreciate the wide differences of religious and spiritual beliefs.
Drawing is a form of communication that is neurologically distinct from writing and speech.30 Where writing involves the abstract functioning of language centers in the left hemisphere, drawing involves the language centers of the right hemisphere, where meaning is ultimately processed.31 In essence, words and pictures are two integrated elements of language, and most words, as I mentioned earlier, have an “image” quality associated with them.32 If the right hemisphere is injured, words and pictures lose their meaning. Thus, to have a comprehensive concept of God, the brain needs to integrate abstract associations with image-associated metaphors and feelings. Words are not enough to describe a spiritual experience, but the combination of words and pictures may actually come closer to representing one's individual relationship with God.
Overall, we found that atheists were either highly creative or highly unimaginative when it came to drawing pictures of God. For those who simply lost interest in God, only childhood images were recalled—usually the old man with a beard—but those who seriously contemplated their doubts often used sophisticated symbolism to represent their feelings and thoughts. For example, a leader of a national freethinker group sent me a beautiful four-color mandala made out of concentric circles within circles. Although she does not believe in God, she wrote that her drawing reflected the elements of nature, which she worshipped as a religious person worships God. For her, nature was a source of revelation in much the same way the universe was a source of revelation for Einstein.33
Another leader of an atheist/human-rights organization sent me a picture of a famous optical illusion, similar to the drawings made by the illustrator M. C. Escher, to express her view of religious beliefs. This eighty-year-old woman wrote: “When you first look at it, it seems to make sense, but when you examine it closely, it makes no sense at all. It has no real-world application.”
Drawing by a forty-year-old male atheist who reported having spontaneous mystica and transcendent experiences at various times in his life.
In a drawing by a male atheist who regularly meditates, he used overlapping circles to represent the transcendent nature of a universe governed by the laws of time, space, and relativity. He used black circles to represent different religious traditions, intersecting lines to symbolize human consciousness, and a small white circle near the center to represent “man's conception of God.” For this individual, God was much smaller than the forces that govern a “non-self