How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [65]
SELFISHNESS AND MORALITY
As we reported in detail in our previous book, a tremendous amount of research points to the fact that we are born with a selfish brain and that, when given a choice, we have a biological tendency to act in self-serving ways, especially if no one is watching.12 Children do not know how to behave morally because their brain has not developed the cognitive skills to comprehend abstract ethical principles. And as every parent has learned, different degrees of punishment are needed to train young brains to follow societal rules. In fact, from the perspective of evolutionary biology, it appears that social forms of mild punishment enhance most people's propensity to behave in altruistic ways.13
Not only are we neurologically inclined to act selfishly, but we are also neurologically equipped to detect acts of selfishness and deceit in others.14 When we do, we unconsciously react in a punitive, authoritarian manner. Even when adults play games, if they sense that their partner is being overly aggressive or unfair, they will react more punitively, with less compassion.15 Indeed, a balanced combination of punishment and reward tends to foster cooperation between individuals and groups. As a recent article in Science explains:
Research indicates that strong reciprocity—the combination of altruistic punishment and altruistic rewarding—has been crucial in the evolution of human cooperation. People often reward others for cooperative, norm-abiding behaviors, and they punish violations of social norms. For thousands of years, human societies did not have the modern institutions of law enforcement—impartial police and impartial judges that ensure the punishment of norm violations such as cheating in an economic exchange, for example. Thus, social norms had to be enforced by other measures.16
One such measure was the institutionalization of religion, which, for centuries, has struggled with ways to promote group coherence by demoting socially destructive behaviors. Thus, it is not surprising to find that the “Two Wolves” tale has been used as a metaphor by different religious groups.17 For example, a young Southern Baptist pastor named John Bisagno used it to describe a spiritual struggle that went on in the heart of a Native American who had been converted to Christianity:
At the instant of conversion God places into our being an entirely new nature, His own nature. Now we possess two natures—the old and the new, the carnal and the spiritual, the flesh and the spirit…. An old missionary returned to the home of a convert among the Mohawk Indians. When the missionary asked him how he was doing, old Joe said, “Well, it seems that I have a black dog and a white dog inside of me and they are always fighting.” The missionary asked him, “Which one wins?” and Joe said, “The one I feed the most.” Our daily fellowship with God is determined by which nature we feed the most.18
The tale illuminates a person's inner struggle between spiritual and physical pleasures, and Billy Graham used a version to portray “the inner warfare that comes into the life of a person who is born again.”19 Bisagno and Graham intuitively identified the neurological struggle that