How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [148]
As compelling as such evolutionary explanations are—and surely this must be where the ultimate reason for belief lies (see Chapter 7)—much of the authors’ case depends on explanation in the just-so storytelling mode. (Critics of sociobiology will find much fodder for their cannons here.) We are told, for example, that religion alleviated the “existential gloom” facing our paleolithic ancestors who were “taken off their game by the soul-sapping notion that no matter how hard they struggled, how skillfully they hunted, how fiercely they battled, or how creatively they thought, death was always waiting, and that their lives added up to nothing in the end. The promises of religion protected early humans from such self-defeating fatalism, and allowed them to struggle tirelessly but optimistically for survival.” That’s interesting. Prove it.
The authors also fall into the trap of thinking of human evolution as almost entirely centered around men on the hunt, a paradigm abandoned decades ago in favor of more sophisticated models of social evolution that stress the importance of relationships, hierarchy, dominance, cooperation, reciprocal altruism, and various forms of social exchange. It is out of this paradigm, in conjunction with psychosocial models, that a fuller explanation for why God won’t go away is to be found (again, see Chapter 7).
In related research, a story that broke as I was writing this chapter came out in the pages of the journal Nature. Swiss neuroscientists Olaf Blanke, Margitta Seeck, Stephanie Ortigue, and Theodor Landis, from the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne, through electrical brain stimulation of a forty-three-year old woman who was suffering from severe epileptic seizures, discovered a part of the brain that can induce Out-of-Body Experiences. Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) are typically associated with Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), and have a long tradition of harboring religious and spiritual overtones, as if the experience itself was a conduit to a transcendent state or spiritual dimension. The scientists repeatedly generated OBEs in this woman through electrical stimulation of her brain’s right angular gyrus, part of the temporal lobe that is thought to play a role in the way that the brain analyzes sensory information and monitors the difference between self and non-self (as in the Orientation Association Area, or OAA, described in the research above). Blanke and associates believe that when the angular gyrus misfires it can produce the sense of floating outside of the body: “Stimulation at this site also elicited illusory transformations of the patient’s arms and legs (complex somatosensory responses) and whole-body displacements (vestibular responses), indicating that out-of-body experiences may reflect a failure by the brain to integrate complex somatosensory and vestibular information.” Figure 1 shows the area of the brain electrically stimulated to produce OBEs.
Figure 1. Three-dimensional surface reconstruction of the right hemisphere of the brain from magnetic-resonance imaging.
In initial mild stimulations, the patient reported that she was “sinking into the bed” or “falling from a height.” More intense stimulation led her to report “I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk.” Two additional stimulations induced “an instantaneous feeling of ‘lightness’ and ‘floating’ about two meters above the bed, close to the ceiling.” They then asked the patient to stare at her outstretched legs while they stimulated her brain. This led her to seeing her legs “becoming shorter.” When they had her first bend her legs and then applied the electrical stimulation, “she reported that her legs appeared to be moving quickly towards her face, and [she] took evasive action.” The same thing happened with her arms when the experiment was duplicated. Blanke and associates concluded: