Quote:
Originally Posted by ratbastid
...I've been reading a lot of neuroscience lately. All those phenomena you list there are being picked apart, modeled, and in some cases replicated from a neuroscientific perspective. There's even an area of the brain that, when electrically stimulated, reliably produces religious epiphanies.
I read that sort of thing, and I can begin to fathom the panic that must be lurking behind the fundamentalist rejection of science. It must feel like they're standing on a fast-eroding rock in the middle of the rushing rapids, and if they just shout loud enough about how solid the ground is they're standing on, then everything will be okay.
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I hear what you're saying. But I don't think it's that simple. I think that there are probably areas of the brain that, when stimulated, produce experiences
like religious epiphanies. But the fundamental contentions of Western religion-- that there is a God; that He is capable of communicating or communing with us; that we have souls given by His grace, made of the stuff of Him, that resonate to Him and permit us to experience revelation-- are not things that can be accurately reproduced in a laboratory, no matter how refined our knowledge of neuroscience becomes.
It is, I suppose, somewhat analogous to telling a Catholic that, given certain scientific techniques, one could construct a matter-rearranging device (like, I suppose, a replicator from
Star Trek), which, programmed correctly, could take a sample of wheat cracker and wine, and shift their structure into a morsel of flesh and blood whose DNA is a realistic projection of what archaeo-physiologists believe was the genetics of the Davidic line at the time of Christ's supposed existence: and therefore they no longer require a Church, because transsubstantiation can be accomplished in the laboratory. Even if what these hypothetical scientists were saying was both possible and true, that would not be what the Catholic was looking for.
To put it another way, figuring out the "scientific bases for religion" is (while in some ways interesting, and no doubt likely to produce food for thought) like creating a golem or an android. One can make it: and being made properly, it might look like a man, walk like a man, even act like a man. But it is not a man: it is the image of a man. Even so, these experiments may be an interesting mirror to hold up to religion-- they may even help us understand certain things about religion-- but they ultimately do not really
replicate or
reconstruct religion. No more than if, by electrically stimulating our brain to produce a memory of the scent of new-mown grass, we really are smelling new-mown grass. It is a real phenomenon, but it is not the phenomenon we might think it to be.
Or so it seems to me.