Religion as evolution, meaning, comfort, neural circuitry, consciousness, and existentialism.
In Mahāyāna Buddhism, the final goal of the practice is the attainment of buddhahood: an omnipresence and awakening from the sleep of ignorance in which others live, and to quote the book an Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, a breaking “in the cognitive barriers that impede understanding.” In the Theravada tradition, the final goal is nirvana, a release from cyclic earthly reincarnation. In the steps to achieve both grails, meditation intends to, among other goals, “cognitively restructure” the mind. Buddhist meditation has been done in the traditional monasteries of Tibet, cave hollows of the region’s hermitage moraines, the niveous Himalayan Mountains of Northern India, the carpeted meditation halls of Koyasan, Japan, and in a laboratory tucked away from the noisy city of New York. There, Buddhist Tibetan monks lay on the hard bed of a brain scanner, meditating inside clunky MRI walls amidst loud, echoing operating rhythm, so that researchers can understand how the brain reorganizes itself during such a deep religious state, and how such practices “break cognitive barriers,” or rather, shape the mind.
Similar studies have been done on Franciscan nuns engaged in prayer, Sikhs chanting, Pentecostals speaking in tongues, and skeptics thinking about God. This research is a part of the emerging field of neurotheology. It is done with the goals of understanding the what: large questions of the brain’s engagement with faith, religion, and spirituality, where regions are active in the brain during deeply spiritual practices or thoughts, how the human mind believes, who a person becomes as a believer or nonbeliever, the whens of religious neural evolution, and why religious belief remains an omnipresent, central feature of the human experience. In the past decade, the cognitive and neurological science of religion has made vast strides; however, very recently, psychological researchers have been digging deeper in the realm of human cognition to study the relationship between religion and another ubiquitous feature of the human experience: existential dread.
May it be the cause of religion and a contributor to its progression, or solely a consequence of religion and an actor in its retrogression? Furthermore, can a cross-disciplinary study of the two reveal both religion and existential thoughts as evolutionary products of a developed angst?
Religion as Existentialism
I was baptized before I understood what a God was. I made a vow to take God into my heart and let Him be the Lord of my life scarcely abroad toddlerhood. In my memory, my mother told me it was my decision, but the sound choice to make. However, if I were to make the decision now after experiencing some life, albeit a brief one thus far, I wonder if it would’ve been as simple.
I grew up attending church, dressed in the wide-skirted pastel dresses my mom got from Macy’s sales. I was nudged towards the children’s choir long before I realized (or was alerted that) singing was not my God-gifted talent. Rather, I was good at poetry, but always had a hard time writing something adherent to the sermons. Instead, my poems were questions, stanzas of skepticism and thoughts I would now classify as existential.
These initial thoughts were catalyzed by religious teachings, a learning of history, and engagement with the often unfair and cruel world I saw. I wondered if God’s hands surpassed the Heavens, through the clouds, to dip into the realm of mortals. Did He sway His fingers in our wars? In our downfalls? In genocide. In apartheid. In slavery. In internment. In imprisonment. In mass atrocity.
These thoughts fall in line with the first wave of philosophical existentialism, birthed in the 19th century, which expressed anxiety about the idea that meaning and morals are made secure simply because of God’s omniscience and good will. Later in adolescence, my thoughts were in tandem with existentialism’s second wave, a post-Holocaust response grounded in a vision of a secular, collective good. However, now, like many, I find my thoughts creeping into the current wave of existential anxiety: neuroexistentialism.
Undulating across the global sea of collective consciousness, this third wave refers to our mass developed response to advances in the sciences, specifically neuroscience. The rise of scientific authority slowly begins to clash with the humanistic image we have of ourselves and faces us with questions concerning our animality, the existence of an immaterial soul and self, consciousness, free will, and the overall illusion we have of sapien-kind. It propels the idea of “naturalism” to the forefront; an idea championed by the late Stephen Hawking, as well as modern philosophers of neuroexistentialism, that to put it bluntly, theorizes we have no soul. No concrete self. No predestined purpose in macrocosmic space. It feels bleak and reductionist, diminishing the images we have of ourselves to thread counts in the fabric of the universe and cosmic plane. It disrupts what is much like a self-designed, individualist Manifest Destiny, or rather, God’s Plan.
“God has a plan for you, baby. Just wait and see,” my mom tells me at least once a week.
In Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith, he describes the very notion of God, regardless of belief, as a shorthand for what concerns humanity ultimately, and that ontologically, faith is to “see in a concrete piece of reality the ultimate ground and meaning of all reality.” This type of faith, he argues, is present in all religions. It is “the ultimate concern,” as Tillich entitles it. Questioning it and questioning the notion of God is inherently existential, for it questions meaning, the fifth research-identified existential concern. The problem with meaning is the desire to believe life is meaningful as opposed to random, meaningless, or inconsistent with one’s bases of meaning. In many cases, this base is religion.
Increasingly, neurological research suggests that the need for meaning and to believe in something may be natural inclination or a predisposition: a byproduct of brain functionality, neural underpinnings, and evolution.
According to a cover story by Beth Azar at the American Psychological Association, the main reason people believe in religion is to fill the human need for finding meaning and spare us the detriment of existential angst, an anxiety that interrogates one’s existence, responsibility, freedom, world, and perhaps, entire universe. Yet, it must be asked, why is existential concern a detrimental fate if the quest to find meaning, especially through religion, is existential in itself?
To quote behavioral scientist and science writer Clay Rutledge, our quest for significance is the result of “neurological machinery that has helped us survive” and “has also rendered us distinctively ruminative.”
The question of meaning and the basis of religion opens a Pandora's box of incessant questions catalyzed by one another like Rube Goldberg-inspired dominos. This domino asks what it means to be human, or rather sapiens. Another questions the uniqueness of our species in the kingdom; are we just animals? If so, do our lives have meaning akin to that of the farm cow, the prairie elephant, or the ocean’s turtle? Without true meaning, is there a common good? Are we without it amidst a world of chaos? And with so much chaos, Who looks down on us? What comes after this life: as Shakespeare put it “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
It’s hard to imagine the farm cow pondering the meaning of life while grazing along the pasture. Thenagain, it is such a successful creature, quantitatively at least, because of domestication and the human want it satisfies. It’s life’s meaning (at least to humans) is to sustain us. What meaning is there when you are pounds away from slaughter? What meaning is there to wild animals whose plight is generally one of survival? What meaning is garnered when the basic necessity to survive is satiated, or distinct hardships to be are arguably the fault of immoral systems put in place by and actions of fellow humankind? Is faith prewired or predestined—however you’d like to put it. Or is it then, at the plight of being, we have to believe in something; find a safety net for existential angst through God/spirituality/meditation/prayer/naturalism/Shakespearean nothingness/science/poetry/ philosophy, and everything in between.
Religion as Consciousness
I heard my mother first speak in tongues on the night she learned she lost her father. She kneeled on the side of her bed, her elbows protruding the comforter, hands joined in prayer, and tears streaming down her face as she spoke in a patter: a secret language I and no one else was meant to understand. It was between her spirit and the Holy one’s.
During that time, several regions of her brain would have been engaged. However, strikingly the prefrontal area which specializes in language and action thinking may have been quiet. Instead, regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness may have been active, fluorescently lit up on a neuroimaging scan. These are the results of a 2006 study conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, observing the brain images of five healthy, active, Pentecostal Christian women performing glossologia—speaking in tongues. They found that the women were not in blind trances, hypnotized by perceived transcendental forces. Rather, it was unclear which region was driving the behavior at the forefront.
This was one study led by Dr. Andrew Newberg, a notable neuroscientist in the emerging field of neurotheology. Like his research on the Pentecostals, his early work analyzing brain scans of Tibetan Buddhist Monks meditating and Fransican Nuns praying utilize an imaging technique called single photon emission computed tomography or SPECT imagery to track changes in the brain’s blood flow. In the glossolalia experiment, each woman was observed under two conditions. The first as she sang gospel, and the second as she spoke in tongues. Through comparison, the researchers could identify where the blood flow spiked and plateaued, unique sloping patterns in speech evoked by “the divine.”
In both the monk and nun studies, areas most strongly affected were the hypothalamus and amygdala, which underpin body regulation and perceptual evaluative/qualitative memory respectively. Specifically, neural overload activated circuitry in the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) through the hypothalamus and amygdala. Activation of the SNS is a rapid involuntary response to typically stressful situations. This system works unconsciously. The overload in stimuli then blocks input into the superior temporal sulcus (STS), a region thought to cause a divergence in spatial association: perceived location in relation to the world around you. This and abated processing in the posterior superior parietal lobes (pSPL) supports the phenomena the authors call “absolute unitary being,” which is, to Buddhist monks, a necessary step in the ultimate realization of the lack of self. It is with these results the authors argued for a delusion of the self during religious activities which invoke a self-other dichotomy.
These results contrast with that of the glossologia study because during such, the SPL activation decreased, to which the researchers explain speaking in tongues as not a self-other dichotomous ritual. Despite the difference of note, all three studies share the feature of altered consciousness; meditation specifically through a production and suppression of bodily, spatial, and temporal awareness. While Newberg’s data utilizes extremely small sample sizes of those trained in their rituals, this work offers support to the argument of the “embodied cognition framework,” a psychological model for religion which posits the phenomena as “grounded in an integrated and dynamic sensorimotor complex.” This complex includes the brain region which plays a major role in the execution of movements. Thus this framework suggests commitment to religious worldviews manifest in the body just as the drill of a dentist or the chill of wind may trigger a specific bodily sensation. As this paper puts it, religion is not “all in one’s head.” Instead, it can be understood as religious consciousness, a framework that allows researchers to understand perceived religious experiences as modified states of awareness.
Naturally, I wonder how and why the capability for such a form of consciousness evolved.
Religion as Neurological and Behavioral Evolution
Generally, neuro-sociological evolutionary theories of religion can be divided into two groups. As an adaptationist viewpoint posits, religion is a result of purposeful adaptive advantages through which human beings evolved a natural, neural disposition to believe in God and other supernatural entities and engage in religious behaviors. As put by primatologist Frans de Waal, “If all societies have religion, it must have a social purpose.” Spandrelists, on the other hand, find religion too esoteric to be selected during evolution, and instead label it as an unintended side effect or “spandrel” of traits that were selected during evolution. Presently, the more modern theory of theogenesis draws upon the spandrelist model, theorizing religion as a byproduct of multiple adaptive features of human nature, all of which evolved to serve other purposes. Thus to theogenesists, “God” is a spandrel fashioned from independent adaptive aspects of human nature, all of which manifested from core evolutionary virtues. In sum, theogenesis places religion in the timeline of Darwinian natural selection as a “fiction” as put by author Yuval Noah Hariri in the popular anthropology book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
When I first read Harari’s use of fiction to describe religion and other human creations I was, like many readers, taken aback. However, his ideology isn’t exactly unconventional or novel. It is backed up multidisciplinary by the modern wave of research on religious evolution. Nonetheless, usage of “fiction” as a product of imagination isn’t to posit untrueness. Color is manufactured by our brain, yet not many would deny the existence of a rainbow. Perhaps a devout religious individual would say, Allah/Jehovah/God/the Gods/G-d/Waheguru/Jah/Brahman/Holy Father put the Word in our imagination for the purpose of communicating with or praying to the divine.
Still, the ideas of a Creator as a neural spandrel or natural disposition only lead us partially to the answer of why religion evolved. To continue the quest, one must analyze how these changes in the brain translate to behavior.
On a biological level, evolutionary psychologists point to a plethora of religious features and assemble each feature’s evolutionary marking into the puzzle of religion. Chronologically, the puzzle starts with easy edge pieces: our evolved capacity for group living. The next pieces are an increased sociality and bonding through enhanced emotion, necessities for religion as a shared, collective experience. With enhanced emotions comes the emergence of complex feelings from primary emotions. Chiefly, the birth of guilt and shame from the primary emotions of sadness, fear, and anger, mark a crucial point in the development of religion, for they are requirements for sin. Our emotional palette binds us to one another on a visceral level. As put by author of The Emergence and Evolution of Religion Johnathan Turner, “when positive emotions like love, care, and loyalty are neurologically possible, they can become entwined with rituals and other emotion-arousing behaviors to enhance solidarities and, eventually, produce notions of power gods and supernatural forces.”
It is from here, humans fathomed the famed gods and goddesses to represent human phenomena of ancient empires, from the Aztecs to the Greeks to the Oyo to the Egyptians. From here, we fathomed the spirits of ancestors to worship, heroic sanctity to praise, and fasting and lenting as an act of ultimate devotion to the highest one, who my mom calls “the Alpha and Omega, the great I Am.” However, the question remains of why we still do it: fathom higher powers. Why does religion persist?
Religion as Meaning
From a biological perspective, neural circuitry evolves for prediction and control; whether that prediction be of the world or control of movement in response to the world. Thus, neurologically, religion must respond to and/or predict something. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which has in the past two decades become one of the most investigated regions of the brain, has countless functions as suggested by extensive neuroimaging evidence. With empirical findings and computational models to put together a framework for its neurocognitive architecture, researchers have gathered the ACC is likely an intensive player in prediction and effortful control, along with empathy and emotion assessment, management, and control. Recent research published in the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior has postulated the ACC as a level for measurement of religion’s palliative attributes. The reasoning is because it produces a “distress signal” when errors, conflict, and expectancy violations—responses to unanticipated behavioral deviations from social norms—are detected.
Thus, in this study, researchers at the University of Toronto, Canada, used a social neuroscience paradigm to investigate four main predictions from the “motivated meaning-making” model: a hypothesis that posits people are motivated to create and sustain meaning. This may be through perception of environment, goals, and/or beliefs, all of which the researchers attribute to features of religion. To quote the paper, the four main predictions they investigated are as follows:
Religion should be associated with activation in the ACC.
Religion should decrease activation in the ACC.
This attenuation of ACC activity should be related to religion's ability to buffer bodily states of distress, and not to decrease in motivation, attention, or control.
Religion should have these effects because it provides meaning and thus buffers people from uncertainty.
For their investigation, they utilized an electroencephalography or EEG test to record electrical charges resulting from activity in brain cells, known as event-related potentials (ERP). This test is done by applying a number of small metal disks called electrodes to the scalp, and analyzing the wavy lines on the EEG recording. The study by researchers Michael Inzlicht, Alexa M. Tullet, and Maria Good, built off the team’s past research which investigated and supported the theory of religious belief causing a decrease in anxieties.
In their present investigation, their predictions were supported, thus providing further evidence for the theory of religion as a product of the motivated meaning-making model, a framework supported by humans’ natural quest for meaning in life. Thus, while there is no evidence for dedicated religious circuitry in the brain and no “God spot” region, the results assert that through the ACC, religion may cause and predict meaning. These activation results are similar to that of other research, such as this study on neural correlation and the influence of culture in religion, and this study on the neural markers of religious conviction, both published in the journal PubMed exactly a decade apart, 2019 and 2009 respectively. Of course, neither studies pinpoint the ACC as the sole regional activation site of religion’s attributes, but they highlight it as a possible vital player. Brain scans show other areas of the brain active during religious activity. As is the case with all neuroscientific research, a specific region may specialize in computations that contribute to a certain function (language, memory, ideological belief), however, these functions are not localized.
Nonetheless, it is remarkable to suggest our brains allow us to induce religious experiences as seen in Newberg’s research, and give life meaning or highlight the meaning that already exists. Naturally, however, this leads me to another question of how that attainment of meaning holds up in the face of existentialism.
Religion as Comfort
In the ultimate existentialist setting of dystopia, “God is Change.” This is the mantra of Lauren Olamina in Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Parable of the Sower. In the book, Lauren, the daughter of a Black Baptist minister, “discovers” her religion Earthseed, amidst a world of mass chaos: constant death, destruction, a rising climate, and incessant fires. In an analysis of the role religion plays in the book, theologian Tamisha Tyler says, “Part of what Butler was trying to say is that religion is ultimately the way in which we try to articulate our role in life and in the universe.” While still alive, Butler was once asked if Earthseed was her religion. It wasn’t, because to her, Earthseed isn’t ‘comforting enough.’ It gives one a way to understand the world, but doesn't swaddle its fictional followers in a warm blanket of God’s love, because simply, God represents the change in the world to her characters; the horrid and the beautiful.
Most modern religions comfort their followers, and it is widely theorized that religion is a source of comfort, especially when confronted with existential angst like questions of morality and death anxiety: life’s unnegotiable á la cartes. This provides one potential reasoning as to why religion persists.
Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, ethologist, humanist, and perhaps the best known atheist and religion-critic globally, evokes Issac Asimov in his 2008 speech at UC Berkeley, saying “Asimov’s remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion; he said, inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.” Dawkins goes on to explain that comfort simply doesn’t equate to truth. Of note, is that it does not equate to falsity either. While a wealth of evidence accumulated in the past decade supports religious belief as a comfort mechanism, behaviorally, it does not allow for a definite conclusion on the role of religion in our brain and life.
The theory of comfort is supported interdisciplinarily. Oftentime, that comfort is found in the thought of a fatherly God or a worthwhile afterlife, both of which alleviate negative emotional states. Research from the social sciences like this cross-cultural study, supports personal religiosity as a source of higher self-esteem and psychological adjustment such as life satisfaction, optimism, and well-being. Research psychologically such as this study in which participants were asked to remember past events they had no control over, and this set of four studies which requested participants consider their own mortality, both show an increase in the endorsement of God following the tasks. Interestingly, the first study showed not only an overall elevation of belief in God, but an increase in believing God as Controller rather than solely Creator. In this experiment in which motivational anxiety was evoked by presenting participants with an uncertain threat, levels of religious idealism increased, a result that was most significant in those with a proneness to anxious thoughts. Socially, a breadth of research shows increases in religion after natural disasters, terror, and other mass afflictions like the COVID-19 pandemic. Evidence presented from our most recent malady becomes even stronger when paralleled with the low-levels of religiosity in our current era, an epoch marked by secularization. These phenomena are in tandem with rises in existential angst, a double-pattern opening the door to a plethora of hypotheses on the connection between the three.
Religion as Science
In the first century BC, Lucretius in the poetic text of Epicurean philosophy, On the Nature of Things, speculated that the perils of mortal life is what leads us to believe in the reign of Gods over the natural world. In book five he postulates,
The causes of beliefs in the gods. The miseries caused by erroneous beliefs concerning the nature of the gods. Metals. Iron. War. Weaving. Agriculture. Music. Seasons. Art.
He christens the catalyst of theistic belief as misery. The idea that religion is a comfort or a meaning mechanism is one that is centuries old. Octavia Butler was correct when she prescribed religious belief as the automatic response of a realistic character in a world of constant tragedy and looming doom. There is clear evidence that suggests existential anxiety correlates directly with and even drives religiosity, a phenomenon backed up by increases in religion after mass calamity, existential therapy as a tool in forming belief structures, and existential perspectives in the study of religion and spirituality. Due to meaning’s inherent function of a topic of existential angst, the idea of religion as a natural disposition for the motivated meaning-making model also serves as evidence for the correlation of religion and existentialism. After all, research that combines both existential and evolutionary perspectives theorizes our cognitive capacity to design God(s) as a way to alleviate anxieties about the “precariousness of life and the inevitability of death” that come with Darawanian development. We allow our personal notions of the divine to meet our psychological needs.
Thousands of theories exist in the realm of scientific study on the evolution of religion, and as the idea of human-design comes to the forefront, it's important to remember the paramount pillar of neurotheology: openness. As put by Andrew Newberg in an NPR interview, “For neurotheology to really work as a field it needs to be very respectful and open to both perspectives.” The two perspectives he refers to are religion and spirituality as biological phenomena or the notion that there is a spiritual or divine presence in the world and perhaps in us. While data improves our understanding of religion as biology, psychology, neuroscience, evolution, sociology and all of the other sciences of sapiens, the data eliminates neither possibility. In fact, the very formation of the field itself marks a harmony between science and religion—veritably juxtaposed pursuits— to better understand each as a vital vessel in solving the puzzle of humanity.