I guess Time Magazine is still standing behind their Oct. 22, 1965 story which stated:
We must recognize that the death of God is a historical event: God has died in our time, in our history, in our existence.
Well, forty years later, you’ve got to hand it to the boys at Time Magazine. They really did it this time. They managed to turn a story about how faith helps people live longer and healthier lives into a scientific snore fest which reduces God to something which can be measured by beakers and CT scans. Here’s Time’s story:
Most folks probably couldn’t locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it’s at the top of your head — aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does — particularly concerning matters of faith.
If you’ve ever prayed so hard that you’ve lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that’s your parietal lobe at work. If you’ve ever meditated so deeply that you’d swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that’s your parietal too. There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: your thalamus plays a role, as do your frontal lobes. But it’s your parietal lobe — a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input — that may have the most transporting effect.
Needy creatures that we are, we put the brain’s spiritual centers to use all the time. We pray for peace; we meditate for serenity; we chant for wealth. We travel to Lourdes in search of a miracle; we go to Mecca to show our devotion; we eat hallucinogenic mushrooms to attain transcendent vision and gather in church basements to achieve its sober opposite. But there is nothing we pray — or chant or meditate — for more than health.
Health, by definition, is the sine qua non of everything else. If you’re dead, serenity is academic. So we convince ourselves that while our medicine is strong and our doctors are wise, our prayers may heal us too.
Here’s what’s surprising: a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health. People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don’t attend. People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God. No less a killer than AIDS will back off at least a bit when it’s hit with a double-barreled blast of belief. “Even accounting for medications,” says Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief, “spirituality predicts for better disease control.”
It’s hard not to be impressed by findings like that, but a skeptic will say there’s nothing remarkable — much less spiritual — about them. You live longer if you go to church because you’re there for the cholesterol-screening drive and the visiting-nurse service. Your viral load goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol — a stress hormone — go down first. “Science doesn’t deal in supernatural explanations,” says Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. “Religion and science address different concerns.”
Essentially, they’re saying “This is your brain on faith.”
Time tells us here that religion and faith might simply be explained in a physical manner. Yet, Time Magazine itself is telling us that, in fact, the opposite is true in that our physical bodies might depend on our faith to be healthy. Odd, they didn’t expound on that.
If science persists in viewing faith as a physical boon I’d bet it won’t be long before a pill is introduced called “Synthetic Faith” which would mimic all these positive attributes which science has tested in religious people with none of those pesky rules. And you get to sleep in on Sundays! So you could get all the benefits of faith without ever actually having any. I could hear the commercial now with the fast talking guy at the end listing the possible negative side effects of “Synthetic Faith.” “Could cause loneliness, depression, nihilism and possible damnation.”
February 16, 2009 at 3:10 am
They have merely noticed increased activity in the parietal lobe during the time when people report spiritual experiences. As far as it goes, this is no more significant than observing increased activity in the occipital lobe whenever somebody sees something.
The problem is that the researchers are violating a logical principal: correlation does not imply causation.
A rooster may crow exactly when the sun rises, but it is folly to say that the rooster’s crow causes the sun to rise. Likewise, the parietal lobe may show increased activity when a subject reports experiencing the divine, but it is folly to say that the parietal lobe causes the experience. Indeed, an something actually divine might rather be causing heightened activity in the parietal lobe.
February 16, 2009 at 3:23 am
That and the fact, noted by many neurosurgeons, that the mind is in fact aware of things done to the brain to stimulate sensations, memories, etc. That is to say there is a mind that is aware of what is done to the brain.
“When the Mind Restores Order to the Brain”
February 16, 2009 at 3:35 am
Synthetic faith? It’s called soma.
(http://www.huxley.net/bnw/five.html)
And, soon enough, you can sing this fine little ditty while you take the soma, that is, once the government imposes it on us.
***
Ford, we are twelve; oh, make us one,
Like drops within the Social River,
Oh, make us now together run
As swiftly as thy shining Flivver.
Come, Greater Being, Social Friend,
Annihilating Twelve-in-One!
We long to die, for when we end,
Our larger life has but begun.
Feel how the Greater Being comes!
Rejoice and, in rejoicings, die!
Melt in the music of the drums!
For I am you and you are I.
Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at one with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release.
***
Oh, I can already hear the test-tube babies chanting!
***
Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted!
Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?
Skies are blue inside of you,
The weather’s always fine;
For
There ain’t no Bottle in all the world
Like that dear little Bottle of mine.
***
My family will be an unspecified location for the next five hundred years or so. Call us when the apocalypse is over and Jesus is here.
You have no idea how bad it’s about to get. Oh my freaking Ford you have no idea…
February 16, 2009 at 4:11 am
Eo Nomine, similar thoughts came to my mind. It’s astounding how prescient Brave New World and related books have been. One can only hope that the similarities remain on the surface and society never goes as far as it does in literature.
I don’t know if Time is saying that religion has ceased to exist in this article (I only read your bit though). Studying the way the brain reacts to and processes religious experiences certainly doesn’t have baring on whether religion is true or not. As physical beings it makes sense that an experience, even one with supernatural origin, would be processed in our brains.
February 16, 2009 at 12:12 pm
That sounds like something directly out of the Screwtape Letters!