No. 557, December 18, 2006

Why God won’t disappear

Brain research is beginning to understand more of the unknowns of science: faith, spirituality, mysticism, religion and God. It is called Neurotheology. Even if the question about God’s existence still cannot be answered, faith does gain some ground.

What is written here is based on the book Why God Won’t Go Away – Brain Science and the Biology of Belief by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili and Vince Rause. Newberg and D’Aquili are neurologists who based on brain science have researched, among other things, what happens in the brain during deep meditation.

Research shows that God is much more a neurological and biological phenomena than a social phenomena. The authors show that God is an inevitable consequence of the neurological construction of our brain.

Several astounding but reasonable conclusions can be drawn from this:

• To deny spirit, an all encompassing higher reality or God, be it religious or not, is to avoid using an important part of our brain.
  
  
• A secular society will have higher levels of stress and anxiety than a society that accepts some form of spirit or God, all other factors being equal.
  
  
• To create a given level of safety and welfare in a society will cost more the more secular the society is.
  
  
• A personal faith will enhance our ability to learn and grow.

So, God definitely exists in the brain. Whether God also exists outside the brain cannot be proved or disproved according to the authors. But they regard it as a reasonable hypothesis from both a neurological and a spiritual standpoint that there is something beyond our "real" world, which may be even more real.

It is not unreasonable that there exists what the authors call, an Absolute Unified Being, which unifies everything living, where all dichotomies are dissolved and which is greater than the material world. Our metaphor for this being is God.

The authors show that science and mysticism can co-exist, that they need not be mutually exclusive and even can enrich one another from different perspectives.

So, here science and mysticism embrace for once. Anyone with the slightest sense that there must be something more than what meets the eye out there will find dozens of insights in Why God Won’t Go Away. It is written in a warm, personal and almost graceful style. One can sense two scientific researchers who on the basis of their research have been forced to admit that the existence of a God is reasonable – something the mystics of all big religions have consistently claimed.

The intense Christmas feeling in parts of the world at this time of the year could be one sign of such a mystical existence. That idea would be in line with this book.

Creative regards! Jonas Himmelstrand

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