Scientific look at Religion

I should first say that if someone already talked about this, I sincerely apologize. My brain doesn’t have the capacity to remember all the blog posts that have already been posted, and I don't have the time to go back and look.

After thinking all day about what I should write about, I decided to crack open Linden’s The Accidental Mind and see what he had to say about religion. I thought it might be interesting to get some scientific thoughts into the class. I opened to the chapter titled “religious impulse” and began to read. I found that he noticed that all cultures in the world have different religions, but are all similar in the fact that they practice a religion. He then poses the question “Why does every human culture have religion?”

Somehow, he is able to explain this in a way that I understand (I'm pretty sure), and hopefully I can relay this to you in a way you can understand. He first discusses how your brain can make things appear to be “gap-free.” His first example is about saccades. Saccades are the jumps and jerks of your eyes as you scan a visual scene. You don’t actually see those jerks, but everything blends very smoothly because you brain is basically making up the visual feedback between each jerk. Hopefully you’re still with me. This shows that your brain can make things up for you, in order for things to make sense.

He then goes on to say the same concept happens with split-brain patients. He gives an example of a patient who is set up in front of a device where they can see two images next to each other, a chicken claw and snow. The subject is asked to select two cards out of several different ones that would best match the individual pictures on the devise. The subject decides to pick a shovel and chicken. As you can see, the subject chose to match the shovel with the snow, and the chicken claw with the chicken. However, when the subject is asked about why they decided on those, the subject states “The chicken claw goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” Because there is no clear link between the two hemispheres in a split brain patient, a side of the brain that can clearly see the snow was able to tell the body to pick the shovel card, but was not able to relay this to the other side of the brain, which is supposed to allow the subject to explain themselves in the decision (but it couldn’t). The brain is able to re-organize what happened, and create something that made sense.

(You might be starting to recall all this from last year.)

If you can see where I’m getting at, or actually what he’s getting at, you’ll notice that the brain likes to try and make things make sense. He states “The binding together of disparate percepts and ideas to create coherent narrative that violates our everyday waking experience and cognitive categories is a left cortical function that underlies both dreaming and the creation and social propagation of religious thought.” I’m pretty sure that the statement means that for something that can’t be explained in a way for someone to understand, the brain will make something up, to allow for the person to understand that explanation. This results in unnatural answers to these questions, with “unnatural” referring to something that is “God-like”, which would explain why so many cultures will have some sort of religion.

So, what do you think? Could this be the reason why cultures have religion? Is this the reason behind any religious thoughts? And don’t think of this concept as a scientific fact, he states in the beginning of the chapter that it is all speculation. But who knows? This is probably the reason why I keep on thinking that God had a part in creating life, because scientifically the creation of life it is too difficult to wrap my head around.

Works Cited:

Linden, David J. The Accidental Mind. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007.

Course texts