Why has religion been part of humanity since the beginning? Religious scholar Reza Aslan, PhD, clinical psychologist Lisa Miller, PhD, and former pastor Rob Bell, MDiv, explore innate spiritual instincts, the neuroscience of belief, and how faith and science both seek truth. They discuss substance dualism, religion’s role in resilience and mental health, and why our brains may be wired to find meaning, connection, and a sense of something greater.
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Video Summary
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This presentation explores the biological and neurological foundations of religious and spiritual experiences. It argues that the human instinct for substance dualism is innate and provides an adaptive advantage, specifically acting as a neuro-protective mechanism against depression and offering a sense of universal connection and support.
Religious thinking has been a part of the human experience from the beginning.
The question then becomes why?
Studies of children have shown that we are born with this instinct for what's called
substance dualism, the idea that the body and the mind or soul are separate.
Religious experience is a universal phenomenon.
If it can be traced about all time, then there must be some adaptive advantage.
Otherwise, it wouldn't exist.
The problem is that the countless different answers that have been given for why religion
fail primarily because they're functionalist answers.
What religion does, not why religion exists.
We are a point and we are a wave.
We are magnificently distinct and unique and diverse.
And we are part of one field of life, one sacred consciousness.
So it turns out that every single one of us are all born with the neuro-docking station
for awakened awareness.
Together with my colleagues, we looked at people who recovered from depression
through an awakening.
We could see that people who suffered the most really derive profound support
and even renewal when connecting to their higher power, to God, the universe,
whatever their word might be.
They were more likely to perceive and reflect in a profoundly spiritual way.
And this tendency to see life on spiritual bedrock was mirrored by a thickening of the
cortex, offering some evidence that sustained spiritual life is neuro-protective
against depression.
And in addition, when we looked at the awakened brain, what we saw is that universally we
are drawn into an experience in which we are loved and held guided and never alone.
If you think about the past three, 400 years of human history, especially the history of
the Western world, we've had this explosion, some call it the age of certainty, the explosion
of scientific rationalism.
But we've had this explosion of knowledge about how the world actually works.
Weight, height, gravitational pull, electromagnetic force.
And yet the same questions are still gnawing at the soul.
What's it mean?
What are we doing here?
This idea somehow that faith and science are in opposition, I've always found to be
complete insanity.
Both are searching for the truth.
There is something in the way that our brains work that compel us to believe that we are
more than just the sum of our material parts.
Is it possible that you have been on a quest, that you already are walking a spiritual path?
