Brain Biology and Belief - Why God Won't Go Away - Review

Why God Won't Go Away. Andrew Newberg, M.D., and Eugene d'Aquili, M.D., Ph.D. Ballantine Books, New York, N.Y 2001. ISBN 0-345-44033-1. 320 PP. Hardcover $24.95.

In the early 1990s Gallup polls showed that over half of American adults have had "a moment of sudden religious awakening or insight." For these people one can image how this experience could quickly become the true pillar of their faith. Whatever Thomas Aquinas may have done to try to prove God's existence in his Summa Theologica 800 years ago is unimportant to the real, undeniable experience over half of Americans have felt in their lifetimes. A simple commoner can attain that "oneness" with the universe and that great surge of both fear and overwhelming joy by just closing his eyes and clearing his mind. Skeptics may show whatever logical and empirical evidence they wish for and against the spiritual realm, but eventually they must account for that feeling of infinite harmony attributed to meditation and prayer. Thanks to the latest in twenty-first century technology, that is exactly what Dr. Andrew Newberg and the late Eugene d'Aquili have attempted to do in their new book, Why God Won't Go Away.

The most compelling aspect of the book is experiments using a "SPECT camera" (the acronym stands for single photon emission computed tomography) to take, as the title of the book's first chapter puts it, "a photograph of God." Newberg and d'Aquili, working with eight Tibetan meditators and several Franciscan nuns, were able to use the SPECT to gain an "accurate freeze-frame of blood flow patterns" at the transcendent peak of mystical experience. What was found in these scans was an expected increase in the activity of the prefrontal cortex, home to the attention span; but also, and more interestingly, there was a decrease in activity of the "orientation association area (OAA). The "primary job of the OAA is to orient the individual in physical space," and to accomplish this it must also generate a clear "distinction between the individual and everything else, to sort out the you from the infinite not-you that makes up the rest of the universe." Specifically, the left orientation area is responsible for creat ing the borders of the self, while "the right orientation area is associated with generating the ... physical space in which that self can exist."

In fact, people with severe damage to this area of the brain have great difficulty maneuvering in physical space--often bumping into chairs or falling to the floor instead of successfully lying down on a bed. But what the SPECT scans show is not a shutdown of the OAA; instead during spiritual events it becomes deprived of the "incoming flow of sensory information" it needs to be able to find any boundaries between itself and existence. Put simply, the mind has "no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything."

Newberg and d'Aquili describe the different levels of spiritual events leading up to the culminary, and rare, "Absolute Unity Being" (AUB) state. They describe two paths of meditation that religions have used over time to attain this AUB. Newberg and d'Aquili connect the origin of religion and myth to the ability of the brain to reach this state. In turn, they also propose that the origin of this very "ability" lies in our ancient ancestors' dread of death and need for safety.

Those are the positives.

The most dismaying aspect of Why God Won't Go Away is the authors' conclusions from their own research. They regularly interject personal speculation, and this greatly harms the work, at times teetering to the point of scientific irresponsibility. They try to draw connections between their research and the existence of "a primary reality that runs deeper than material ... a state of pure being that encompasses the lesser realities," whatever that means. The irony lies in how Newberg and d'Aquili often point to the flaws in their own conclusions, but then fail to correct them. Just as often as they tell us that they believe "we saw evidence of a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence," they state (rather contradictorily) that their "neurological model ... does not explain whether absolute being is nothing more than a brain state or, as mystics claim, the essence of what is most fundamentally real."

A reader is left with the question, If their research cannot determine if this transcendent and nonmaterial world exists, then why do they at other times draw the conclusion from their very research that it does exist? They even go on to tell us that their work "could support the argument that religious experience is only imagined neurologically, that God is physically 'all in your mind'," but then try to draw the opposite conclusion later in the book with no evidence why. Newberg and d'Aquili repeatedly state that they have proven that this meditative state is not a delusion, but I am inclined to believe this is their attempt to soften the book so not to drive away religious readers and their wallets. Otherwise, Newberg and d'Aquili's ability to hold these contradictory ideas would be a true testament to the brain's ability to overcome reality and rationality.