From the Toronto Star today:...
The human brain tries to explain the world around us, applying whatever it knows to develop a reasonable explanation for what it sees and experiences.
And for the things it can't explain, the brain simply fills in the holes with its own neat little invention, a new book says.
God.
"Our principle concern was to understand why religion works," says Lionel Tiger, and anthropologist and co-author of the new book God's Brain.
In the book, Tiger and psychiatrist Michael McGuire argue that some 150,000 years ago, humans figured out they were all going to die. This changed everything. Humans began to wonder about the purpose of their lives and what came next.
Suddenly, the world stopped making sense. This was stressful. We wanted an explanation.
The human brain needed answers, so it created God, an afterlife and religious stories that explained the world around us.
Having answers released serotonin into the brain, a natural stress reliever, and it was good. For millennia to follow, Tiger and McGuire argue, the rituals of religion provided more comfort, more serotonin and more followers.
"All the religions map the major transition points and crises of human life, and make them easier to deal with," Tiger says.
"There is almost always a complex ritual that has to happen and people can focus on that rather than the drama of what's actually happening."
That contract began to fall apart in the last century or two, however, as science answered some of the questions religion once addressed.
We still needed that serotonin boost, however, if only from artificial sources, Tiger says. "While people may not be going to church, they are going to the medicine cabinet."
Tiger and McGuire aren't the first to say that man may have created God, rather than the other way around.
American geneticist Dean Hamer wrote The God Gene six years ago, arguing humans are "hard-wired" to believe in some sort of deity.
John Shelby Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop of New Jersey and author, says that humans invented God to make sense of the world once we figured out that we will all die. And French philosopher Voltaire posited more than 300 years ago that, "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
Tiger says there is nothing in the book to offend true believers, saying they might see the brain as "God's instrument."
"If you accept that there's a God, then what's God's way of operating?"
comments anyone?
The human brain tries to explain the world around us, applying whatever it knows to develop a reasonable explanation for what it sees and experiences.
And for the things it can't explain, the brain simply fills in the holes with its own neat little invention, a new book says.
God.
"Our principle concern was to understand why religion works," says Lionel Tiger, and anthropologist and co-author of the new book God's Brain.
In the book, Tiger and psychiatrist Michael McGuire argue that some 150,000 years ago, humans figured out they were all going to die. This changed everything. Humans began to wonder about the purpose of their lives and what came next.
Suddenly, the world stopped making sense. This was stressful. We wanted an explanation.
The human brain needed answers, so it created God, an afterlife and religious stories that explained the world around us.
Having answers released serotonin into the brain, a natural stress reliever, and it was good. For millennia to follow, Tiger and McGuire argue, the rituals of religion provided more comfort, more serotonin and more followers.
"All the religions map the major transition points and crises of human life, and make them easier to deal with," Tiger says.
"There is almost always a complex ritual that has to happen and people can focus on that rather than the drama of what's actually happening."
That contract began to fall apart in the last century or two, however, as science answered some of the questions religion once addressed.
We still needed that serotonin boost, however, if only from artificial sources, Tiger says. "While people may not be going to church, they are going to the medicine cabinet."
Tiger and McGuire aren't the first to say that man may have created God, rather than the other way around.
American geneticist Dean Hamer wrote The God Gene six years ago, arguing humans are "hard-wired" to believe in some sort of deity.
John Shelby Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop of New Jersey and author, says that humans invented God to make sense of the world once we figured out that we will all die. And French philosopher Voltaire posited more than 300 years ago that, "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him."
Tiger says there is nothing in the book to offend true believers, saying they might see the brain as "God's instrument."
"If you accept that there's a God, then what's God's way of operating?"
comments anyone?
