Religion and Evolution May Have More In Common Than We Thought
Throughout the world and through every time period, only one thing seems constant in human civilization: religion. But why? Why has every human civilization developed its own religious beliefs? One neuroscientist from Laurentian University believes he knows – and most religious people won’t be happy with his answer.
Dr. Michael Persinger believes that “God” is an evolutionary construct that we developed as we grew more self-aware. He has designed a helmet that, when placed on a subject’s head, generates a strong magnetic field. This field stimulates the temporal lobes, an area of the brain involved in auditory perception and connecting words and images with their meanings. “In the laboratory, we have reproduced every aspect of the god experience…” says Persinger “from the rising sensation, to the feelings of ecstasy, to the feelings of a sensed presence, to the feelings that you’re at one with the universe.”
No two people respond to the helmet’s influence in the same way. Some of them report visions of God, while some merely report something staring down at them from behind them, comforting them. One subject even had a near-death experience, reporting seeing “a sudden wave of darkness…there’s a distant point of light”. But 80% of the test subject report feeling some kind of a presence, whether it is God or merely the face of a dead relative.
So why would this device, no more powerful than a hair dryer, create such feelings in people? Persinger has hypothesized that as humans grew self-aware enough to realize their own mortality, they developed this collection of cells to help them deal with such an enormously stressful revelation. When stimulated, these cells induce a feeling of a presence, something greater than themselves, in that person, comforting them and perhaps convincing them that death is not the end. This model certainly explains the phenomenon of the “near-death experience”, as well as providing an evolutionary basis for why every self-contained tribe of humans invented some sort of religion for themselves as they developed.
Persinger has come under fire for insufficient double blinding in his work, however. In addition, when a Swedish team of neuroscientists tried to replicate the experiment, they failed. Dr. Persinger says that they failed to set it up correctly, but the attempt remains a source of controversy. Regardless, many experts are reluctant to throw out Persinger’s work yet, since it explains so much, and has already become used in treating depression.