Atheists have, of late, had great fun demolishing the argument from biological design. Best known through William Paley's 19th century treatise on Natural Theology, this argues that the adaptations to their environment that we see in animals and plants necessarily imply the existence of a divine designer. Charles Darwin, who had read and admired Paley as an undergraduate, subsequently explained these adaptations in terms of natural selection. The argument from biological design became untenable, as certain well-known biologists have recently reminded us.
The paradox is that this undoing may yet turn out to be good news for religious believers.
In his seminal book,
At The Origins Of Modern Atheism, American Jesuit historian Michael Buckley highlights the weakness of a religious apologetic that depends on theoretical argument rather than on direct human experience. He suggests, specifically, that the bias of philosophy during the 16th and 17th centuries – both in its best-known materialist version of Thomas Hobbes and in the idealism of René Descartes – encouraged scepticism about our experience of God. As a result, traditional piety lost plausibility to the extent that apologists for religion felt they could no longer appeal to religious experience. In submitting to these influences, Buckley suggests, the theologians made a tactical error by handing over the defence of faith to natural scientists, who proceeded to deduce the existence of God, at second hand, from scientific data.
That was a fatal mistake. There is something very odd about a defence of religion that avoids reference to direct experience of God's presence. It is a bit like going through an inner debate as to whether my friend in the chair opposite is real or a delusion before inviting him to the pub. It is to abandon common sense. In the end, those who chose to defend religion this way succeeded only in generating the atheism they were trying to avoid, for as Buckley says, "if religion itself has no inherent ground upon which to base its assertion, it is only a question of time until its inner emptiness emerges as positive denial."
The fact that theology is still blighted by this error should not surprise us given our continuing scepticism concerning religious experience. This scepticism takes its modern form from the founding father of secularism, Ludwig Feuerbach. For the past 150 years the default secularist position has been to interpret all claims to such experience as being based, in Feuerbach's words, on ignorance and stupidity. That is to say, it has nothing to do with our true biological nature, for we are all of us without religion as infants. Religious belief is acquired, it is not inborn, and Feuerbach says this is due to the projection of human qualities onto an imaginary figure in the sky.
But what if religious experience is the precursor of belief and not a delusion? Alister Hardy was Linacre Professor of Zoology at Oxford between 1946 and 1961. He was an orthodox Darwinian but one who believed that our religiousness is biologically inbuilt. He suggested that spiritual awareness had been selected for during the process of organic evolution because it contributes to survival and he founded the Religious Experience Research Unit to test his hypothesis.
We now know that religious or spiritual experience is widespread in the Western world. The last UK national survey indicated that around three quarters of the adult population admit to being aware of a spiritual dimension to their lives. Surveys in Britain and the United States have also repeatedly demonstrated links between religious experience and good mental health, good education, lack of prejudice and concern for social justice.
What was missing when Hardy founded his Unit in the 1960s was scientific evidence to contradict Feuerbach’s claim that religious experience had nothing to do with our biology. Over the last ten years, however, the physiological processes associated with such experience have begun to be identified. One illustration is the research led by Andrew Newberg, head of the Nuclear Medicine Department in the University of Pennsylvania. Newberg used a SPECT scanner to measure the metabolic changes in the brain when someone undertakes the most characteristic of all religious activities, prayer or meditation. His remarkable findings, first reported in 2001, show that the physiological data closely complement the subjective accounts of mystical experience available in many religious traditions, including Christianity. More recently still, in 2006 Mario Beauregard at the University of Montreal published data from a parallel study using an MRI scanner, which works on a completely different principle from the SPECT scanner and obtained results that appear to complement Newberg's findings.
Genetics research backs up the physiology. Geneticists often study identical and non-identical twins to help distinguish inherited characteristics from those that are acquired from the environment. The methodology has been applied to the investigation of spirituality by Lindon Eaves at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics. He published a report in 1999 on research done in cooperation with the University of Queensland. The team examined more than 2,200 pairs of twins and found that whilst churchgoing was mostly to do with upbringing, spiritual awareness was linked to genetic inheritance. In a twin study in Japan, reported in 2004, Juko Ando and his colleagues also found spiritual awareness was linked to heredity, suggesting that biology transcends East/West cultural differences.
In as far as this evidence is recognised by the new atheists, it is rather sidestepped. Richard Dawkins, for example, admits that religion had survival value and therefore was selected for during the process of evolution. But he interprets this as an accident, claiming that adaptations that have evolved for other purposes just happen to be available for the construction of biologically useful but mistaken religious experience.
This argument is flawed, however, because it assumes as axiomatic that religious belief is erroneous, thereby forcing Dawkins into explaining away the biological realities as accidental. That is a prejudgement in accord with the sceptical canons of the European Enlightenment; not a 'scientific' conclusion.
With Occam's Razor firmly in mind, the most straightforward interpretation of the data is to say that there is a transcendent dimension to human experience, associated with specific physiological states, and commonly but not exclusively associated with religious belief. This does not necessarily mean that a religious interpretation of reality is correct, but it does suggest that there’s an empirical basis for religious beliefs that is not all that different from the experiential basis for scientific beliefs.
Dr David Hay was formerly Director of the Religious Experience Research Unit in Oxford (now based in the University of Wales at Lampeter). He is a zoologist and the data and detailed argument supporting his views are contained in his book Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit, published in London by Darton, Longman & Todd in 2006 [ISBN 0-232-52637-0] and in Philadelphia by Templeton Press in 2007 [ISBN 1-1-599-47114-0].
"Why Spirituality is difficult for Westerners" (Chapter 9 of David Hay’s book Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit, Darton, Longman & Todd, 2006) is particular relevance to this debate. Thanks to the generosity of his publishers, the complete chapter can be read by clicking here.