A friend of mine told me about a fascinating article on Slate.com, "God is in the Dendrites: Can Neurotheology Bridge the Gap Between Science and Religion?" As neuroscientists have started to study various types of religious experience, we end up with the chicken and the egg question - which came first, brains predisposed to religious experience or religious experience that developed certain areas of the brain? Further questions are asked about the meaning of brains that have the mechanics for religious experience, such as were the brains created by God to facilitate such experiences or are such experiences simply physical occurences that create an illusion of a God? The answer to this question is one that cannot be scientifically proven one way or another. It simply comes down to faith and/or opinion.

As for which comes first, the chicken or the egg, I suspect it is like most of our other traits, that there are differences physiologically that make a person more prone to religious/meditative feelings or experiences, and then that part of the brain is developed and enhanced through actual religious/meditative practice. Our intellectual frameworks, belief systems, etc., also affect the experiences we have. The Newburg study (Eugene D’Aquili and Andrew Newburg, The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience) shows that Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns, when meditating, initially display similar MRI patterns , but if you read further in the study, there is a point in the meditative experience where those patterns diverge, and they describe their experiences differently. The Franciscan nuns speak of a oneness with God, whereas the Buddhist monks speak of an impersonal void (D’Aquili and Newburg, “Religious and Mystical States,” Zygon 23:178). The scientists tell us that the divergence of areas in the brain that are stimulated in the experience (as shown in the MRI patterns) corresponds to the nuns experiencing a positive feeling and the monks experiencing a neutral feeling, hence my argument that the fact that they come to the experience of meditation with different intellectual frameworks actually affects the experience itself. The physiological activity in their brains is different because they are operating under different belief systems. Does this mean that religious experience is a product of our brains? Yes and no. Yes, in the very physiological way that I just described, but no in that the physiological basis of the experience does not negate the religious nature of the experience.

From a religious perspective (note that I am going beyond what science can prove or disprove at this point), we are embodied spirits. We do not have spiritual experiences that do not involve our bodies. Of course religious experience is physiological! The embodiedness of the experience does not make it any less of God. In Catholic theology there is a principle that God works through secondary causes. It is this principle that allows Catholic theology to see very little conflict between most areas of science and religion. Scientific explanations do not discredit theological explanations. Ultimately they should enhance theological explanations by filling us with a wonder and awe of the God whose creation is so intricate and beautiful, from the expanse of the universe to the tiniest details of every atom. That human brains should be created in such a way as to be able to have an experience that gives them a sense that there is something "more" than our own existence doesn't "prove" the existence of God, but for those of us that do believe, it sure does make sense. That those same brains are able to reflect upon theological concepts and that the different concepts in turn affect the experience one has, says something even greater to me both about free will and the infinitely, incomprehensible mystery that we call God.