Religious Pathology

I was just watching a snippet of some BBC documentary on whether or not the brain comes pre-programmed for religion. I didn't bother watching the whole thing, so this is a rather sloppy post.

My assumption is that the documentary was going to end without having any clear answers and that it would provide just enough scientific data to make one start to wonder whether religion wasn't all just a neurological disorder. At the very least, I had a premonition that it was going to suggest that the founders of major world religions were neurotics.

Or so I imagined from watching the start of the documentary, which featured two people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy. Apparently, a fraction of those who suffer from this particular kind of epilepsy report distinctly religious hallucinations. One victim was an atheist, the other a Catholic. Both had seizures that led them to believe they were experiencing the supernatural. This was a starting point for the question of whether or not religion can be pinpointed to a region of the brain.

Should there be such a region, it seems to me we'd have some dangerous questions to deal with...
Would a lack of faith or religious fervor be signs of a malfunctioning brain?
Would such a region of the brain dissolve all spirituality into an unexpected byproduct of an evolutionarily beneficial neurosis? Or would such a region of the brain be precisely the kind of thumbprint of a creator god that Intelligent Design theorists rather desperately have sought out?

And this late-night rambling suddenly makes me have a strange thought...Is it possible to distinguish between thoughts that are pre-determined by brain activity and brain activity that is triggered by thought? (Maybe this is a non-question from a scientific, materialist point of view?)
That is, in one case, perhaps I start thinking about pizza because something has triggered whatever in my brain stores the idea of pizza. Is there ever a case where I independently want to think about pizza, and then have to fire up those memory banks? Or is the very desire to think about pizza a result already dependent on a set of neurons that somehow went off and made me want to think about pizza?

If there was a difference between the two scenarios (my consciously willing myself to think about pizza vs. my brain subconsciously initiating pizza thoughts on its own), I don't know how we would tell the difference..

Comments

[Akh Ari]

This is a very interesting phenomenon you bring up. This close connection between the mind and the body poses a real stumper for post-Descartes modern thinkers. It would be pretty tough for Platonists and many other ancients, too, I think. The best system I have come across so far is St. Thomas Aquinas. This whole thing would come as no surprise to him.

St. Thomas considered that we arrive at understanding of things through the intellect operating on data provided by the senses. That understanding is stored in the intellect, which is not itself a body nor strictly dependent on one. But in order to actively think about that thing again, it needs to consider it in the context of sensual info which is provided for the occasion by the body. If the body is impaired, therefore, so is the ability to think about certain things. Somewhere he gives the example that "lesions of the brain" can cause this selective loss of ability. Of course this could also be accounted for by materialist theories, but those theories in their crudity overlook many important things that Aquinas' more robust system accounts for. Not enough space to pontificate about that here, though.

[Akh Ari]

Galileo was so right when he likened nature as a book and natural science to reading from this book. There are the words (the facts) and then there is how you interpret them (natural science), and then the higher levels of interpretion (philosophy) which many people do not reflect on.

For instance, the longing people have for God is a fact (even if some people manage to deny or repress it). But some people interpret this fact to mean that there is no God. Odd when you think about it, because the usual interpretation of peoples' longing for love isn't that there are no other people to love; or longing for food that there is no such thing as food.

Similarly, some people will interpret these data as meaning that we have our source from God and others that God has His source in us. Then we get to start arguing from the "text" about whose interpretation is more fitting.