Saturday, November 6, 2010

Is our brain hard-wired to believe in God




Jack Dikian
August 2003

Are human beings hard-wired to believe in God. That is, it possible that brain-structure is designed such that the belief in God is to serve as an anxiety reducing function.

The connection between the temporal lobes of the brain and religious feeling has led a Canadian neuroscientist, Dr Michael Persinger, from Laurentian University to attempt and answer if there is a biological and brain basis to some of the concepts that are called the God belief and the God experience.

If the brain basis for the sense of self is tied to language and left hemispheric processes then the right hemispheric equivalent, Persinger believes is a second sense which when experienced is the sense presence or the prototype of the God experience.

One hypotheses is that as we developed an ability to forecast our own self disillusion, and our own death, which generates a great deal of anxiety, the efforts of our brain’s

right temporal lobe is to relieve the anxiety of death - what we sense when we think we are sensing God.


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