By Peggy Fletcher Stack
The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 08/21/2009 02:23:31 PM MDT
Journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty came to the study of the God gene, monk's brains, peyote-induced visions and healing prayers by an unlikely path: her own mystical experience.
During a June 1995 interview with a cancer survivor and born-again Christian, Hagerty felt engulfed by a presence she could feel but not touch. After a minute or so, the presence dissipated but left Hagerty with a mixture of terror and exhilaration and an ineffable experience she could neither fully grasp nor completely dismiss.
Was God real, she wondered, or just some brain blip?
So Hagerty, religion reporter for National Public Radio, did what comes naturally -- she posed the question to believers, practitioners, psychologists, experts and scientists, then sifted their answers and analyzed the data. The result of her yearlong research is the just published Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality , which she recently previewed for Utah audiences.
Not surprisingly, Hagerty concluded that science cannot prove God -- but science is consistent with God. She sees a nascent "paradigm shift" among scientists toward increasing acceptance of something beyond the five senses.
"Many scientists suspect that the days are numbered for a purely materialistic paradigm," she writes in Fingerprints . "They believe that the evidence challenging the matter-only model is building, bolstered by research on meditation, the
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mechanisms for prayer, and more radical studies on the neurology of near-death experiences."
For Hagerty, the research only buttressed her belief in God.
"Spirituality is in a class by itself; it's not like a beautiful walk in the woods, a transcendent opera or a once-in-a-lifetime baseball game," Hagerty said in an interview. "After an experience with the divine, it changes everything about you in ways opera, nature or baseball just don't."
Asking questions » Science no longer questions the notion that thoughts and emotions affect physical health, Hagerty writes, but one researcher has taken it a step further, concluding that spirituality can halt the progress of diseases such as HIV.
"Turning to God rather than rejecting God appears to boost your immune system and stave off the disease nearly five times as effectively," physician Gail Ironson at the University of Miami told her.
Next Hagerty explored the genetics of belief. Is a predisposition to believe in God in a person's DNA?
After interviews with Dean Hamer, researcher at the National Institute of Health's National Cancer Institute and author of The God Gene , Francis Collins, former head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Pat McNamara of Boston University as well as several skeptics, Hagerty concludes that genes do seem to play a role as a "sort of tipping point for spiritual experience."
"It's a little bit like automatic air-conditioning," she writes. "For some people, a relatively modest rise in temperature ... can flip on the cooler system. Those people are genetically inclined to be spiritual. Others may sweat it out to 90, 95, 100 degrees; only then will their God switch flip on. And some would rather die of heat than turn to 'God.' "
Hagerty wondered if spiritual experience could be induced by chemicals, so she participated in an American Indian peyote ceremony (without ingesting). She later went to Johns Hopkins University's Medical Center, where Roland Griffiths studies the effect of psilocybin (mushrooms) on spirituality.
None of it convinced her that mystical experience is nothing but brain activity.
"If there were an Other who wanted to commune with us, of course He or She or It would use the brain to do so, as opposed to say, the left big toe. Of course God would use the chemistry in our brains to create visions," Hagerty writes. "He would also use electricity."
From there, she examined the neuroscience research on the brains of mystics, monks and nuns -- all of which clearly shows activity in the temporal lobe of those who are meditating deeply. Later, she looked at so-called prayer studies in which people pray for unknown patients, and she talked with people who reported out-of-body experiences.
Hagerty's book is a "wonderful review for the nonspecialist reader of a whole lot of new neuroscience work, showing that the physical brain is not all there is," said Richard Sherlock, a philosophy professor at Utah State University. "She presents both sides, but clearly thinks that the new studies are valuable and cannot be explained away."
The Jesus question » What is unique in Hagerty's book is her willingness to offer candid responses to scientific findings, infusing the narrative with her own soul-searching experiences.
She describes, for example, moving away from the Christian Science faith of her childhood, then realizing founder Mary Baker Eddy may have had some important mind-body insights that modern seekers are just now discovering. She shares a frightening experience of being lost and panicked on a dark mountain in Tennessee and of discovering that her grandmother had what can be described only as a near-death experience.
It was tough for the award-winning reporter for The Christian Science Monitor and NPR to be so self-revealing. But she wanted readers to know these weren't just academic questions to her. They mattered.
"Journalists often treat religious people as if they're anthropologists, as in 'look at those funny little people with their funny little beliefs,' " she said. "I wanted [believers] to know I wasn't looking down my nose at them. I was saying, I have the same questions you have. Come along with me."
As a Christian, the hardest issue she faced was Christianity's claim that Jesus is the only way.
"I interviewed 80 people for the chapter on mystical experiences who had all sorts of religious backgrounds or none," Hagerty said. "What was clear to me is that they were just as transformed after that experience as any Christian I have ever met. I couldn't deny their experience."
In the end, she decided people of all faiths or none can follow Jesus' edicts about "feeding the poor, helping those who cannot benefit you, loving your enemies, sacrificing rather than promoting yourself, living as if every moment on Earth counts for eternity."
The scientific studies did not rob Hagerty of her faith in the "young man on the cross," she writes, "although the old man with a beard can no longer encompass the grandeur and genius of the God I embrace today."
She ends her book where she began, answering the question: Is there more than this?
"Yes, I believe there is, and the new science of spirituality buttresses my instinct. ... The language of our genes, the chemistry of our bodies, and the wiring of our brains -- these are the handiwork of One who longs to be known."
We have all about us, she says, "the fingerprints of God."
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