Interesting, but it seems to me that their methodology is a bit iffy -- they're trying to posit a religious basis for the biological evolution of the brain, rather than looking at the brain and going the other way -- sort of putting the cart before the horse.
Honestly, I think that the basic idea put forth by Julian Jaynes in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" goes at it from a better angle. Less that we evolved to believe in god, and more that god is a result of the changing evolution of the brain.
Oh, that's not the way I read it at all. I think they were trying to say that the religious impulse arises from the evolutionary changes in the brain as reinforced by positive communal experience: What people feel as awesome and magnificent and so on, and call "communion with a higher power."
I suggest this is why meditation works, too. You don't need to be religious for it to work, yet it makes one feel the same thing that heavy prayer-doers feel.
without looking at the actual study, of course, it's impossible to tell what it's really saying. My problem with it -- as presented in the article -- is that it says he went from the work on Parkinson's, etc. to looking at the brains of the religious. As presented, that seems to imply that he was only looking at one side of things. Now he may well have looked at a wide variety of people -- religious, non-religious, atheists, etc. -- but the article doesn't present it that way. If the article is correct (not necessarily a given, of course), then at the very least he's trying to generalize from a very limited and skewed sample. If he did look at a wider spectrum of subjects, I'd be interested in finding out more about it...
Let me refer you to Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
This book posits that hearing god was a function of the brain whose hemispheres are disconnected from one another. Approximately like being schizophrenic. He also figures that evolution favored communication between the hemispheres.
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Honestly, I think that the basic idea put forth by Julian Jaynes in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" goes at it from a better angle. Less that we evolved to believe in god, and more that god is a result of the changing evolution of the brain.
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I suggest this is why meditation works, too. You don't need to be religious for it to work, yet it makes one feel the same thing that heavy prayer-doers feel.
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This book posits that hearing god was a function of the brain whose hemispheres are disconnected from one another. Approximately like being schizophrenic. He also figures that evolution favored communication between the hemispheres.
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Yeah, back in the day I felt that way a time or two. And it sure as heck didn't come from prayer.
*cough*
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