Is God Dead?: Just a Mind Game?

Ty B. Kerley

DMin

The Bible skeptic Michael, that we have been engaged with for many weeks, asks a very important question: “Isn’t all religion just a mind game?” After all, it was the German philosopher Karl Marx who famously said; “Religion is the opium of the people. It is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, and the soul of the soulless condition.”

No doubt, critics of religion have long argued that it is a mind game we play with ourselves to soothe a fearful soul in a hostile world. Survival of the fittest surely selects for those who have the best coping mechanisms, right? No doubt, as soon as prehistoric men evolved enough to realize that everyone dies, his mind then evolved to find a resolution.

Just so happened, religion fit the bill. Darwin himself considered there to be “an evolutionary derivation of mind and morality” as a product of natural selection. In other words, Darwin thought belief in God to be just a mind game as well. Very well then, let us begin once again from the common ground of modern science (twenty-first century science, that is).

Two neuro-physicians, Andrew Newburg, and Eugene D’Aquili conducted extensive research studying the relationship between human consciousness and “the persistent particularly human longing to connect with something larger than ourselves.”

It seems Newburg and D’Aquili were asking the same question our Bible skeptic Michael had asked: “is belief in God just a mind game?” The studies involved observing subjects who were steeped in the art of religious meditation and prayer, from Tibetan monks, to Franciscan nuns. When the subjects would reach a maximum level of spiritual consciousness, they would be injected through an IV line with a radioactive solution. Then, their brain was scanned using a SPECT camera.

The resulting images showed “unusual activity” in a highly specialized portion of the brain that is responsible for sorting out what is you, from everything that is not you.

For Newburg and D’Aquili it became obvious that the altered mental states of their subjects brought about by intense religious meditation or prayer were not the result of “emotional mistakes or simple wishful thinking but were instead associated with observable neurological events.” And while this brain activity was unusual, it was not outside of normal brain function.

Newburg writes: “In other words, mystical experience is biologically, observably, and scientifically real.” In fact, Newburg and D’Aquili are convinced that spiritual experience at its foundational level is “intimately interwoven with human biology.”

One could argue this is exactly what Darwin predicted, the human mind has evolved the capacity to create for itself a mythical, spiritual reality. That is, “it is all just a mind game.” However, Newburg points out how the brain and mind experiences reality suggest “a very different view.” Simply, if God is not dead, then how else would human beings perceive Him except as a neurologically generated image of reality?

Newburg writes; “there is no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain’s neural pathways. This is true whether one experiences God through meditation or prayer, or through reading Scripture. Quite simply, the reality of God as Spirit cannot exist any other place but in the human mind. All experiences are “made real” to the mind in the same way—through natural cognitive function. And that holds for all men.

It is said that myth-making is a “normal cognitive function” of the mind as well. Remember Darwin believes that the existence of God is just a mind game—that the mind, as a coping mechanism, has created the myth of a dying hero rising to the heavens to save mankind. “Fair enough,” I say. But why are the “myths” (religious beliefs) from all the world cultures so consistently and spectacularly similar?

Scholars are quite clear: “in every human culture, across the span of time, the same mythological motifs are consistently repeated: virgin births, world-cleansing floods, lands of the dead, expulsion from paradise, men swallowed into the bellies of whales, dead and resurrected heroes . . .”

The Psychologist Carl Jung, certainly no Christian himself, thought all religious myths to be an expression of a singular basic form that has been modified through time and by cultures. A great example can be seen in The Tower of Babel, the Samarian ziggurats, Mayan pyramids, and step-shaped Buddhist temples.

Sure enough, according to Newburg evidence suggests that the deepest origins of religion are based upon spiritual experiences, and that religion endures because the functioning of the brain continues to provide consistent experiences that believers interpret “as assurances that God exists.” But this assurance goes deeper than that.

“It anchors religious belief in something more potent than intellect or reason: it makes God a reality that can’t be undone by ideas, and that never grows obsolete.” It would seem, in a spiritual sense, we humans truly are all of one mind.

From a Christian worldview, this makes complete, and perfect sense. If man has a common origin, and there was a primordial pair — our first parents — then everything began in a central location. At some point in the very distant past there was only one language, only one race, only one family, and only “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:6). Why wouldn’t all people’s religious beliefs share a very similar core? Even still, is it all just a mind game? Join us next week as we conclude our look at Why God Won’t Go Away.

Gloria in excelsis Deo!

Ty B. Kerley, DMin., is an ordained minister who teaches Christian apologetics, and relief preaches in Southern Oklahoma. You can contact him at: dr.kerley@isGoddead.com.