The University of Pennsylvania Survey of Spiritual Experiences
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Over the past two decades, there has been a tremendous explosion of research in the cognitive neurosciences. This field has expanded to explore many aspects of human thought, feelings, and behaviors and has worked towards linking them with the human brain. More recently, this field has begun to explore the most complex elements of human behavior - religious and spiritual phenomena. There is a growing body of work that has explored this intersection, but it is still and emerging area that requires the synthesis of the most highly regarded cognitive neuroscientists with the highest academic and theological perspectives of those in religious and theological studies. At the University of Pennsylvania in particular, there is tremendous strength in both areas with many investigators in fields such as cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, psychology, psychiatry, and psychoneuroimmunology as well as scholars in religious studies, anthropology, and philosophy. While this work has grown substantially in recent years led in large part by individuals at the University of Pennsylvania, it appears to be time for a "quantum leap" to advance this field of the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and religion. The Templeton Research Lectures program would provide such a major step in the development of this field and place the University of Pennsylvania in the center of such scholarship. The overall design of this project will be to bring a major scholar each year for three years into a dialogue on major topics pertaining to the cognitive neurosciences and religious studies. These scholars will interact with members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty in order to establish an important dialogue on the topic which will lead to substantial developments in this field and provide the foundation for the publication of a book on each major topic. The three major topics will be neuropsychology and spirituality in year one, compassion and neuroethics in year two, and biogenetics and free will in year three. It is also anticipated that this lectureship will galvanize an existing body of scholars at the University of Pennsylvania through the interdisciplinary committee to establish a more formal program of study at Penn. This includes a wider base of undergraduate and graduate level courses available to students, the development of a science and religion graduate program, an ongoing research group to establish research programs, and the publication of future papers and books on this topic.
Overview of Major Topics
The three major topics - neuropsychology, compassion, and behavioral genetics - will each provide fertile grounds for dialogue and debate. Each has important implications from both a cognitive scientific and religious perspective and each has deep relevance to everyday life and the problems currently facing the human world. Furthermore, each of these topics can stand on its own as well as be highly interrelated to the other topics. These three topics address the most fundamental issues that both cognitive science and religion can address about human beings.
The visiting scholar selected for each year as the primary fellow will present a series of lectures as well as attend several meetings of the interdisciplinary group (see below). Additional lectures by other invited speakers and also Penn faculty will supplement the primary lectures given by the fellow. In all, it is anticipated that approximately four public lectures on each topic will be given during the year as well as additional smaller lectures to members of the interdisciplinary committee and also appropriate departments. Thus, when neuropsychology and spirituality is discussed in the first year, additional talks will be given to Departments such as Psychiatry, Neurology, and Religious Studies. When compassion and ethics is discussed in the second year, additional talks will be given to Departments such as Bioethics, Psychology, and the Law school.
The three major topics will provide a critical foundation for the future intersection of cognitive neuroscience and religion since these three areas are central to religion and philosophy and can also be addressed by cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience provides a powerful new perspective for addressing these age-old questions. What will also be an important element in these research lectures is that there is extended dialogue of alternative perspectives. In this way, the resulting scholarly work will not be simply a rehashing of a particular topic from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, but a true integration of concepts and perspectives. With regard to the topic of free will as an example, it will be not only necessary to understand what information cognitive neuroscience has to offer towards an understanding of free will, but how this correlates with current religious, theological, and philosophical views. The result should be a synthesis which works towards the optimal interrelationship between science and religion. For this reason, the research fellow may either be predominantly from the scientific or the religious viewpoint, but will be necessarily paired to a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania or outside who can provide alternative expertise. The result will be a true interdisciplinary dialogue.
The reason that the three topics were chosen is that they each have a rich history of religious and philosophical thought that support them and can each be addressed by integrating the psychological and cognitive neuroscience with religious and philosophical scholarship. Further, they provide a critical overview of topics that can each pertain to neuropsychology and the mind. By covering each of these topics over the three years, the interdisciplinary group can help determine how the topics relate to each other and also explore them individually in great detail.
Neuropsychology of Spirituality
The study of religious and spiritual phenomena from a neuropsychological and developmental perspective presents a number of complex issues. The most important of which is to determine if such an approach may open a window to understanding how religion and spirituality are intimately linked with human biology and psychology throughout the life cycle. Neuropsychologically, religion and spirituality must be experienced by the human brain, which can then help to translate and interpret the experience and eventually modify outward behaviors accordingly. With this in mind, it is important to explore the wide variety of experiences that can be considered to be religious or spiritual and also to try to describe and identify these experiences.
Such an analysis requires reviewing the larger context of the neuropsychology of religious experience by including disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, cultural anthropology, and human development - disciplines that have matured only over the last 50 years. This integrated synthesis can hopefully create a unifying vision of spirituality. Besides spirituality and neuropsychology, relevant topics would include: hope, faith, love, joy, forgiveness, healing and dying. Such an analysis will help to determine if these simple words are cross culturally valid and are essential ingredients of spirituality. They have a neurobiological basis, and an evolutionary architecture that can be glimpsed, excavated and explored.
Other issues include the following:
- For many, religion is a red flag. But spirituality is distinct from religion in that it draws a circle that draws people in; in contrast religion draws a circle that draws people out. Too often critics place spirituality in the realm of self-contemplation and wistful metaphysics, which is to miss the visceral hard-wired, socially oriented basis of spirituality. Modern neuroscience and cultural anthropology both suggest - as do the world's great religions - that spirituality is more about human connection than about solitary contemplation. Thus, in spite of a neuropsychological approach, the most potentially revolutionary - and commonsensical - conclusion is that spirituality is based more upon community than upon individual survival. Popular notions notwithstanding, spirituality is not "all about me".
- Semantics gets in the way of our understanding of spirituality. For example, just as in physics light may be described as made up of either particles or of waves; just so in the human quest for meaning "God" and "love" probably describe the same force. Indeed, the fact that the common denominator of all the world's eight great religions is unselfish life seems more important than any of their differences.
- Scientific truths and spiritual "truths" are not as different as we are led to believe. They exist in two separate and sometimes conflicted parts of the brain. While government and religion must be kept scrupulously separate, there is still important values in integrating science and spirituality. It appears that spirituality derives more from the evolution of the limbic system than it does from the evolution of the neocortex. The limbic system, unique to mammals, permits them to become securely and lovingly attached. In contrast, theology derives from the neocortical development that renders Homo sapiens distinct from other primates. The point is not, like Freud, to suggest that religious ideation is an illusion, but rather my intent is to suggest that mammalian evolution has hard-wired the human brain for spiritual experience.
- Karl Marx quipped that religion was the opiate of the masses. Modern neuroscience, however, suggests that Marx got it wrong. Opiates highjack neural tracts designed to promote love, attachment and spirituality. However, this analysis can evaluate how various neurotransmitters systems, such as the opiate, dopamine, and serotonin systems, play a role in religious and spiritual phenomena.
- From a neuropsychological perspective, spiritual joy is distinct from "Hollywood happiness". Happiness allows us to run from pain; while joy allows us to acknowledge suffering. Sometimes joy can even let human beings run towards pain. The joy associated with Easter weekend provides a dramatic example. Happiness is a cognitive and a thoughtful appraisal, but unless paired with excitement, happiness is not a basic emotion. In contrast, joy is a fundamental emotion. Spiritual joy is evoked by a loving connection.
Ethics, Compassion, and the Mind
The proposed topic and popular book that will result from this year will develop the human capabilities approach toward the conception of an extended human compassion and ethics that is constrained by a norm of respect for the dignity of all human beings. Promoting human capabilities has an institutional side, which is captured by discussing the relationship of the capabilities to fundamental constitutional principles, and a neuropsychological side, involving the education and extension of compassion. The aim of the present book is to explore this complex interaction between institutions and human emotions from perspectives ranging from the global institutional level to the individual neurobiological level.
The overall argument of the book is that while there may be problems with compassion, especially in the face of various historical events and even dating back to the ancient Stoic project, it is critical for human beings to extend and educate compassion, not to remove it. What vision of human dignity should inform our enterprise of educating compassion and ethics? The capabilities approach begins with an intuitive idea of human dignity, and of a life worthy of that dignity. It then asks what the necessary conditions of such a life are, and uses the capabilities so justified as the basis for political principles that are a partial (minimal) conception of social justice. There will also be a discussion of how this approach provides benchmarks for thinking about redistribution from richer to poorer nations.
With regard to compassion, it is also critical to evaluate what can be learned from tragic historical events. It is important to ask what tragedy can teach us, not only about the general capability goal, but about how we should view conflicts between capabilities. Thinking in this way should lead to a strongly critical perspective of standard economic models of public choice, with the central role they assign to cost-benefit analysis.
The education of compassion and ethical behavior has a neuropsychological aspect and an institutional aspect. These two aspects are complementary: we cannot hope to produce perfect people, and thus we need institutions that embody and make compulsory the insights of an educated compassion. At the same time, we cannot hope that these institutions will be realized, or be stable, without at least a robust progress in the direction of educating appropriately compassionate citizens and cultivating the psychological and biological underpinnings of such compassion. Such an analysis will include evaluating how compassion is understood by various psychological models and whether various neurological drivers may contribute or prevent compassion within human beings.
With regard to the institutional side of compassion, it is important to determine what domestic institutions would look like which embody the insights of the capabilities approach. This can be addressed by focusing on the role of the constitution, and basic constitutional entitlements, as well as which other institutions are required to make constitutional entitlements more than words on paper.
Turning to the international domain, this approach argues against
the idea of a world state, and in favor of a complex set of interlocking institutions,
the goal being to realize the capabilities, up to a suitable threshold level,
for all of the world's people.
These institutions include:
- domestic governments, which have both duties of redistribution internally and duties of foreign aid;
- international treaties and agreements;
- international agencies and organizations;
- nongovernmental organizations and political movements;
- multinational corporations, which have duties to promote education, health, and other human capabilities in the regions in which they do business;
- the structures of the global economic order, which need to become more ethically attuned to the needs of the world's poorer citizens, and to take the promotion of human capabilities as a central goal.
Genetics, Spirituality, and Free Will
The concepts of free will, spiritual experience, and behavioral genetics appear to provide an important nexus of topics to conclude this project. The notion of free will, which will be addressed throughout the other two years, is deeply related to the classic "nature vs. nurture" argument. The evaluation of the biogenetic basis of the human brain and hence, human thought, has a great impact into our understanding of human free will. How much of our spirituality, of our compassion, of our experience of the world is determined by our genetic make up that directs the brain to view reality in specified ways? It may be that our genetics specifically allows room for free will and our ability to pursue spiritual paths of our choosing. This discussion also incorporates issues related to consciousness, ethics, and psychology.
The free will question is fundamental to understanding how we as human beings function within the framework of the function of the universe. Whether or not we have free will bears directly on our entire existence, our reasons for existence, and our sense of justice and moral responsibility. However, the free will question goes deeper because it relates directly to our understanding of how the human mind and brain works. After all, if we do have free will, then our ability to choose is based somewhere in the realm of our brain and mind. More specifically, it is usually thought that the part of the mind responsible for generating choice is consciousness. Thus, free will usually refers to conscious choice.
Unfortunately, it has been most difficult to objectively prove that we have free will. This has been the problem that has most perplexed those philosophers, theologians, and scientists who believe in free will. This inability to find free will is perhaps the most compelling argument for those who believe in determinism. Free will is seen only as an illusion. We only have a sense of free will even though it does not really exist.
This raises another aspect of the free will question regarding
how we perceive reality. Since the brain is that part of us which gives us
all of our perceptions of the world, it is difficult to prove whether those
perceptions are accurate. Thus, the functioning of our brain is the only mechanism
by which we come to know reality. But if different states of the brain give
us the perception of different realities, how do we know which is the true
reality. This is the problem of neuroepistemology that is also related to
this overall topic integrating genetics, behavior, and the brain.
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