Worshipping Waterfalls: The Evolution of Belief

It's to the best of our knowledge, could animals have a sense of the sacred?

Jane Goodall has seen chimpanzees in the wild sit quietly for a long time, staring at a waterfall.

You can't help feeling that it must be awe or wonder.

Well, it makes you wonder if our ancestors had similar experiences.

I would bet they did.

So if chimpanzees' awe and wonder led to early religion, just how common are these experiences?

Could anyone have them?

Some people enlightenment just hits no matter what they're doing.

Just driving their car down the street and suddenly an experience happens to them.

I think that's called bliss happens.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm Anne Strainchamps.

This hour, science, chimps, and the deep roots of religious belief.

Plus, what it means for you and me.

Wisconsin Public Radio.

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It's to the best of our knowledge.

I'm Anne Strainchamps.

Have you ever had an experience you just could not explain?

We were doing...

field research to basically collect everything we could about the chimpanzee community there.

Wildlife biologist Laura Kehoe.

This was in Guinea, West Africa.

We were sort of just trundling through the bush, and we stopped at a clearing.

And this guide, Mamadou Aliouba, incredibly talented guy, he had found some markings on a tree.

Other local people thought that these were probably just wild pigs.

Or teenagers, or something else.

But Mamadou was sure that there was something more to it.

So we put up a camera there for a few weeks to catch what it can.

And we essentially moved on.

Finally, two weeks came, and I was pretty excited just because you kind of dream when you're in the field that you'll find something new or interesting.

What we saw was a chimp approach the tree, pause, look around, pick up this huge rock, and fling it at the tree.

And then basically run off.

And there was a pantout as well that he did.

I hadn't seen anything like that before.

And it turns out that it was a chimpanzee.

It was an entirely new behavior that hadn't been recorded before.

We still don't really know what it means, but that's what we found.

Now I can hear you thinking, seriously?

An ape throws a rock at a tree.

This matters why?

First of all, it's not just one chimpanzee.

It turns out to be dozens of them all over West Africa.

Second, the behavior looks to scientists like some kind of ritual.

And the reason that matters is that it might, just might, help explain the origin of religion.

Could these chimpanzees be having spiritual experiences?

Steve Paulson tracked down Laura Kehoe to find out more.

Laura, the first time you saw the chimps doing this, what was your reaction?

Really just shivers down my spine.

I couldn't believe it.

So, yeah, no, I was just stunned, really.

I mean, you said big stones, what, eight to nine kilograms?

Yeah, like they were ridiculous.

I mean, that's like, that's 20 pounds.

That is not an easy thing to hurl, no.

And so, if I understand this, so they weren't just any stones.

I mean, there were stones that sort of had been cached, it would seem, for this purpose of being thrown at the trees?

Yeah, exactly.

It did seem like that.

And not every time was the stone flung in a kind of a violent way at the tree.

Sometimes.

Sometimes the stones were tossed.

Sometimes they were neatly placed inside the tree cavity.

So, that really kind of added to the mystery, I guess.

And not only were certain stones chosen, but only certain trees were targeted, is that true?

Yeah, yeah.

They were selected trees that would have repeated visits, yeah.

And were these always male chimpanzees?

No, so there's observations of females and juveniles as well, carrying this out.

So, it's not just male displays.

No.

It's mostly males, but yeah, there's also females, even a female with a young chimp on her back.

Okay, so obviously the huge mystery is why.

And you have speculated that one explanation might be some sort of ritual, perhaps even a symbolic act.

Yeah, I mean, I think that, well, first of all, plausibility shouldn't be mistaken for proof.

And it is important to say that it's a speculation, you know.

I nearly died when I saw the Daily Mail heading of,

chimps have found religion or something.

So, I wouldn't go that far.

But I do think that it's a possibility.

And I think that some things can seem unlikely until they're discovered.

So, imagine before we found that chimps were making and using tools,

thinking about that, it would seem hugely unlikely.

And I think maybe the same is the case for these kind of spiritual sides of other species.

You have suggested something even more provocative,

that maybe the targeted trees function,

and kind of like a shrine.

I mean, what you've referred to as sacred trees.

Yeah, again, speculation, but it's a possibility.

And it's something that I think we shouldn't turn our backs to and not consider.

If we saw a group of humans returning to the same tree and throwing stones at it repetitively,

what conclusion would we come to?

You know, I mean, chimps have beaten humans at short-term memory tasks.

And, you know, we've seen that they can go to war,

or that they use sticks as dolls,

and make nests for them,

or that they do these sort of mysterious dances in front of fire or waterfalls.

So, I think it's an arena that's opening up to more scientific inquiry.

But it's something that's obviously incredibly difficult to try and prove in any way.

Now, as you can imagine, this discovery was big news among primatologists.

When word first got out, other researchers across Africa

also went looking for trees with strange marks and caches of rocks.

And they set up their own cameras.

And they saw the same thing.

Though, strangely, never in East Africa.

Which means this is some kind of learned behavior.

It's part of the culture of certain West African chimps.

So, this quickly became much bigger than just Laura Kehoe's story.

And it's led to some intense speculation.

Well, the original paper that came out,

which was written by 80 scientists,

led by Kuhlman Callen,

they also raised the possibility that this could be a ritual.

Anthropologist Barbara King.

It's the same stones over and over,

the same trees over and over.

So, this brings up the possibility of ritual.

Also occurs to me, though, that it could be something simpler.

Maybe the apes just enjoy forceful throwing at trees.

Maybe they enjoy what is essentially skilled practice at aimed throwing,

just like many of us would do if we had a pile of stones and trees.

Calling it a ritual is fine with me.

It seems like a ritualized behavior.

But it has been sort of overblown in the media.

Primatologist Frantz de Waal.

People started adding things like sacred ritual or religious ritual.

And the Daily Telegraph recently even had a headline,

chimpanzees believe in God.

Now, that seems a bit of a jump from piles of rock to believing in God.

Yes, but could it be some sort of proto-spiritual activity?

I mean, is that just totally out of bounds to even consider that?

No.

I think it is a hypothesis that you can put on the table.

But there's probably several others as well.

Is it to impress others that they're doing this?

Are others as an audience present?

Are there females present?

We don't know these things yet.

All of this reminded me of a story I heard from the great field biologist Jane Goodall.

Back in the 60s, when she was living with chimps in Gombe,

she used to see them occasionally stop at a waterfall.

You can hear the roar of the falling water.

It falls about 8 feet.

It's a small stream, but it makes a loud noise because it's falling on rock.

The chimpanzees, usually the males, will bristle a little bit, which is excitement.

And as they get near, they start this rhythmic display, swaying from foot to foot, often upright.

And they may climb the vines and push out into the spray.

And afterwards, they may sit watching the water.

You know, watching as it falls.

What is this strange substance which is always coming and always going and always here?

You can't help feeling that if they had a language like ours that would enable them to discuss whatever feeling it was,

that that would turn into some kind of animistic religion like worship of the elements.

You can't help feeling that it must be something.

That we would describe as awe, or wonder, or amazement, or something like that,

which can turn into this worship of things that we don't understand.

Well, it makes you wonder if our own ancient ancestors, millions of years ago,

or maybe even more recently than that, had similar experiences.

I would bet they did.

I think we still do.

I mean, I feel that because we...

...have this language, because we like to explain everything.

If we have experiences like that,

we describe it in terms of a spiritual experience or a mystic experience.

And whatever it is inside us that we feel makes us who we are,

different from our mind, we call a soul.

And if we have souls or spirits, if we do, then I suspect the chimpanzees do too.

And I've always felt that if I had to describe...

...what it is, I would say it's a little spark of a great spiritual power

that I felt so strongly around me when I was out in the forest alone.

And probably that little spark is in all living things.

And it's we, with our passion for describing everything,

that decided to call it a soul or a spirit or what have you.

I asked a lot of scientists if they think these experiences of awe or wonder

might be at the root of religion.

And most of them said yes.

But do chimpanzees have souls?

Well, that's another story.

Yeah, the question that I would like to ask to turn this around,

if I had Jane Goodall and the authors of the chimpanzee rituals

stone-throwing paper here, especially Laura Kehoe,

I would ask, what evidence do you see in chimpanzees' visible behavior

that convinces you that they have a conception of anything sacred?

And this is anthropologist Barbara King again.

I mean, we can't just be content to say there may be a ritual in stone-throwing.

How do we get from that to this very big leap of the sacred,

an experience of connection to forces outside oneself?

But I would also add the word some kind of sacred force,

some kind of mysterious, ineffable, unknowable force.

I don't see any evidence of that.

I don't see any kind of meaning-making going on in these chimpanzees.

But how would you know?

I mean, chimpanzees can't talk to us.

We can't actually get inside their minds.

How do we know whether or not they have any sense of meaning-making?

Well, my definition of meaning-making is that we need to see

some visible expression of behavior that meets certain criteria.

I don't know how we would ever answer that question in a scientific framework.

And to me, that makes the...

These claims of sacred shrines, very patently unscientific.

I am a scientist, and I think that this question is outside the realm of science.

But not necessarily wrong.

Who knows?

We have no idea what is behind there.

Science can't prove it.

Science can't disprove it either.

I mean, whether there is some kind of ritualistic, religious act happening here.

True.

We can't disprove it.

So why are we taking...

What I think is human, species-specific meaning-making

and insisting upon talking about it in chimpanzees?

Why are we so wrapped up in this question in the first place?

Doesn't that say a lot more about us than it does about the apes?

I kept wondering whether this whole business of chimpanzee spirituality

is strictly a science question.

What would a religion scholar think?

Do chimpanzees have religion?

I say, of course they do.

James Harrod's a scholar of religion and comparative mythology,

and he's written a paper called The Case for Chimpanzee Religion.

Now, he has some unconventional views.

He's come up with a trans-species definition of religion,

which includes behaviors that seem to show reverence and devotion

and experiences of awe or wonder at the apparent aliveness

of something that is not real.

Something like moving water.

And vocalizations like pant-hoots

that apparently call out to other members of the group

things like, I'm here, or are you with me?

We cannot know if they have spiritual beliefs.

So I just say, let's just set all that aside.

I'm not talking about beliefs.

So I'm doing chimpanzee theology, if you want to call it that,

but we're not talking about some intellectual concept.

I just want to talk about how they experience,

the reality of this mysterious world we're in.

So where does this leave those stone-throwing chimps in West Africa?

Well, Harrod has a novel and highly speculative theory.

He thinks it's some kind of proto-ethical behavior,

a way to deal with their bottled-up anger

from getting bullied by those alpha chimps in the group.

They can't express their aggression in that situation,

so at a later time, they displace that aggression,

and they're not able to express their aggression.

They can't express their aggression and anger

by throwing stones around,

or they're carrying the stones

that they might have wanted to throw at some bully.

They place them in the tree.

It's a wonderful metaphor.

So placing the stones in the hollow of a tree,

stones that could be thrown at somebody,

this is the necessary holding space

for our outrage at injustice and inequality.

Now, all that may sound a bit far-fetched,

but the point is, can we ever know why they throw these stones,

what they're thinking about,

and why do they sometimes just sit and stare at a waterfall?

This is where science may reach its limits.

That seemed to be one of the takeaways for Jane Goodall.

She spent decades trying to imagine the interior life of chimpanzees,

our closest relatives on Earth.

And in the end, she can only wonder.

I still maintain,

if I could be inside the mind of a chimpanzee

for just a few minutes,

I would learn more about them

than goodness knows how many years of study.

Because, you know, we can guess what they're thinking,

but how do they think?

How do they think?

Are they thinking in pictures?

I spent ages thinking about that,

wondering about it.

We think with words.

And when we don't think with words,

I think we come close to

what mystics might describe

as a mystical experience.

Because I don't think that words would come into that.

It's a feeling of complete oneness with the natural world.

And being able to hear it better,

and sense it better,

and smell it better,

and be better.

Steve Paulson produced our story.

So let's say our earliest human ancestors

were like those West African chimps.

And then at some point,

they went from admiring waterfalls

to worshipping them.

And then they developed sacred rituals

and local spirits.

And then came the battle of the gods.

I'm Anne Strangehamps.

It's to the best of our knowledge

from Wisconsin Public Radio

and PRX.

Nobody knows exactly how religion evolved.

But people think it went something like this.

For tens of thousands of years,

humans were hunter-gatherers.

They lived in forests and savannas

in small groups.

And they probably had some kind of animistic beliefs.

They painted animal spirits

on cave walls.

They carved bones or small stones

into totems.

They probably believed the landscape was alive

and sacred.

And then, in just a few thousand years,

everything changed.

People built bigger settlements

for hundreds and thousands.

And the big gods arrived.

All-knowing and all-powerful gods

who saw everything you did.

The mystery is,

why?

Where did those big gods come from?

And for that matter,

why are they still here?

Psychologist Ara Noran Zayan has a theory.

He told Raymond Tungakar

that any explanation of religion

has to answer two questions.

Major puzzles.

We have minds and brains

that are calibrated to live in small groups

of relatives and friends and allies.

Yet, we live in a world

that is mostly defined by interactions

with complete strangers.

That's the first puzzle.

The second puzzle that intrigued me

was the fact that

of all the possible religions

that exist in the world,

it seems like just a few

account for most believers in the world.

So I was trying to answer these two puzzles.

Okay, so let's unpack that first part.

I mean, you talked about,

how we transition from small hunter-gatherer societies

to larger communities.

And traditionally,

I would think that the explanation

that most people have for that transition

is, you know,

is agriculture

and the domestication of plants and animals.

But it would seem that you have a different theory.

That's correct.

So that's the prevailing notion.

But here is the thing.

A few decades ago,

there was this discovery

in south-central Turkey,

very near the Syrian border.

It's an archaeological site

called Gokal.

Gopekli Tepe.

What's really fascinating about this site

is that it may give us some answers

to this question

and may turn this idea on its head.

So Gopekli Tepe is about 11,500 years old.

So it's thousands of years older

than the oldest pyramids

or the Stonehenge.

It was built by hunter-gatherers.

It did not have agriculture.

Yet it's the world's oldest place

for religious worship.

It's the world's oldest temple.

And do we know what the prevailing religion

of the time was?

We don't really know.

It's very sketchy.

We see some stone pillars

that seem to indicate some animal worship

and some ritualistic behavior.

What's really striking about this site

is that it's a pre-agricultural site.

So the archaeologists who excavated this site,

Klaus Schmidt,

put the question this way.

He said,

is it possible that the temple came before the city?

That's the question that I explored

in my book, Big Gods.

What are these big gods that you refer to?

So these are the gods

of the world religions

that we now live with.

These are gods that are powerful.

They're omniscient.

They can know your mind.

They are intervening.

They are moralizing.

They care about human morality.

And they punish and reward human behavior.

What's really interesting is that

these types of gods are actually quite rare

in the ethnographic record.

So among foragers, for example,

where most of humanity evolved,

these types of spirits and gods

are extremely rare.

So then the question is,

how is it that these types of gods

became increasingly common?

So if we combine Christianity,

Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism,

that's already the overwhelming majority

of believers in the world.

Okay.

So why was this transition to big gods,

why was it significant?

Because, well, a few things.

One is that to the extent that

these kinds of beliefs

encourage interaction and cooperation

among strangers,

then that would give us

at least a partial explanation

for this remarkable expansion

of human group size

in the last 10,000 to 12,000 years.

So the problem with interaction

with strangers, of course,

is that why would you cooperate

with a complete stranger

and how would you trust them?

So the default strategy

in human psychology

is not to trust or interact with strangers.

Yet we do this all the time.

So one possible idea is that

to the extent that people believe

in these kinds of moralizing gods,

then that could give us some explanation

for why these groups expanded.

Okay, so big gods essentially led,

to a sort of revolution

in group cooperation

that allowed early humans

to move from hunter-gatherer societies

to larger groups.

But why weren't the so-called small gods,

the hunter-gatherer gods,

why weren't those moralizing gods?

Well, the thing about gods

of hunter-gatherer groups,

if you look at hunter-gatherer lifestyle,

you realize that these gods

are really not that important.

So most interactions in these groups

are among either family members,

relatives, or reciprocating partners,

people you know and interact with every day.

So these are transparent societies

where there is no problem

of cooperation among strangers.

So this only is a problem

for large-scale groups

where interaction with strangers is the norm.

I mean, I guess what I'm wondering, though,

is as humans are entering

into larger and larger communities,

facilitated by, you know,

the kind of cooperation that big gods allow,

I mean, I would think that you can have

some bad faith actors undermine that.

You can have some people

fake faith, for instance,

and pretend to be religious

in order to gain some kind of honored advantage.

What prevents that from happening?

That's a great question,

and you're right that religious hypocrisy,

as you're describing,

is a big problem for these communities

of cooperators.

And these societies have developed

various ways to cope or deal with this.

So one possible solution

is to require the faithful

to basically walk the walk

and not just walk the walk.

So I think that's a great question.

I think that's a great question.

Well, what's an example of that?

A good example of that is sacrifice, right?

So self-sacrifice

and accepting costly restrictions

on human behavior

are common and widespread

among these pro-social religions

with these big gods.

And one explanation for that is that,

well, if you don't expect

or require people to do costly things

like accept limitations on property,

who you can marry,

restrictions on food,

and even in some conditions,

sacrifice your life and limb

for the community.

And these are the kinds of signals

that will genuinely convince others

that they're interacting with a true believer.

As a result, cooperation can flourish

among these people.

Let's bring this to the present.

I mean, do big gods still facilitate

that kind of cooperation?

I think they do to some extent,

although today's world is a more complex world

and we have created other institutions

to encourage large-scale cooperation.

So we have lots of secular institutions,

institutions that basically have taken over

from religious sources of cooperation

to basically do the same thing.

So some societies have climbed the ladder of religion

and then kicked it away.

A good example is Northern Europe,

Scandinavian societies where majorities are not believers,

don't have religious beliefs anymore,

but they're living highly cooperative societies.

And largely because they have created institutions

that play that role, that encourage people

to cooperate with complete strangers.

Well, for instance,

what kind of institutions are you talking about?

I'm talking about courts, police, credit, trade, markets.

So I'm more likely to trust my neighbor

if I know that if I had a problem with my neighbor,

I could call the police

and the police can intervene, for example.

So policing institutions are a very important element

of large-scale cooperation

because in hunter-gatherer societies, there is no police.

You can call because you don't need police.

You can call, you can resolve your differences individually.

But as societies grow larger,

you need some institutions to come and settle disputes.

And you have to trust these institutions.

So you're saying then that thousands of years ago,

big gods helped humans cooperate.

Now you have secular institutions

and the commonality between both is that

both keep people honest and truthful

because there's an element of surveillance

and accountability built in.

Yeah.

I think that secular societies are surprisingly similar,

more similar than you think,

to the religious societies that they succeeded.

Instead of watchful deities,

you have watchful institutions,

norms that encourage cooperation

as long as you're part of the in-group,

part of the community.

So they're not that different,

even though often people think of them

as the opposites or clashing,

but they are largely serving the same functions.

Well, I have to ask,

if you were to compare

secular societies with perhaps more religious ones

that believed in big gods,

I mean, what's more effective in making people cooperate,

big gods or secular institutions?

Well, if your definition is something like corruption

or rule of law,

then clearly secular societies are doing better now.

Not all secular societies have strong rule of law,

but many do.

So as societies give up on religion,

they do so partly because they are developing alternatives

to religion.

And in modern society, in modern society,

in modern society, in modern society,

in modern world,

that seems to actually work pretty well.

It makes me wonder,

I mean, as more and more places around the world

strengthen their secular institutions

and establish the rule of law,

do you think it's inevitable

that someday we won't need big gods or religion?

Possibly.

I mean, it depends.

If you look at Scandinavia,

that's the best case scenario

where you see very strong institutions,

rule of law, cooperative societies,

very high trust levels,

and quite a decline of religion.

Japan might be an example like that.

The question, the big question

that I don't have the answer to is,

is the world moving in that direction inevitably,

or is this a temporary blip

in historical changes?

There are other things to consider.

For example, as societies secularize,

fertility rates decline quite massively.

So even though secularization is happening in the world,

at the same time,

These secularized societies are, if anything, shrinking because of decline in fertility rates,

whereas societies that are not secularizing, they're maintaining their religious levels,

they are actually expanding because of high fertility rates.

So that will factor in into these kinds of calculations about the future of religion

because one very powerful way that religion is transmitted is from parents to children.

That's Aran Norenzayan.

He's a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia.

Raymond Tungacar talked with him about his book, Big Gods.

And now, an experiment, maybe for you and your kids.

You put a snake and a rat in a box and you ask the children,

who's in the box, the rat and the snake?

And you've told them beforehand they're both hungry.

The box shakes.

Yeah.

And now you ask the children, who's in the box?

And they'll say, well, just a snake.

Where's the rat?

Well, the snake ate the rat.

Is the rat hungry?

Yes.

So they have this sense of aspects of life or personhood that endure post-body.

From snakes and rats to the resurrection,

humans become believers up next.

I'm Anne Strainchamps.

It's To the Best of Our Knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX.

Religion says God created humans.

Science says humans created God.

It's kind of a cosmic chicken and egg question.

And it seems like the answer has to be one or the other.

Or does it?

Jeff Schloss is an evolutionary biologist.

He's also Christian.

And as a scientist, Jeff's interested in the question

of whether the human capacity for religious belief

is a product of nature, inborn, or nurture, learned.

He thinks it's probably some of each.

For example, he told Steve Paulson that we all seem to arrive in this world

with something called a hypersensitive agency detection device, or HAD.

This looks like it emerges very early on.

Even infants make the distinction.

What's the difference between animate and inanimate objects?

And it makes sense.

We've got to avoid predators and snakes.

And some people argue that, well, it's better to jump out of the way of a snake that isn't there

than to fail to jump out of the way of a snake who is there.

So our agency detection devices are tuned to be a little hypersensitive.

And so we may end up seeing agents that aren't there, maybe even spirits and ancestors and gods.

But that's just a byproduct.

Actually thinking.

If there are spirits or gods isn't adaptive.

The adaptive thing is jumping out of the way of snakes that aren't there.

And there are others who say, no, we have an innate disposition to believe in these beings.

And it is adaptive.

Okay, so we've been trying to come up with these evolutionary explanations

for why people might be religious.

What about transcendence?

What about the experience that some people report of revelation or of the experience of the numinous?

Does that figure into any of this?

There's a gripping power of religious experience that involves the numinous,

where you just have an experience of reverential awe.

I did my fieldwork at the University of Michigan Biological Station up in northern Michigan.

We often see northern lights.

But one night it was...

It was one of the...

One of the most dramatic manifestations of the aurora borealis that any of us have ever seen.

Giant tongues of multicolored flame were leaping up from the horizon to the middle of the sky.

And there's a group of us out on the lake watching it.

And...

One of my colleagues, well known for his atheism,

after one particularly spectacular flame, he said,

Whoa, I'm going to church tomorrow.

And the whole group burst into laughter.

We knew what he meant.

We were all experiencing this numinosity.

And there was this disposition to think that there was something more.

So where does it come from?

Well, my colleague would say, well, it comes from the radiance.

It comes from the radiation display in the sky.

But what do you say if people have those experiences apart from the aurora borealis?

If they're sitting in their room and they are overcome by an awareness of a numinous presence?

I don't think it's a question that science can answer of whether there's a downstream presence really there.

Whether God is there.

Yeah.

And if there were a God there,

we'd still have the question,

is God somehow causally generating that experience?

Or is he always there?

And something within our internal physiology in some people generate moments of awareness of his presence.

And if it's the latter case, you don't invoke God as part of the proximal explanation.

It's just not a delusion.

It's a revelation.

Is this a science question?

I mean, can science...

Can science come to any answer of that dilemma that you pose?

I mean, like, you know, essentially, is God there or not?

Well, I think science could answer the question,

can we come up with a causally adequate explanation of where the experience comes from?

So let's forget the aurora borealis.

Somebody's in their room.

I'm talking about me, actually.

Tell me about you.

I mean, does this...

I'm guessing there's something from your personal experience.

Okay, yeah.

I was not raised in any particular religious tradition,

maybe even, not even maybe, somewhat anti-religious

in a family of German-Jewish Holocaust refugees

who believed that religion was the source of human ills.

Didn't settle the question for me of whether there was a God.

And...

I was reading C.S. Lewis,

and I, frankly, I found him unpersuasive and a little irritating,

that he would think his arguments were adequate.

And I read Why I'm Not a Christian, unpersuaded,

and I actually despaired of reason being able to solve these questions.

I was laying in my bed one night

and decided to pray to a God who I wasn't sure was there.

Okay.

I give up.

Reason's never going to solve it.

And...

in that moment, the most glorious,

numinous,

loving, overwhelming personal presence

that I had ever experienced or even ever imagined

flooded my heart

and filled the room.

Sounds like it changed your life.

It did.

Profoundly changed my life.

And I found a narrative to help make sense of that experience,

which for me was the Christian faith.

But you actually are from a Jewish background,

sort of a more or less atheist Jewish background.

My immediate family, atheist, larger family,

was practicing, and we were sitting around Passover

at my uncle's house,

who my uncle loved me dearly,

and he says,

you know, aren't you betraying your...

tradition by this move,

and what do you need this Jesus person for?

And I'll tell you, I had been living a pretty...

well, life on the edge would be an understatement.

My dad jumps in and he says,

Gary, that's enough.

I don't know who this Jesus is,

but all I can say,

the changes he's made in my son's life,

God bless him.

So...

In any case, this is a little of a diversion,

but to your question,

could science...

explain that experience?

And if it did,

would it remove the warrant

for believing that the experience

was in any way truth-tracking,

or revealed anything about the truth of things?

And I think, I really believe that science

could come up with a proximal explanation

of what my brain was doing.

So it might, science could maybe figure out

what triggered this,

like, obviously,

something happened in your brain

to be able to have this experience,

but not necessarily

the ultimate cause of the trigger.

Yeah, science could certainly explain

what was happening in my brain

during the experience.

What part of the brain is it

that actually perceives,

not just agency,

but experiences, personhood?

What caused these events in the brain?

You know, maybe it was something I ate,

or some development,

or maybe it was a developmental cascade

that culminated in that moment.

I'm open to the possibility

that maybe the trigger wasn't natural.

Maybe there is a divine decision.

I'm going to give this experience to Jeff.

If that's the case,

I don't think science could explain it.

And then the last question is,

okay, so let's say we do come up with an explanation.

It was a drug that Jeff took.

And then the last question is,

okay, so let's say we do come up with an explanation.

It was a drug that Jeff took.

Well, we still have the...

Could science say anything about the ultimate cause?

About whether or not there was in fact

an intelligent, loving being

who so constructed the...

Well, no, science can't say anything

about that one way or another.

Science can come up with discoveries

and descriptions of the world

that seem to comport

or not comport with the idea

of a loving, moral, intelligent creator.

But science can't adjudicate

whether such a creator actually exists.

That's Jeff Schloss.

He's a professor of biology

at Westmont College in California.

And he and Steve talked more

about evolution and religious belief

in this week's Podcast Extra.

Also, if you'd like to read

essays about evolution and morality

by Jeff Schloss and some others,

you'll find them on the website

of humansandnature.org.

They were our partners

in this episode.

So you wouldn't think

you could find that many scientists

whose careers were inspired

by mystical experiences.

But you know what?

Here's another.

Meet Andrew Newberg.

My own story with regard to

just thinking about the universe

started out as a kid,

and I just always asked a lot of questions.

He's a neuroscientist.

I wanted to understand

what it was that I was looking at.

And I just thought,

well, if we're all looking at the same world,

shouldn't we all come to the same conclusion?

Ultimately, I came up with this idea

that, well, if I was really going to

figure out what was real

and what we could know,

that anything that I wasn't really sure of,

I would put into what I would refer to

as a kind of realm of doubt.

It didn't mean that it was wrong.

It didn't mean that it was right.

It just meant that I wasn't sure at that moment.

I went to college and medical school.

I had kind of a summer off there,

and I spent a lot of that summer

in fairly deep contemplation,

philosophical meditations, if you will,

trying to resolve this issue.

How could I get beyond all of these questions?

And then one day,

something happened.

It was a nice summer day.

I'd spent some time walking outside

and just sort of thinking about things.

As I kept striving for this,

I was just getting more and more anxious.

It was very upsetting to me that I couldn't get to an answer.

Finally, I had this experience

where I came to this realization

that ultimately

there was nothing I could know.

Everything was doubted,

and there was no way that anything

had any kind of solid foundation.

Everything just blended into this one

kind of a deep emptiness,

but there was this

incredible feeling of

calm, I guess maybe

a blissfulness,

may be the best way to describe it.

Ultimately, I know no other way

of describing it other than to call it

infinite doubt.

And with a little meditation

or focus, he can still summon up

that feeling. So what started

as Andrew Newberg's personal

experience of spiritual bliss

or enlightenment or infinite

doubt, whatever you want to call it,

led to his scientific

practice. Andrew is

one of the founders of neurotheology,

the study of the human brain

on enlightenment.

He's done hundreds of brain scan studies

of meditating monks and

praying nuns, psychic mediums,

Pentecostals, Sufi mystics,

and he says they all have something in

common. Well, I think that there is

certainly a neuroscientific

signature of these experiences.

One of the other fortunate things

that I had the opportunity to do was actually to scan

my own brain. And I was in an

MRI scanner. We were doing some testing

with it. And I said, well, listen,

why don't you just do a scan?

I'm just going to sit here and be quiet.

And let's see what happens.

So I didn't tell them that I was going to

kind of get back into that meditative state

and just kind of rest within this

infinite doubt. But I was

able to do that, at least for

a short period of time, even while I was

in the scanner. And what was fascinating

was that when I looked at the scan,

one of the areas of my brain,

the parietal lobe, which is located

in the back of my brain and

all of our brains, that was an area that

actually started to shut down.

And for a long time, we've

been hypothesizing that

this is an area that normally helps us to

create our sense of self. And that during

that kind of an experience,

as we lose that sense of

self, as the boundaries between ourselves

and the world begin to blur, as the boundaries

between other objects, everything in the world

just kind of becomes a oneness,

that there would be a shutting down,

a decrease of activity in this area.

And that's exactly what I actually saw

in my own brain. So do you

think that it's only

some lucky or

spiritually gifted people

who can do this? Or are

all human brains kind of

essentially hardwired, you know,

preset for this experience?

Well, I think it's the latter. I think the evidence

suggests that pretty much anyone can

have these experiences. That doesn't

mean everyone will. But if we

look at the data that we've collected

over the last 20 years,

which includes several hundred people

getting their brain scans,

and more recently, an online

survey, and we have about 2,000

people who provided us

information about who they are,

their religious and spiritual background,

their medical background, and the narratives

about the experiences themselves.

To me, the real take-home message is

that everyone can have these experiences.

And people sometimes think, oh, you know,

that's only for the Mother Teresas

of the world, or the Buddhas of the world.

And the evidence suggests just the

opposite. And then what I hope

that we can do is use that information

in a way that can help

more effectively guide people

down their own paths towards enlightenment.

But I just want to point out the kind of

remarkable thing you're talking about, which is

using science to improve

people's spiritual lives.

So there's a,

this all kind of begs

a question. We're talking

about spiritual religious experience

using the language of science, and isn't

there something essentially reductionist

about that? I mean, let's say

I have an experience of

a transcendent reality, you know, call

it God, or the divine, or something

I experience as a living

reality outside the bounds

of the merely human.

I'm not sure I really want you to tell me

that that's the result of electrochemical

surges in my brain.

Well, it's a

very important question, and I think

part of the way to

understand this has to do with

the causal relationships.

The analogy I sometimes think about is

there's a boat on the ocean.

When we do a brain scan, are we looking at the boat,

or are we looking at the wake of the boat?

Either way, it still tells us something interesting.

It still tells us something about the boat.

But the question is, how much can we actually know?

And so I think, you know,

we always have to be very careful in this field of

neurotheology about what kinds of conclusions

that we draw. And I think ultimately

it's probably a little bit of both.

I mean, it's probably a little bit of our biology

creating the experience, and a little bit of the

experience creating the biology.

Biology is the symptom, not the cause.

Exactly. So, you know, there are many shamanic

cultures throughout the world where

they take a mushroom or something,

and for them, the spiritual experience

that ensues

is not artificial. The mushroom

was just a way of getting the person

into the spiritual realm,

which is a real thing.

And, you know, the analogy that I always use is that

I have very bad vision, so when I wake up

in the morning, it's a very blurry world, and I put on

my glasses and suddenly it's clear.

What if taking a drug or doing

one of these practices is a way of just

making the world clear for the brain,

and maybe by clear we're saying

we're seeing the world in some kind of

new consciousness level,

a spiritual level, maybe even a

supernatural level? These are the big questions.

And again, it gets back to the infinite doubt, too,

that, you know, look, I don't know,

you know, that's why I keep looking

and we keep exploring.

Well, you've been studying this kind of stuff

for quite a long time, but the thing that you've been

working on recently is seeing

if you can take all of this scientific

information that you've accumulated

and use it to

help people have these

experiences. So, what have you figured

out? Sure. Well, I

think that, you know, again, we look

at all of these experiences that people

have, we look at the biology of how we

understand what's going on in these

experiences. Some people, enlightenment just

hits no matter what they're doing. So,

those are the fortunate few. We have some

wonderful examples of people basically just driving their car

down the street and suddenly an experience

happens to them. But

for most people, it

is a bit of a process. And I think

that there are a couple of steps that we've outlined.

So, one of the early steps, which any

one can do, is to think about

what enlightenment means to them. What are they

looking for? For me, it was

sort of a striving for knowledge

and understanding. And for other

people, you know, it might be something different.

And then the second part is preparing

yourself for that journey and for

that process. You know, if you go hiking in

the woods, you know, you just don't walk out the door

and hope for the best. I mean, you go and you take

your backpack and you bring water

and some food. And so,

you know, part of it is to be prepared for the

experience. And sometimes these experiences

they can be both wonderful

and scary at the same time.

They can transform your life. And

so, to some degree, you have to say to yourself,

I'm alright with the fact that my life may

change going forward. I think

perhaps the most individualized aspect

of all of this is finding

the ritual, finding the individual

path that works best for you.

You know, if you're a Catholic, it might be doing

the rosary or some particular prayer

or going to church. If you're a Buddhist,

it might be doing some type of specific

meditative practice. Each person

has to kind of find those

different processes and those different

rituals that work best for them.

And as you do this on some type of fairly

regular, repetitive basis,

you ultimately allow yourself

to let go. The idea of saying,

okay, now I'm just going to

open myself up to whatever happens

and whatever that experience is and just let

it come to me. That's when

you have these very dramatic changes

in the brain that seem

to be associated with those kinds of

experiences. So here's

what seems to me one of the really big questions.

If we're all walking

around with these brains

that have evolved

to have this amazing

capability, why?

Like, why do you think our

brains evolved to have the capacity

for spiritual experience?

Well, that is a very interesting

question and there are a couple of different ways

of going about thinking about that.

You know, some people feel like

this is something that they refer

to as an epiphenomenon that, you know,

our brains developed so that we could

try to interact with the world and as we

thought about things and solve problems

and, you know, connected with others socially,

that this is something that kind of grew

out of that process. And I

think that to some degree that that's part of what

probably did happen. But

part of it is that,

you know, our brain is capable

of transcending itself,

of changing from one moment of life to the

next. It's part of what evolution

is, which is to go

beyond where you are now. And I

think that these experiences

are a kind of ultimate expression

of that. Do you feel

at a gut level that we

are evolving on a spiritual

path?

You know, it seems

like we are. You know, this is where

it's always hard when

you're kind of in the middle of it to know exactly

where you're headed.

You know, we do keep evolving

and whether we are ultimately evolving to something

which is a greater

sense of being connected

to the universe in some way, a greater

sense of connecting to some

sort of universal consciousness or universal

reality, to what

extent it is a truly

spiritual evolution or

it's a more biological one or some

combination of the two, which

to me seems perhaps the most likely.

You know, we'll have to see. But yeah,

I think that because these experiences

are so powerful for people, I think we'll ultimately

get them to that kind of

an enlightened

perspective, an enlightened

vein of looking at the world and truly

understanding it in a way that we never

have before. Thank you.

That is just great. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Andrew Newberg

is Director of Research at the Myrna Brind

Center of Integrative Medicine at

Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia.

And he's the author with Mark Waldman

of How Enlightenment Changes

Your Brain.

Today's show is produced in partnership

with the Center for Humans and Nature.

And if you're still curious, you'll find

essays on evolution and morality

by Jeff Schloss,

Ara Norenzayan, and other scholars

on their website,

humansandnature.org.

To the best of our knowledge comes to you from Madison,

Wisconsin, and the studios of

Wisconsin Public Radio. Steve Paulson

produced this episode. He had help from

Charles Monroe Cain, Raymond Tangakar,

Doug Gordon, and Mark Rickers.

Our technical director and sound

designer is Joe Hartke.

I'm Anne Strainchamps. Thanks for listening.

PRX