Broca's Brain: The Romance of Science

Attempts at rationalistic explanations of religious belief have been resisted vigorously. Voltaire argued that if God did not exist Man would be obliged to invent him, and was reviled for the remark. Freud proposed that a paternalistic God is partly our projection as adults of our perceptions of our fathers when we were infants; he also called his book on religion The Future of an Illusion. He was not despised as much as we might imagine for these views, but perhaps only because he had already demonstrated his disreputability by introducing such scandalous notions as infantile sexuality.

Why is the opposition to rational discourse and reasoned argument in religion so strong? In part, I think it is because our common perinatal experiences are real but resist accurate recollection. But another reason, I think, has to do with the fear of death. Human beings and our immediate ancestors and collateral relatives, such as the Neanderthals, are probably the first organisms on this planet to have a clear awareness of the inevitability of our own end. We will die and we fear death. This fear is worldwide and transcultural. It probably has significant survival value. Those who wish to postpone or avoid death can improve the world, reduce its perils, make children who will live after us, and create great works by which they will be remembered. Those who propose rational and skeptical discourse on things religious are perceived as challenging the remaining widely held solution to the human fear of death, the hypothesis that the soul lives on after the body’s demise. [27] Since we feel strongly, most of us, about wishing not to die, we are made uncomfortable by those who suggest that death is the end; that the personality and the soul of each of us will not live on. But the soul hypothesis and the God hypothesis are separable; indeed, there are some human cultures in which the one can be found without the other. In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.

Those who raise questions about the God hypothesis and the soul hypothesis are by no means all atheists. An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed. A wide range of intermediate positions seems admissible, and considering the enormous emotional energies with which the subject is invested, a questing, courageous and open mind seems to be the essential tool for narrowing the range of our collective ignorance on the subject of the existence of God.

When I give lectures on borderline or pseudo or folk science (along the lines of Chapters 5 through 8 of this book) I am sometimes asked if similar criticism should not be applied to religious doctrine. My answer is, of course, yes. Freedom of religion, one of the rocks upon which the United States was founded, is essential for free inquiry. But it does not carry with it any immunity from criticism or reinterpretation for the religions themselves. The words “question” and “quest” are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth. I do not insist that these connections between religion and perinatal experience are correct or original. Many of them are at least implicit in the ideas of Stanislav Grof and the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry, particularly Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud. But they are worth thinking about.

There is, of course, a great deal more to the origin of religion than these simple ideas suggest. I do not propose that theology is physiology entirely. But it would be astonishing, assuming we really can remember our perinatal experiences, if they did not affect in the deepest way our attitudes on birth and death, sex and childhood, on purpose and ethics, on causality and God.

AND COSMOLOGY. Astronomers studying the nature and origin and fate of the universe make elaborate observations, describe the cosmos in differential equations and the tensor calculus, examine the universe from X-rays to radio waves, count the galaxies and determine their motions and distances-and when all is done a choice is to be made between three different views: a Steady State cosmology, blissful and quiet; an Oscillating Universe, in which the universe expands and contracts, painfully and forever; and a Big Bang expanding universe, in which the cosmos is created in a violent event, suffused with radiation (“Let there be light”) and then grows and cools, evolves and becomes quiescent, as we saw in the previous chapter. But these three cosmologies resemble with an awkward, almost embarrassing precision the human perinatal experiences of Grof’s Stages 1, 2, and 3 plus 4, respectively.

It is easy for modern astronomers to make fun of the cosmologies of other cultures-for example, the Dogon idea that the universe was hatched from a cosmic egg (Chapter 6). But in light of the ideas just presented, I intend to be much more circumspect in my attitudes toward folk cosmologies; their anthropocentrism is just a little bit easier to discern than ours. Might the puzzling Babylonian and Biblical references to waters above and below the firmament, which Thomas Aquinas struggled so painfully to reconcile with Aristotelian physics, be merely an amniotic metaphor? Are we incapable of constructing a cosmology that is not some mathematical encrypting of our own personal origins?

Einstein’s equations of general relativity admit a solution in which the universe expands. But Einstein, inexplicably, overlooked such a solution and opted for an absolutely static, nonevolving cosmos. Is it too much to inquire whether this oversight had perinatal rather than mathematical origins? There is a demonstrated reluctance of physicists and astronomers to accept Big Bang cosmologies in which the universe expands forever, although conventional Western theologians are more or less delighted with the prospect. Might this dispute, based almost certainly on psychological predispositions, be understood in Grofian terms?

I do not know how close the analogies are between personal perinatal experiences and particular cosmological models. I suppose it is too much to hope that the originators of the Steady State hypothesis were each born by Caesarean section. But the analogies are very close, and the possible connection between psychiatry and cosmology seems very real. Can it really be that every possible mode of origin and evolution of the universe corresponds to a human perinatal experience? Are we such limited creatures that we are unable to construct a cosmology that differs significantly from one of the perinatal stages? [28] Is our ability to know the universe hopelessly ensnared and enmired in the experiences of birth and infancy? Are we doomed to recapitulate our origins in a pretense of understanding the universe? Or might the emerging observational evidence gradually force us into an accommodation with and an understanding of that vast and awesome universe in which we float, lost and brave and questing?

It is customary in the world’s religions to describe Earth as our mother and the sky as our father. This is true of Uranus and Gaea in Greek mythology, and also among Native Americans, Africans, Polynesians, indeed most of the peoples of the planet Earth. However, the very point of the perinatal experience is that we leave our mothers. We do it first at birth and then again when we set out into the world by ourselves. As painful as those leave-takings are, they are essential for the continuance of the human species. Might this fact have some bearing on the almost mystical appeal that space flight has, at least for many of us? Is it not a leaving of Mother Earth, the world of our origins, to seek our fortune among the stars? This is precisely the final visual metaphor of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a Russian schoolmaster, almost entirely self-educated, who, around the turn of the century, formulated many of the theoretical steps that have since been taken in the development of rocket propulsion and space flight. Tsiolkovsky wrote: “The Earth is the cradle of mankind. But one does not live in the cradle forever.”

[27] One curious variant is given in Arthur Schnitzler’s Flight Into Darkness: “… at all the moments of death of any nature, one lives over again his past life with a rapidity inconceivable to others. This remembered life must also have a last moment, and this last moment its own last moment, and so on, and hence, dying is itself eternity, and hence, in accordance with the theory of limits, one may approach death but can never reach it.” In fact, the sum of an infinite series of this sort is finite, and the argument fails for mathematical as well as other reasons. But it is a useful reminder that we are often willing to accept desperate measures to avoid a serious confrontation with the inevitability of death.

[28] Kangaroos are born when they are little more than embryos and must then make, entirely unassisted, a heroic journey hand over hand from birth canal to pouch. Many fail this demanding test. Those who succeed find themselves once again in a warm, dark and protective environment, this one equipped with teats. Would the religion of a species of intelligent marsupials invoke a stern and implacable god who severely tests marsupialkind? Would marsupial cosmology deduce a brief interlude of radiation in a premature Big Bang followed by a “Second Dark,” and then a much more placid emergence into the universe we know?