Did God create the brain or does the brain create God?

The book “Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist‘s Case for the Existence of the Soul” suggests that humans are, indeed, spiritual beings--and that neuroscience can challenge the existing materialist view (which is a monistic philosophy).

Thus, we are trying to challenge the materialist claim that “mind, consciousness, and self are mere by-products of the brain’s electrical and chemical processes, and that RSME’s [religion, spirituality, mystical experiences] are nothing but brain states or delusions created by neural activity. Thus, the human brain creates these experiences and, in doing so, creates God.”

However, there is evidently some disconnect between this materialist claim and facts because empirical data suggests that “individuals who have RSME’s do in fact contact an objectively real force that exists outside themselves.” Hence, materialist neuroscience cannot simply reduce mind, consciousness, self, and RSME’s to mere neurobiology.

According to the non-materialist view, there is substance in the belief that humans are spiritual beings--one that even survives death. In a Beliefnet survey in 2005, 79% of subjects described themselves as spiritual and only 64% claimed that they were religious. Furthermore, this spiritual tendency is more than just an unconscious desire to avoid death.

Indeed, humans are able to become spiritual beings because we all have inherited the capacity for abstract ideas such as God, the future, and ethics. Also, we are spiritual because we have assumed that we can survive death. Hence, we tend to hope for, and imagine, heaven, hell, and reincarnation.

In conclusion, humans are spiritual beings because individual minds and individual selves “arise from and are linked together by a divine Ground of Being (or primordial matrix), which underlies both the physical and psychological realms.” Thus, the spaceless, timeless, and infinite spirit exists in the cosmic order, which includes both physis (the material nature) and psyche (the spiritual nature). Lastly, both the mind and consciousness “represent a fundamental and irreducible property of the Ground of Being”; for which, the mind, the consciousness, and the self profoundly affect the physical world.



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Question For You:
Have you ever been aware of, or influenced by, a presence or a power--whether you call it God or not--which is different from your everyday self? If you have, then, we can assume that RSME’s can have both life-changing effects and a psycho spiritual transformation. Of course, the brain merely mediates RSME’s but does not produce them.

*In the U.S. General Social Survery of 1998, 39% of those polled have claimed that RSME’s truly had impacted their lives. Now, do you still think that the brain creates God or is it vice-versa?