Tests of faith opens with some stats:
Last year, an ICM poll found 85% of Americans believe that God created the universe. In Nigeria, 98% claimed always to have believed in God, while nine out of 10 Indonesians said they would die for their God or religious beliefs. Last month, a survey by the market research bureau of Ireland found 87% of the population believe in God. Rather than rocking their faith, 19% said tragedies such as the Asian tsunami, which killed 300,000 people, bolstered their belief. Polls have their faults, but if the figures are even remotely right they illustrate the prevalence of faith in the modern world.
Humans seem “wired” for spiritual belief:
Psychological tests Boyer has run on children go some way to proving our natural tendency to believe. “If you look at three- to five-year-olds, when they do something naughty, they have an intuition that everyone knows they’ve been naughty, regardless of whether they have seen or heard what they’ve done. It’s a false belief, but it’s good preparation for belief in an entity that is moral and knows everything,” he says. “The idea of invisible agents with a moral dimension who are watching you is highly attention-grabbing to us.”
The biology of epiphany:
At the University of California in San Diego, neuroscientist VS Ramachandran noticed that a disproportionate number of patients — around a quarter — with a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy reported having deeply moving religious experiences. “They’d tell me they felt a presence or suddenly felt they got the meaning of the whole cosmos. And these could be life-changing experiences,” says Ramachandran. The feelings always came during seizures, even if the seizures were so mild, they could only be detected by sensitive electroencephalograms (EEGs). Between the seizures, some patients became preoccupied with thoughts about God.Ramachandran drew up three explanations he thought might explain why the patients with epilepsy seemed so spiritual. First, he considered that the upwelling of emotion caused by the seizure might simply overwhelm, and patients made sense of it by believing that something extremely spiritual was going on. Second, the seizure might prompt the left hemisphere to make up yarns to account for seemingly inexplicable emotions. The ability of the brain’s left hemisphere to “confabulate” like this is well known to neuroscientists. Third, he wondered whether seizures disrupted the function of part of the brain called the amygdala which, among other tasks, helps us focus on what is significant while allowing us to ignore the trivial.