A Return to Religion

Jane Lott

By his own account, Michael Davis was a juvenile delinquent. Kicked out of school for theft, and later for drug use, he finally graduated from a boys ranch run by the California Youth Authority (CYA). Later, despite a year playing football for Cosumnes River College and a stint working at UC Davis and a bank, despite his parents going to bat for him and his marriage to a CYA counselor and despite an honorable discharge from that program, Davis ended up in prison at age 25-the first time. For the next 15 years after, he cycled in and out of California's prison system. By the time he was 40, he was facing a life sentence.

"I would get out and say I would do right," he says. "But it's hard when you're not used to doing good."

He tried, though. He read the Bible more than once. In fact, by his final lock-up, he had been through a stack of Bibles-literally. Every time he entered a different prison, Davis would receive a new Bible-the only item he was allowed during the weeks it took his personal effects to be screened. And when he acted up and was put in isolation, he was permitted to take with him only a Bible. His mother still has a collection of his Bibles, the pages so well-riffled they fan at the outside edges where the paper is thin from repeated thumbing.

"All those years in prison," he says, "I would study and study and study." But somehow the studying didn't make it into action.

The first time he faced strike three, the charges against him were dropped for some technical reason. Expecting them to be re-filed (they never were), Davis left prison with a "what-the-hell" attitude. He was soon picked up again, charged with a third strike for the second time. When the witness against him was discredited and these charges, too, were dropped, Davis walked out of prison believing in miracles.

"I came out with my hands up. I said, 'All right, God, what you want me to do?'"

And this time, he listened for the answer. This conversion was the beginning of Davis' life of ministry, which includes clothing the homeless, witnessing to the faithful and establishing not one but two Bible colleges. He currently teaches at World Harvest Bible College and preaches at World Harvest church, both in West Sacramento.

Religion and God

"People are looking for something," Davis explains. "They're not being fulfilled. It's not in the jobs; it's not in the relationships; it's not in the money." The answer, he says, is God. "People are finding out there's not too much you can do without Him." For Davis, religion is a manifestation of God.

For others, however, the two are not so inextricably linked. "One should not confuse religion and God," says Fred Previc, a brain researcher from San Antonio, Texas. "Religion is a product of the brain, whereas God is the producer of the universe."

Previc is one of a number of scientists looking at religion and the brain in a new field known as neurotheology, or the neuropsychology of religion. These researchers seek to understand not God, but the religious experience. "Religion is a behavior that can be studied like any other behavior," Previc explains. He considers religion a physiological phenomenon. In fact, he has hypothesized, based on twin studies, that religious experience and behavior have a biological basis and that the brain's evolutionary increase in the neurochemical dopamine is linked to the evolution of religion.

Divine Dopamine

According to Previc, "dopamine gets us thinking about distance-space-time." By this, he means not just external space, but distant space; not linear time, but eternal time, including the time after death. "Religion is comprised of beliefs, practices and experiences," Previc explains. "They generally involve things that are supernatural." Dopamine provides an emphasis on the astral and cosmological events and predictions that are associated with religion. But it's involved not just in thinking about these, but in somehow controlling them. "The belief in the ability to connect events and control them-this is something the dopaminergic mind provides," says Previc.

As one of the mediators of the human brain's reward system, dopamine is responsible for goal-directed behavior and the prediction of outcomes, even to predicting the future, an illusion of control. Previc notes that humans want to be able to control events. "By controlling events, we control anxiety," he says, adding that belief in an afterlife is one type of dopaminergic tendency, leading to a sense that we can control something even if it's beyond our death. Thus, dopamine regulates the brain's perception of control along a spectrum ranging from an internal locus that assumes a person can control events to an external locus that assumes a person has no control. In other words, from free-will to pre-destiny.

In most formalized American religions, God is, to varying degrees, external along this spectrum depending upon the dogma. So, paradoxically, while humans want a sense of control, they also seek someone or something outside of themselves to be in control. This external outlook could be due to the neurochemical ratio in the brain. As Previc says, "People who have more dopamine in general tend to be more religious."

But there is an interesting caveat. The brain is malleable, and brain chemistry changes in response to environmental pressures. "In an uncertain environment," Previc says, "you increase your dopamine and respond to the challenging circumstances." This could explain why people under stressful circumstances-inmates in prison or concentration camps, for example, or soldiers in the front lines of battle-often turn to religion in a conversion much like Davis had.

Inside the brain, or out? Individual or social?

What Previc calls an individual phenomenon Professor Allison P. Coudert, Castelfranco Chair in Religious Studies at UC Davis, describes as a social construct, a system designed by a specific society. Coudert notes that humans are primarily social animals with social brains, far more interested in group dynamics and gossip than scientific abstractions. While acknowledging the important role of the brain in understanding the human experience of God, Coudert explains that "even more than the sheer difficulty of science, what accounts for the persistence of religion is that it, and only it, can provide what most human beings seem to want so desperately: explanations for why bad things happen to good people and the promise of some kind of ultimate reward and compensation from the inevitable pain and suffering of human life."

Even from his neuropsychological perspective, Previc concedes that "whether you are religious or not has to do with your society."

Coudert would say that society determines not just if you are religious, but how that manifests. Native Americans, for example, and other people who lived in closer harmony with nature than most modern Americans, worshipped gods of natural things-so, there is a god of thunder, of the moon, of the cornfields. Like Native Americans, Greeks, Hindus, early Christians and others worshipped female gods. In the U.S., these forms of religion are no longer as popular as they once were. But then again, neither are the traditional churches whose quest for religious freedom helped form this country.

Though the U.S. has never had a single established religion or church, it is, as Coudert notes, "terribly religious. It always has been." The number of people in the U.S. who attend an institutional worship service each week hovers at around 42 percent, according to Gallup polls, a number far greater than, say, Europe. But, Coudert says, "America has an incredibly diverse religious landscape." A function of this landscape is a growing trend away from traditional religion and toward spirituality.

This trend, Coudert notes, is a result of social changes: the breakdown of community and the accent on individualism.

"People who say they are spiritual tend to be disillusioned by institutionalized religion," she explains. For example, those people who abhor violence tend to recoil over religious wars. But despite the horrors committed over the course of history in the name of God, religion can be amazingly positive, Coudert says, noting Davis' conversion as an example.

What is unclear from science at this point, and what might never be understood is this: Is conversion a response to an increase in dopamine, making the person more susceptible to a belief in a higher power, or did the increase in dopamine create a brain environment that allowed the person to see a higher power that was there all the time? Or did God actually intervene, dopamine or no?

Scientists continue to climb the mountain of knowledge searching for answers. But as Previc says, when scientists reach the pinnacle, theologians will be there waiting. On this, Coudert agrees. Whether it's called religion, spirituality, or neuropsychological religiosity, Coudert emphasizes that religion offers something essential to the human spirit. Alluding to Nietzsche, she says, "God may be dead but religion is here to stay."