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Hard-wired religion
Religion, write the authors, turns out to be good for us "... in profound and pragmatic ways." And it persists because 

... the wiring of the human brain continues to provide believers with a range of unitary experiences that are often interpreted as assurances that God exists.

Research, they say, shows that religious people are physically and mentally healthier than others. Their support networks render religious people less likely to fall prey to social ills.

Could it be, they ask, that the realer-than-real experiences of religious people and mystics means that 

... the mind's machinery of transcendence may in fact be a window through which we can glimpse the ultimate realness of something that is truly divine? 

Is God hard-wired into us?

In a chapter sub-titled In Search of Absolutes the authors conclude that 

... our understanding of the brain and the way it judges for us what is real argues compellingly that the existence of an absolute higher reality or power is at least as rationally possible as is the existence of a purely material world.

In other words, if brain brain activity is the means by which we infer an external world, and if brain activity tells us that we are experiencing an "Absolute Other", then there is as much chance of the Absolute Other existing as there is that the material world exists.

Seems logical, doesn't it? Even scientists experience the numinous. The authors quote one who says, 

If [a scientist] has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense, invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist.

The reader must decide for himself if this book's arguments for the objectivity of God are good. I for one was left with an impression that it stops just short of concluding that the God of mysticism is objectively real and out-there. It seemed to me that the discussion at this point lacks cohesiveness and strength:

• The words "reality" and "real" appear to be used with fluctuating meaning.
• Something called "science" is caricatured as rejecting this and accepting that, when it is only scientists who do either.
• Having been given a fairly tight definition at the beginning of the book, the word "mind" is used in what are clearly other senses than "the phenomenon of thoughts, memories, and emotions that arise from the perceptual processes of the brain."

It took me some time before I could identify the point at which the thesis concerning possible objectivity appears to fail. At one point the authors write that 

Since no empirical method can objectively test that realness [of the religious, mystical experience] we have to turn instead to the more subjective approach of the philosophers.

What follows is philosophically naive. Not only has this question been debated for centuries, but even the novice philosopher knows (or at least suspects) that it will almost certainly never be fully and satisfactorily answered.

The only possible ground for "knowing" that our subjective experience relates to a material world is the prevailing almost universal consensus of human beings. Those who think otherwise will no doubt quickly come to grief in heavy traffic.

The nature of the material world is, however, subject to ongoing, intense debate. The only satisfactory method we have of establishing consensus in this respect is what's loosely called the scientific method and the extensive analytical disciplines derived from it.

It seems to me that the authors are correct: God won't go away because we are hard-wired to experience the divine. In this research we have perhaps made our first steps to understanding the processes by which this subjective programme has come about, and why it persists in our materialistic societies today.

If one day we understand the brain's hard wiring and religious processes more completely will "God" once again be pushed into another gap, or perhaps even perhaps disappear as a useful human construct? I doubt it, because there is no way of proving (in the modern sense of the word) that God exists. Indeed, the word "God" means "that which is absolutely other" than anything we can define or even know.

The upshot, I believe, is that we choose our ways of knowing God because we can know him only through natural phenomena. The brain, through which we can experience the "other" as intensely real, is just that - a bundle of nerves and tissue, animated by electro-chemical impulses, which can know God in itself and through the world.

Lest we think this too mundane a vision to be borne, let's turn to the person of Wisdom in C S Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress. She's counselling the pilgrim about his recent imprisonment by the Giant Despair:

"Then do you not see how the giant has deceived you?"

"Not quite clearly."

"He showed you by a trick what our inwards would look like if they were visible. That is, he showed you something that is not, but something that would be if the world were made other than it is."

Seeing coloured patterns in a brain is not to see God, nor do the patterns show that God is no more than those patterns. They are representations of brain activity. In other words, our taste receptors are not the taste, the orgasm is not the pleasure, our subjective experiences are not what we interpret them to be. But the pleasure is real, the taste is real and the God of the mystics is real.

However, this reality isn't the same reality as what we call scientific "fact" or "truth". Personal pleasure remains unique until someone else confirms a similar (never verifiably the same) experience, when a "consensus of two" comes about. In science, consensus can be broad or narrow. Even then, the consensus lasts only as long as the paradigm it supports remains valid. Or, as some put it, all scientific knowledge is provisional.

The authors of this book fail the moment they propose an extension of the reality of the religious experience beyond individual consciousness.

We now know that certain subjective states can be observed second-hand as a type of brain activity. The experience is undoubtedly real and those having it report certain common strands about which there is a degree of consensus. 

The interpretations of the experiences differ but the experiences themselves, even if they are activities of the brain, are not therefore necessarily any less of God. 

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