There is nothing new about the debates between science and religion on the existence of God. What is new is that science says it may have found proof of God in our DNA. People everywhere have always understood that there is an inner drive inside humanity to seek out God in their hearts and minds. We even joked and said that somehow we were hard-wired to seek out God. What a surprise when geneticists discovered that a specific part of the brain regulating some aspects of our brain function was tied to a gene found in people.
According to Wikipedia, the God gene hypothesis proposes that a specific gene (VMAT2) predisposes humans towards spiritual or mystic experiences. The idea has been postulated by geneticist Dean Hamer, the director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, and author of the 2005 book The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes.
I just took my family to see the movie “The Son of God” this week and have clear and vivid recall of experiencing deep spiritual feelings for the character portrayed in the move as Jesus. Intellectually this is just an actor, right? But watching the movie shot on location in Israel I am, as in a travel log feature, imagining myself there, as though I was present when Jesus walked those places. The desire to see Him, to be with Him; to experience what people in those days had before their very eyes was overwhelming and deeply enriched my faith as a Christian. Now I know that these emotional feelings were produced in a certain part of the brain specially designed to make that God-connection.
There are scientists today that try to argue in their disbelief that we are only experiencing neuro-hormones working in the brain; that spirituality is nothing more than a chemical interaction creating these feelings. If that is the case, so is love, and fear, and hate, and jealousy, etc.
One scientific paper decades ago stated that the body, your entire body serves one main purpose, to keep your brain alive; because once your brain is gone, so are you. Ask a blind person to describe the colors red or green; it can’t be done since there is no reference in the brain to recall the colors. So where does our recollection of God come from? According to science, it is hard-wired in out DNA.
I frequently mention when I speak to a group that they will have a difficult time discovering the secret to Health by searching all over the world for a cure when the power of health has always been inside of us, our body’s ability to regenerate and heal itself. So it turns out that we have been doing the same with our search for God, instead of looking inside of us where He has always been, we mistakenly look externally for God. Now we know and that is why a quiet private prayer time is the most powerful spiritual exercise we can do.
Yours in Real life,
docMIKE
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