I knew that Collins was an evangelical Christian, a statistical fluke in the rarefied scientific atmosphere he traveled in, which must surely affect his approach to the research. I was unsure how to broach this intimate question. He did it for me.
“Take myself,” he said, out of the blue. “I have been a blatant materialist during a significant part of my life, an atheist with no use for God. I am now a very serious believer. My DNA did not change during that time interval. So I can certainly cite from personal experience that it’s nothing about my heredity that changed my view from one end of the spectrum to the other.”
For Collins, the path to God wound not through the shroud of mystery but the light of logic. When he was a twenty-seven-year-old medical student at the University of North Carolina, he said, a woman with terminal cancer asked him whether he believed in God and eternity. He evaded the answer, but the question haunted him.
“I came to the realization that my atheism had been chosen without considering the evidence for or against faith,” he said. “As a physician/ scientist, you’re not supposed to make decisions without looking at the data. So I decided I better learn more about this so I could defend my position—and accidentally converted myself.”
For a “tortured” year, Collins wrestled with God. He was mortified at the prospect of accepting God.Would he have to become a missionary? Would he turn into a dreary, humorless person? He eventually concluded, reluctantly, that God made logical sense to him: Where else would the moral laws that are “written in our hearts” come from? When Collins finally surrendered, it was like a jet breaking through the sound barrier: the turbulence ended.
Ever since, Collins has let his religion inform his science, and his science inform his faith.
9
He and his team at NIH have mapped the human genome, identifying more than 30,000 genes in the human body. Genetics, Collins said, has not explained what he sees as the central element that makes humans different from animals: the sense of right and wrong, which often prompts people to sacrifice themselves, not just for friends and family, but also for enemies. It is a drive that, according to Darwin’s theory, would make one’s selfish genes very unhappy. Nor, Collins said, can genes explain the transcendent moment.
Transcendence is like music, he suggested, “where you are transported briefly into this experience that you can’t put into words, which leaves you with this longing, a longing to be part of something but you don’t know what it is. For the atheist, well, that was just your amygdala [in your brain] going off, I guess. But for the believer, it’s a signpost calling you to examine yourself and ask: What’s here more than molecules?”
How to reconcile the ideas of Dean Hamer and Francis Collins? Why does one man begin contemplating ministry and end up agnostic, while the other tracks exactly the opposite course? Why does inquiry lead Hamer down to molecules and Collins up away from them? Why does Hamer’s view of the science seem intriguing, while Collins’s view of the world seems true?
And yet, for all their verbal sparring, I do not think their views of the science are irreconcilable, since both believe that biology must be involved with spiritual feelings. They agree there is a gravel road beneath their feet; the dispute is over where the road leads. Is it a large loop circling back to the same physical spot, or is it a path to a different, spiritual, state? For a moment, let us to stoop down and examine the stones in the road, without worrying about the destination.
Diving for DNA
As scientists began to hunt for genes or brain chemicals that might exist in “spiritual” people, one of the chemicals they quickly trained their sights on was the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is the “feel-good” chemical in the brain. It is what makes runners euphoric after a long jog. It is what is so addictive about cocaine and amphetamines.
As neurologist Patrick McNamara at Boston University explained it, a gene will “code for,” or regulate, certain chemical processes—such as the production of dopamine, which then stimulates different parts of the brain. Think of a gene as a dimmer switch for a light: it can turn it on and off, but it can also give some people more or less of a certain trait. McNamara and others say that if there are “spiritual” genes that code for dopamine, then that dopamine would stimulate parts of the brain that could create a spiritual experience, transcendence, or a feeling of God.
“There are genes that help regulate the levels of dopamine in specific areas of the brain: the limbic and prefrontal lobes,” he explained. “And those areas of the brain in turn support all kinds of complex functions. And many of those complex functions in turn would support these more basic capacities related to religiosity, namely positing supernatural agents and engaging in rituals.”
The limbic system of the brain is involved in emotions, such as awe, joy, ecstasy, transcendence, deep sadness—emotions that seem to pour out of mystics. The prefrontal lobes involve more complex thought, reflection, and attention—and researchers have found that these areas play a big role in prayer and meditation.
Therefore, theoretically, a gene that codes for the activation of dopamine could affect spiritual feelings and religious behavior. The question is: Is there any evidence of a link between spirituality and dopamine?
David Comings and his team of genetics researchers at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California, had a hunch that there might be. He speculated that a particular dopamine docking station, or receptor gene, called the DRD4, might have something to do with spirituality.
10
The researchers recruited 200 men in California. Some of them were college students, while others were recovering addicts in a nearby treatment program.
11
They asked the men to complete Cloninger’s self-transcendence test, and to donate a bit of their DNA. The geneticists knew that dopamine receptors varied from person to person. Comings and his colleagues hypothesized that the gene variation (or “polymorphism”) might affect whether a person believes in God.
That is precisely what they found (although, remember, this is a single study). People with a particular variation of the DRD4 gene scored higher on the self-transcendence scale. To a layperson, that particular gene might seem only modestly important: 3.9 percent of the difference in the men’s spirituality scores could be traced back to that particular receptor.
12
However, Comings noted that it is rare for a single gene to account for more than 1.5 percent of variance of any behavioral trait.
13
He also noted that the dopamine receptor is present in high concentrations in the frontal lobes of the brain, which is the site of many higher human brain functions.
“One could argue,” he and his colleagues wrote, “that spirituality is the quintessence of higher human brain functions.”
14
While the scientists cautioned that this particular gene “is not ‘the gene for spirituality, ’ ” it does seem to contribute to a “significant portion” of the variance, or reason, some people are spiritual and others are not.
There is another frequently mentioned suspect in the God-gene lineup: the serotonin system. The serotonin system has intrigued scientists for years because it dramatically alters moods. For example, the drug Ecstasy creates a high by releasing a wave of serotonin. Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft work more slowly in the system, evening out moods by doing the same thing. And hallucinatory drugs can create a mystical experience worthy of Saint Teresa of Ávila.
In 2003, a group of Swedish scientists led by Jacqueline Borg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm tried another approach to determine what role, if any, serotonin plays in spiritual experiences. They used brain scanners. They recruited fifteen healthy Swedish men for a spirituality test. The subjects took Cloninger’s self-transcendence test and then sat for a PET (positron emission topography) scan, which took pictures of their brain activity.
15
Researchers cannot measure the amount of serotonin in the brain directly, so they used an indirect method: they measured the activity of the chemical’s docking stations or receptors, and in a particular receptor gene called serotonin 5-HT1A.
To do that, the scientists injected a tracer fluid that acts very much like serotonin into each man’s bloodstream. Then they put the men separately into the brain scanner and watched what the fluid did once it arrived in the brain. They were particularly keen on seeing whether the counterfeit serotonin would bind with serotonin receptors. Their hunch was confirmed: they found a strong relationship between each subject’s serotonin levels and his spirituality score.
16
Specifically, this genetic dimmer switch seemed to affect which man believed in God, a unifying force, or phenomena that can’t be explained by “objective demonstration,” and which tended to favor a “reductionist and empirical worldview.”
This suggests, the researchers wrote, that “the serotonin system may serve as a biological basis for spiritual experiences,” and that the variation in this gene “may explain why people vary greatly in spiritual zeal.”
17
Researchers in this area remind me of Sherlock Holmes, piecing together scenarios with shards of often conflicting evidence. It is evident that
something
has happened, but exactly how it happened remains a mystery. So it is with scientists exploring spirituality: they know that millions of people genuinely experience transcendence—but what, exactly, is the mechanics of that feeling? Is it genes, or temporal lobes, or a psychological coping mechanism? Or is there a Higher Being, something that few scientists have considered yet, like the dog who didn’t bark?
Does God Play Favorites?
As for scientists like Boston University’s Pat McNamara, he’s thrilled the chase is on.
“There’s going to be a specific biology involved in religiosity,” he predicted expansively. “There’s going to be specific brain systems that are always involved in religiosity. There’s going to be specific neurochemistry. There’s going to be drugs that selectively influence religiosity. There’s going to be a specific cognitive neuroscience of religiosity. And on and on and on! But that doesn’t mean that religiousness is nothing but the biology of religious experience. It just says that religiousness is one of the innate capacities of human beings, like a host of other traits.”
“So maybe there’s a Coder, so to speak?” I asked. “I mean, if there’s a genetic code, is it possible there is a Coder, or a Higher Power, or a Creator?”
“Theoretically, if God wanted to communicate with us, then He, She, or It would create a biology that allows us to communicate,” McNamara stated. “So it makes sense that there is specific biology that allows for that sort of relationship. But the fact that there
is
a specific biology of religiosity does not rule in—or rule out—God.”
While the findings in this realm are preliminary, they do suggest that some people have a greater propensity to respond to God than others. But, I sputtered, feeling acutely my own spiritual mediocrity, what if there is a God who writes His language in our genes unequally—apportioning to some a bounty of spiritual gifting and to others a meager gruel? Isn’t that a bit of deistic favoritism?
“For some people that could be troubling,” observed Ron Cole-Turner, a bioethicist at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. “It’s not for me, but it could be for some. If you thought God is going to send some people to hell on the basis of a lack of response and the lack of response is hardwired in our genes—that would be troubling.
“But,” he added quickly, “don’t read ‘genetic’ as deterministic. Because genes don’t create hardwired, deterministic outcomes. They create a range of possibilities that might incline you one way or another. It’s by no means determined that if you have a certain gene sequence you are spiritual and if you don’t have a certain gene sequence you can’t be spiritual.”
In other words, nature (genes and biology) plays some role, but so does nurture (one’s environment and life events).What genes do is create a sort of tipping point for spiritual experience. If you are genetically inclined toward spirituality, a relatively small event can flip your Sunday mornings from sitting on the couch watching the Sunday talk shows to sitting in a pew watching a preacher. But if you are born with a genetic predisposition to think religion is complete bunk, then it’s going to take an enormous dose of environment to push you to religion.
It’s a little bit like automatic air-conditioning. For some people, a relatively modest rise in temperature—breaking up with a boyfriend, for example—can flip on the cooler system. Those people are genetically inclined to be spiritual. Others may sweat it out to 90, 95, 100 degrees; only then will their God-switch flip on. And some would rather die of heat than turn to “God.”
Those explanations worked well for psychiatrist Robert Cloninger for many years. Cloninger, who developed the self-transcendence scale, heartily believes that genetics is at play. He has conducted some of the studies himself. He also believes that life events push a person toward or away from spirituality. But the more people he worked with and the more studies he performed, the more he felt he was missing a piece: the soul.
“I realized there were other differences that we didn’t measure with temperament or character or genes, that were really spiritual differences,” Cloninger said. “There was a whole dimension here that was basically unexplained. Like how do you explain free will? You can’t do that from a materialistic standpoint. How do you explain intuitive creations and sudden insights?You can’t do that from algorithmic thinking. How do you explain the gifts of Mozart? I had to move to recognizing that we actually do have a psyche, a soul, and that it does have characteristics, and those characteristics differ from one to another.”
“You seem to be saying,” I said carefully,“that there’s nature, nurture, and then something ...”