This comes from the current issue of The Global Spiral, from the Metanexus Institute. The author, Jonathan Camery-Hoggatt, has a B.A. in Biblical and Theological Studies at Gordon College in 2007, and will complete a Master of Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2011. His research focuses on the intersection of religion, society, and the cognitive sciences.
He certainly has a theological bias, but this piece does not feel like an apologia for irrational beliefs - he is seeking a space where religious experience - the mysterium tremendum et fascinans - is expanded by science, not diminished.
Here is the beginning and a selected quote from the middle of the article.
Dreams of Meaning: Where Religion and Neuroscience Can’t Compete
We sleep. We dream. We do not know why.
Faith traditions have interpreted sleep and dreams as meaningful for millennia without the need for scientific grounding, though. Dreams are visits from angels, attacks by devils, and revelation from the divine. Some dreams predict the future while others seem like spiritual exhaust from the day. Dreams drove the Buddha toward enlightenment and saved Egypt from seven years of famine. They propelled Sigmund Freud to stardom through his writings on sublimated wish fulfillment and the royal road to the unconscious.
But the last century has shown a shift in focus from decoding dream content to mapping neuroanatomy,1 and the past two decades have produced much of the technology needed to begin preliminary exploration. When we sleep, proteins knit cells together, growth hormones release, and our bodies paralyze to give our brains room to roam without physically acting out dreams. When it comes right down to it—we spend one third of our lives doing something the medical community currently understands only in scraps and pieces. Sleep research—and the cognitive sciences that engage in it—are young but promising. Each new breakthrough drives this kind of question to the fore: If we can map the neurological processes correlated with dreaming, do dreams lose their religious meaning along the way?
I respond with a resounding no, but we need at least a cereal box understanding of neuroscience and memory before we can discuss why.
We all dream every night whether we consciously remember it or not, and—when we dream— boundaries blend, physical laws break, and imagination combines experiences freely. Emotional potency from dreams often spills over into waking life, too, and haunts us throughout the day. Dreams open windows into the self that often remain closed when we are awake. They force us to face difficult questions every night of our lives and engage imagination in response. Few other experiences can drive us to search ourselves so deeply and detach us from what we think we know so successfully—meditation, prayer, or a particularly moving liturgy, maybe—but the experience of dreaming often feels spiritual whether or not dreamers know about brain cells firing patterns. Now: if we can map the neurological processes correlated with dreaming, do dreams lose their religious meaning along the way? It would be overly ambitious to say that we can comprehensively explain anything relating to the brain at this point, but the need for an answer still seems imminent.Read the whole article.This sort of question is not unique to dreams; it has plagued every area of human experience for centuries. How did humans come to be? God. Until evolution. How did the cosmos come to be? God. Until the Big Bang. When gaps in understanding of physical processes disappear, many people’s God goes with them. Their sense of meaning diffuses like breath in the wind. In the future: if we can map the neurological processes correlated with waking experience, does all of life lose its religious meaning along the way, too?
I will leave debates about ideals and absolutes to Plato and Nietzsche for now and focus on what we can engage as internal participants in social systems instead. Academia and popular culture have treated science and religion as separate categories at least since both underwent revolutions and reformations and counter-revolutions and counter-reformations and cultural cross-pollinations some centuries ago. We might treat science and religion as separate categories now— at least on paper—but those categories do not need to compete for primacy. They approach the same experience—dreaming in this case—from different angles and evaluate it using different criteria. Placing them in competition shows misunderstanding of both.
No comments:
Post a Comment