Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science

by Mike McHargue

The God of my axiom could explain why there was something instead of nothing and how the universe came to be full of galaxies, stars, and planets.

It’s crazy if you stop to think about it. My mom has never seen God. If a grown man were to go around saying he had an imaginary friend, we would think he was delusional, mentally ill. Yet millions of people in America casually mention talking to God, and no one bats an eye.

For a long time, atheism was nothing more than a lack of belief in any god, as opposed to a distinct philosophy or ideology. But in the last 10 years, a more aggressive type of atheism has gained popular acceptance, one that sees religious belief as delusional and contends that human society would be better off without religion.

The New Atheists consider faith to be a “virus of the mind.”

Many harbor a secret (or not so secret) fear that they’re wrong about God—that their relationship with God is nothing more than a security blanket, or that God is a benevolent imaginary friend who helps them cope with the world.

Thankfully, neuroscience offers us a powerful view into what religion is and how religious beliefs form in our brains—all while explaining why some people believe and others don’t.

And, thanks to advances in neuroscience and brain imaging in the last few decades, scientists have begun to study God by observing how religious experiences affect the human brain.

Neurotheology doesn’t try to prove or disprove God. It’s a pragmatic field entirely devoted to studying the effects religion and spirituality have on human brains.

In research recounted in his book How God Changes Your Brain, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg found two basic brain networks that work together to make God real in human minds. First, a network identifies God as an object that exists in the world. Another overlapping network then identifies your relationship with that “God-object.”

God is a specific type of relationship intertwined with love

This relational network is dispersed throughout the brain. The frontal lobe contains all ideas about God—the logical values of faith. The amygdala allows people to fear God or God’s wrath, while the stratum and anterior cingulate cortex allow people to feel safe with God and experience God’s love. Finally, the thalamus coordinates this entire network and is most responsible for making God appear objectively real.

Either way, in most brains, God is not an idea. Instead, God is a set of experiences and feelings attached to an “object” or notion that is closely associated with one’s identity.

There may be countless religions, sects, denominations, and ideas about God, but as far as your brain is concerned, they all fit within two categories: the Angry God and the Loving God.

Discipline or nurturing, father or mother.

When you experience God as being primarily angry, this experience shows up in your brain. God becomes highly associated with activity in the amygdala. You have more stress, and you anger more easily. It becomes difficult for you to forgive yourself or others, and you become fearful or angry toward those who don’t think, look, or act like you.

It’s not all bad, however. The Angry God is great for impulse control.

Unfortunately, the Angry God is ripe for exploitation. When life’s meaning or one’s eternal destiny is closely associated with such a God, it’s easy for authoritarian systems—whether churches, governments, or even terrorist organizations—to drive people to dangerous behaviors.

I believe that many of the New Atheists’ critiques of faith come down to the ways in which this ancient, powerful conception of God has often merged with political systems that prize the advancement of an ideology over the good of people.

The Loving God is often found in the New Testament of the Bible, in modern spiritualism, and in Eastern religions. The Loving God is a gracious deity who forgives and nurtures humanity. This God delights in creation and adores humankind.

The Loving God affects the brain in ways that are remarkably different from the Angry God. People who focus on God’s love develop thicker, richer gray matter in their prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. This development offers them better focus, concentration, compassion, and empathy. They have lower stress levels and lower blood pressure, and it’s easier for them to forgive themselves and others. Over time, they even show less activity in the amygdala.

Even more, people who believe that God is loving will eventually develop a characteristic asymmetry in the activity of their thalamus. When that happens, God’s love becomes implanted in their sense of identity,...

Saying “religion is bad” is a lot like saying “eating is bad.” Eating can be bad, but it depends on what you eat or how much you eat. Religion can be bad, but it depends on how you view God and how attached your faith is to an authoritarian system.

The authors of Scripture described God in ways that were consistent with their own neurological model, and the resulting narrative explores both perspectives.

Neurotheology shows us the folly of viewing the battle between faith and skepticism as a war of ideas. More than that, it shows us that most critiques of faith tend to be about the effects of authoritarian systems built on an Angry God model.

Over time, this focus on analytical thinking at the expense of affectionate activity reshapes the neurological image we hold of our partner. Our prefrontal cortex does its best to solve the puzzle, but in doing so it weakens the involvement of the more emotional parts of our brain that fire when we think of the one we love.

In the modern, Western context, we tend to view our beliefs as a set of ideas, which means we often associate mastery of a subject with people who can best articulate the ideas behind their beliefs.

But when you scan the brains of believers, you find that their understanding of God is nonverbal, more akin to a feeling or experience than a set of ideas.

For the unbeliever, God is truly absent from his or her brain.

But neurotheology treats doubt as a neurological condition and would instead encourage people to imagine any God they can accept, and then pray or meditate on that God, in order to reorient the person’s neurological image of God back toward the experiential parts of the brain.

I now knew that I had to stop trying to perfect my knowledge of God and instead shift toward activities that would help me cultivate a healthy neurological image of God—secure in the knowledge that this network would help me connect with God and live a peaceful, helpful life.

Doubt can’t be beaten with willpower. My inbox is full of missives from people who want to believe in God, but their faith is crippled by doubt. If believing in God is important to you, research says that you can start by pretending God is real, giving your brain something to work (or play!) with as you build a new neurological image of God.

God is at least the natural forces that created and sustain the universe as experienced via a psychosocial model in human brains that naturally emerges from innate biases. Even if that is a comprehensive definition for God, the pursuit of this personal, subjective experience can provide meaning, peace, and empathy for others.

In time, life developed intelligence and brains complex enough to have subjective experiences. We learned to question why things happened and to try to appease the unseen forces that could decide whether we and our families lived or died.

This was a completely new way to process reality, and it appears to have been rewarded by evolution.

We also know that when this faith is centered around a loving God, it has positive effects on the believer’s emotions and actions. God may be nothing more than a way that human brains interpret reality, but that experience is beneficial. People pursuing God aren’t wasting their time.

a meaningful understanding of God is built not on rational propositions, but on the “muscle memory” of times when God (or gods) felt real.

How could God help me but not some other, better person in far more dire need?

Psychologist Viktor Frankl calls this a “redemptive perspective on suffering,” and research has backed up its effectiveness. Somehow, when we see the good that can come from suffering, we suffer less.

One thing I found particularly striking was that when people experienced a prayer going unanswered, or being answered via a redemptive perspective on suffering, the way they prayed changed. Prayer became less about asking God for something and more about being in God’s presence.

These days, my intercessory prayers are an act of surrender—a way to voice my hopes and my hopelessness, my power to act and my powerlessness. When I pray for things I hope for, I am searching for ways I can act to make a situation better. When I pray in situations I find hopeless, I’m searching for that redemptive perspective.

In contemplative prayer, the goal isn’t to petition God to act, but to be in God’s presence.

Neurologically speaking, prayer is a type of meditation, because it produces remarkably similar brain activity and long-term effects.

Among all subjects—Christians, Buddhists, and nonreligious people who meditate—researchers noted increased activity in the frontal lobe, which is responsible for attention and focus.

But among these expected results, there was a more surprising piece of data: both the monks and nuns experienced reduced activity in the parietal lobe of the cerebral cortex.

The parietal lobe is the part of our brain that keeps track of our immediate surroundings and sense of physical presence. It

But researchers found that religious people with a consistent prayer practice basically shut down their parietal lobe during prayer. This reduced activity can create the sensation that one is leaving this reality and connecting with something greater and less physical.

And this should be encouraging, because research shows that meditation is one of the best things you can do for your brain—right up there with reading and physical exercise.

Meditation lowers your blood pressure and helps you feel less stressed. It fosters emotional healing, and it has even been found to help the body cope with disease. These effects are so pronounced, some studies have found meditation to have a therapeutic effect on people suffering from dementia.

When you believe God loves you and loves others, it’s easier to take risks and to forgive people.

Even when the news cycle is depressing or a situation in your life seems hopeless, you can hold on to the knowledge that God is with you and that the overall arc of life will work out for good.

Prayer has always been important to my faith, and now I knew why: Prayer is the most essential practice for cultivating a God network in human brains—even for those who doubt God’s existence.

Prayer is at least a form of meditation that encourages the development of healthy brain tissue, lowers stress, and can connect us to God. Even if that is a comprehensive definition of prayer, the health and psychological benefits of prayer justify the discipline.