One of the typical and most important aspects of mystical experience, according to the philosopher William James, is noetic quality-that is, the feeling the mystic has of receiving some special knowledge previously inaccessible through normal means. Most of us, in our daily life, feel that we are privy to a special sort of knowledge about our own thoughts and feelings-what it is like to be us. It doesn't take a mystical experience for the average person to think, "I know what it is like to be me, and no one else can." Beyond this, those of us who are religious tend to feel that this is also the case with our relationship with God-while it may be something that others can understand, it is not something that they can directly experience. Therefore, it is not something that they can claim to know. They may have their own experiences and can be the ultimate judge of those, but our experiences are ours alone.as is the knowledge we draw from them.

Meanwhile, however, science has increasingly been encroaching on this sacred territory. When I first decided to "brush up" on my understanding of the brain in order to try and get a better grip on where religious beliefs and emotions might come from, I began to realize to what extent this is true. The study of consciousness itself, manifested in various forms among the cognitive sciences (cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, computer science, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy), is in full swing in a way that revolutionary philosophers of the mind such as Hume and Descartes would never have imagined. If you start out with the premise that religious thinking is a kind of thinking, and thinking is something like the result of an interaction between brain and environment, it is amazing what kind of relevant-not to mention surprising and awe-inspiring-revelations begin to pop out of the woodwork. What ramifications can the existence of such discoveries as temporal lobe epilepsy, "promiscuous teleology," and split-brain patients[1] have for our understanding of religious concepts as the soul? Gods? Free will? Or perhaps it would be better to ask, what can such discoveries hint to us about where these concepts came from, why they are so popular, and how they affect the rest of our thinking?

One immediate answer to this line of questioning has been that if we can conclude anything for sure, it is that religion is natural. That is, given what scientists have discovered about the evolution of the mind, its structure, and the way in which it interacts with environment, the emergence and continuation of religious beliefs and behavior is entirely to be expected. In fact, as psychologist Justin Barrett argues in a recent book drawing together elements from various cognitive theories of religion, considering the evidence, it is actually atheism that is unnatural. Obviously, "natural" is a bit of a questionable term here-if humans are natural, then anything we are and do is natural, right? It's not as though atheists are mutants, not quite Homo sapiens because they are missing some critical bit in their brain which makes them different from those who find meaning in prayer and going to church on Sundays (though according to recent findings, it appears that a few well-placed genes may have some effect on such desires and tendencies).[2] Barrett means, of course, that atheists are not typical-they are standouts from the rest of their species, having reached a different conclusion about the supernatural, perhaps due to living in an urbanized, modern environment. He emphasizes this in response to an invisible audience of western academics who approach the question "Whither religious belief?" with an air of incredulity. As the title of the book asks, "Why Would Anyone Believe in God?" Barrett's response, drawing on the evidence he has assembled, is "Because it is natural." It is not something we should find surprising. But even if by "natural" we mean the definition given at the beginning of this paragraph, what are the ramifications of saying that such-and-such standpoint regarding religion is natural or unnatural? If religion is to be expected based on what we know of the human mind, how to account for the lack of it? Is it possible to escape our biological destiny-and if so, is it advisable? The findings from evolutionary psychology are gradually substantiating a lot of truisms that have long been part of our folk psychology-men are more violent than women, the young are held to be more beautiful than the old, blood is thicker than water, and so on; cf. Ridley, page 7. They are also, to some degree, validating some popular theories about the origin and function of religion-to alleviate fear of death, provide a moral compass, seek an anthropomorphic ultimate authority. The difference is that none of these is presented as an exhaustive explanation of religion, as they have sometimes been presumed to be.[3] But in religion, as in the rest of life, a person cannot simply conclude that the beliefs handed down from grandfathers on back porches-or in this case, black-clad philosophy lecturers-have been redeemed, and we can all go home. The reason for this not only has to do with the fact that we will not arrive at a complete understanding of religion (to say nothing of consciousness itself) any time soon, but also with the naturalistic fallacy.

The naturalistic fallacy, for those who are not familiar, is simply that you cannot derive an "ought" from an "is." That is, the fact that things are a certain way does not mean that they should be that way. In the context of science, it's a reminder that "natural" is not synonymous with "good." I bring this up not to dwell on what happens when people mistake the natural for the good, but out of concern for what can happen when we mistake the un-natural for the good. It can be deceptively easy, learning about the ways in which it is natural for humans to think and behave, to conclude that a person can improve him or herself simply by thinking and behaving otherwise. In this way we can feel like we are declaring independence from our genes-we are people with free will, able to make our own choices! We are not subject to the whims of replicating entities whose only goal is to make it into the next generation. In his book The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, psychologist David Buss proclaims, "We are the first species in the known history of three and a half billion years of life on earth with the capacity to control our own destiny. The prospect of designing our destiny remains excellent to the degree that we comprehend our evolutionary past." (page 222) This may be true, but it doesn't mean that we can escape our evolutionary legacy-or that it's necessarily the best idea to try. If you're not careful, it's easy to slip into a smug attitude regarding the revelations from science regarding the nature of our thoughts. Similar to William James' mystic, it may seem that those paying attention to the cognitive sciences are privy to a special kind of knowledge which wouldn't ordinarily be accessible. To a degree, they are. But unlike that attained by the mystic, this sort of knowledge is available to anyone who wants to look.

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