Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

May 14, 2001 - Art Bell

02:01:54

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Matthew Alper - The God Part of The Brain

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Alright, Matthew Alper is a man who wrote a book called The God Part of the Brain.
	Matthew Alper's contention is that our brains, through an evolutionary process, because of the biggest fear we all have, that of death, have fashioned in our own brains the need to worship, the need to believe in an afterlife and worship.
	And of course, as you might imagine, this rubs against the grain of many, many of you out there.
	However, from my point of view, there is no greater question on Earth right now than that of the existence of God, of the existence of an afterlife, Oh, what greater question might one ask or strive to get answered during this life?
	What greater question can you imagine than that?
	Even the presence of aliens or other life forms on other planets does not rise, in my opinion, to the question of whether there is an afterlife, whether there is a God.
	That's what we're talking about right now.
	And why is Matthew Alper back?
	Well, let me tell you.
	If you go pick up a copy of the May 7th edition of Newsweek, you'll probably fall over.
	on the cover of Newsweek is a picture of a person looking up toward the light
	and the headline in Newsweek is God and the brain how we're wired for spirituality
	i went oh my that's an alper kind of headline isn't it That's an Alper kind of headline.
	How we're wired for spirituality.
	Wired.
	The brain.
	And then, there's this.
	Scientists find biological reality behind religious experience.
	And this, let me see, is from Australia.
	So frequently I have to go out of the country, unfortunately, to find these kind of stories.
	But it reads, in a quiet laboratory, Andrew Newberg takes photographs of what believers call the presence of God.
	The young neurologist invites Buddhists and Franciscan nuns to meditate and pray in a secluded room.
	Then, at the peak of their devotions, he injects a tracer that travels to the brain and reveals its activity at the moment of transcendence.
	A pattern has emerged from the professor's experiments.
	There is, he says, a small region near the back of the brain that constantly calculates a person's spatial orientation, the sense of where one's body ends and the world begins, during intense prayer or meditation, and for unknown reasons, this region becomes a quiet oasis of inactivity.
	The professor says it creates a blurring of the self-other relationship.
	A assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, whose work appears in psychiatry research, says if they go far enough, they have a complete dissolving of the self, a sense of union, a sense of infinite spacelessness.
	Professor Newberg and other scientists are finding that people's diverse devotional traditions Have a powerful biological, underlined biological reality.
	During intense meditation and prayer, the brain and body experience signature changes, as yet poorly understood, that could yield new insights into the religious experience.
	An example is a National Institutes of Health sponsored clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that will study the effects of group prayer sessions among black women with breast cancer.
	The first such study.
	Already, scientists say, the young field has provided evidence that these meditative states, which rely on shutting down the senses and repeating words, phrases, or movements, Prayers are a natural part of the brain that humans are, in some sense, inherently spiritual beings.
	Prayer is the modern brain's means by which we can connect to more powerful ancestral states of consciousness.
	It's from Harvard.
	With meditative states, people tend to turn off what Professor Jacobs called the internal chatter of the higher conscious brain.
	During meditation, researchers have observed increases in the activity of the theta brain wave, a type known to inhibit other brain or other activity in the brain.
	Following a preliminary analysis of recent data, Professor Jacob said he had observed inhibitory theta activity coming from the same area of the brain that contains the becalmed oasis during prayer.
	So, we've got this story from the Boston Globe, and we've got the cover of Newsweek magazine virtually saying everything Matthew Alper has been saying.
	globe so
	we've got this story from the boston globe and we've got the the cover of
	newsweek magazine virtually saying everything matthew alper has been saying
	and in that search for god in that search for eternity and for
	what may lie beyond or what may not it is only reasonable in my mind anyway
	that we examine all possible options.
	And by the way, tomorrow night, talking about whiplash, tomorrow night, we're going to have Bob Larson here.
	He's an ordained minister who does exorcisms.
	Talk about whiplash.
	Whiplash, indeed.
	But tonight, we're going to examine this because... Why?
	Because it is one absolute possibility.
	And a lot of the material that is going to be discussed with Matthew tonight is going to disturb some of you.
	I know that.
	If you feel it will disturb you too much to hear what this man has to say, then you may discard it by turning off the radio now.
	Otherwise, the man who wrote The God Part of the Brain, that was way ahead of his time, witnessed Newsweek, witnessed the Boston Globe article, will now speak with us.
	Matthew, welcome.
	Thank you, Art.
	Been a while.
	You're in New York somewhere, aren't you?
	Brooklyn.
	Brooklyn.
	That's right.
	I'm curious, Matthew, after writing the book you wrote, Catching all the hell that you've caught.
	What was it like seeing the cover of Newsweek, seeing Newsweek come out with this?
	You must have flipped.
	Well, the only reason I flipped was because I gave the author of that article, Sharon Begley, the science editor of Newsweek, my book three or four years ago, actually.
	She simply asked me my credentials, and when I said I didn't have a Ph.D., but that I had a groundbreaking idea and that she should investigate it, she told me, you know, thanks, but I can't help you.
	Now, four years later, she puts out an article, God and the Brain, pretty close to the title of my book, The God Part of the Brain, in which the headline of my press release that I gave her was, Are We Wired for Spirituality?
	Her headline on the cover of Newsweek, How We're Wired for Spirituality.
	So if anything it was more disconcerting, but it was also, you know, it was also rewarding in that it kind of gave me credibility.
	For the first time gave me worldwide Well, it absolutely does.
	And then also, you just heard me read this Boston Globe article.
	Same rough idea, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	It's all over now.
	It's on MSNBC.
	It's on Discovery.
	They did a whole Discovery of God in the Brain.
	It was on a couple of weeks ago.
	Discovery Channel.
	They're calling it neurotheology, and it's now the pioneer hot science.
	And as far as I'm concerned, it's still incomplete and it's still five years behind and stuff that people are going to be hearing tonight, because I've been investigating this for longer than they have, is going to be more advanced than what's out there and will be for maybe another five or ten years, which is why I'd also like to kind of give a push for my book's new fifth edition, which has 30 new pages, two new chapters, and is full of so many, so much more Um, neurophysiological evidence supporting my ideas that's come out in the last two years because of the invention of these functional MRIs that can now peek into every aspect of brain activity.
	So this is the fifth edition, huh?
	Not bad, not bad, Matthew.
	Well, I'd like to keep on top of this science.
	I'd like to keep ahead of people like Newsweek.
	So if you want to read what's going to be the cover of Newsweek five years from now, I suggest you go out and buy my fifth edition.
	Okay, well, we'll plug that plenty tonight, but it's available in bookstores, Amazon.com, all the usual suspects.
	Or go to my website, godpart.com, and you can order it signed directly there.
	But yeah, Amazon, barnesandnoble.com, Barnes & Noble Books, etc.
	You know, Matthew, I personally hope you're wrong.
	I hope I'm wrong, too.
	Do you?
	Well, sure.
	I mean, you know, what's wrong with an afterlife?
	What's wrong with immortality?
	You know, the notion that I have a good 20, 30 years ahead of me and then that's it, then infinite darkness, which I won't even be aware of, you know, isn't the most comforting notion, you know, to be joined with one's loved ones for eternity.
	No, it's not.
	It's not completely discomforting either.
	I'll tell you what's discomforting is the prospect of hell.
	Now, that's discomforting.
	I would rather face Infinite sleep, they say sleep is a little slice of death, right?
	When you just have no conscious thoughts.
	I would rather face that than I would the hot coals and whatever else is in store for one in the traditional classic hell.
	Well, if this is our only time to experience reality, including experience pain, then this is basically the closest to hell we're going to get.
	So again, it's going to be that infinite rest ahead.
	I don't think I have too much to worry about.
	Well, I know you don't think so.
	For those that have not heard it, we're awfully close to the bottom of the hour to get into this, but I gave sort of a brief overview of what I think you've said, and it was too brief, and I'm going to have to ask you, you know, there's a lot of new listeners for one thing now.
	We've got a lot of new affiliates, and so we need to go over the basics, but what I said was, evolutionary process the fear of death and and so that our
	brain has concocted this area of the brain that protects us from that fear by
	virtually mandating that we worship mandating that we have belief in an
	afterlife well I would basically just say that what I'm suggesting is with the
	advent of man with human cognition came the advent of self-conscious
	awareness of self reflection
	And with self-reflection, we became aware of our own mortalities, as you said, of death.
	And the anxiety produced by that one particular awareness was so overwhelming that nature had to select in order to protect our intelligence, which made us the most powerful creature on earth, in order to sustain our own intelligence, which had backfired on us Nature had to select a mechanism in the brain which would allow us to survive the anxiety induced by awareness of death, so it produced an inherent awareness, a belief that there's something greater than out there, which makes us believe that even though the physical body is one day going to die, that there's a spiritual reality, and in that spiritual reality we will live forever, which has revealed that reflex, that impulse has revealed itself in every world culture, no matter how isolated,
	No matter how insulated from any other culture, every people has believed in some form of an afterlife and has had some kind of ritual behavior by which we dispose of our deceased, usual by burial, with a ritual that anticipates sending that person's spirit or soul onto the next realm, into the spiritual world.
	Yes, the Egyptians had the pyramids.
	And the pyramids are said by most people to be exactly what you just described, as a method of sending that person's soul into the great hereafter.
	Right.
	Well, the Egyptians, they buried people with the Book of the Dead, which were basically the rules of how to go past from this world to the next world.
	They had a whole pantheon of gods, you know, the god of the underworld, the god of heaven, you know, if the scales tipped toward good, if you were a better person than bad, then you went to heaven, or otherwise you were condemned to the world of Osiris, the netherworld.
	And every culture, every people has had a mythology with a belief in some kind of afterworld.
	All right, Matthew, hold it right there.
	We'll pick up on the other side of the bottom of the hour break.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Dare you listen.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	To Matthew Alper.
	Matthew, you believe that religious... I can't say that.
	Thank you.
	Versus spirituality.
	That these are two distinct and separate impulses.
	That's interesting.
	How do you delineate between the two?
	Well, one of the things I've noticed as this debate grows is a lot of people are saying that they're religious but not very spiritual, spiritual but not very religious.
	How can people say that there's some mechanism in the brain when it's all of these different things?
	Some people are saying, you know, I don't believe in religion, I just believe in a God.
	So, and I was also getting, I was finding, I was getting emails from people who were saying, you know, you're attacking all spirituality, saying it's a bad thing, and you know, and I started to investigate a little, and as I looked into it I began to realize that there are actually two distinct impulses here.
	That the instinct for spirituality, to have a spiritual experience, which is one mechanism that's oriented in the brain, is a much more sensual experience.
	Um, it's that experience we have when we meditate or pray, when we have that sense of cosmic consciousness, that oneness with the universe, that experience that you were describing that the monks had in that Newberg article.
	Right.
	That loss of sense of self.
	Right.
	Then at the same time, we have a religious impulse.
	Um, and there are actually distinct regions in the brain.
	So for instance, the spiritual experience, when people pray and meditate and they put them in a functional MRI, they find that there's a decreased blood flow to the frontal and parietal lobes.
	The parietal lobe, for instance, controls things like time and space consciousness.
	So you lose a sense of all time and space.
	You feel a oneness.
	You're like out there with the universe.
	Um, it also, then the frontal lobe controls sense of self.
	Actually, an interesting article in the Associated Press that came out just last week, they've now located where Sense of Self is located, and there's a Dr. Dennis Miller, or I'm sorry, a Bruce Miller, not Dennis Miller, the comic, Bruce Miller, who's discovered from University of California, San Francisco, found that there's a part of the right frontal lobe where a sense of self is located and
	people who have suffered, for instance, damage to this part of the brain, they have an
	instant change in their religious or political beliefs, everything from preferences in food
	and clothing, all of their most essential components of selfhood and self-awareness are automatically
	changed or altered by damage to this part of the brain.
	There is also a disease called Pick's disease, which is a degeneration of this part of the
	brain, the same thing occurs, all of a sudden people whose favorite color is blue only want
	to wear yellow, they never like Mexican food, all of a sudden they hate Chinese, they are
	old favorite and they like Mexican, people who are hyper-religious no longer go to church.
	They don't even care.
	All right, so this is separate and distinct.
	This sense of self is separate and distinct from what you call the God part of the brain.
	Well, when I say the God part of the brain, it's really not one part.
	There's a network of so many parts of the brain that all work together that give us this adherent sense that there's something greater out there, and it affects moral consciousness, Even something like what would seem obscure like musical or mathematical consciousness.
	Is there not a specific part of the brain identified by MRI that's activated when people are specifically praying or religious experience?
	Okay, well, when they have a spiritual experience, again, there's less activity in the frontal and parietal lobe.
	Those parts become suppressed, giving us a loss of sense of self and a feeling of timelessness and spacelessness.
	Then in the temporal lobe, where it seems that religiosity is contained, where like religious icons and language are stored, where it's stimulated, people have like, you know, it triggers their beliefs in their own, in their religions, in their church doctrines.
	Right.
	That the two are two separate impulses and You know, again, this right now, they're trying to distinguish the two.
	People are saying, how can you say this, because religiosity is unlike spirituality, which is one of the articles in Newsweek, and I think that the scientific community has yet to really detail the distinctions between these two, which is why, again, it's very possible that someone can be extremely religious, you can attend church, you can pray five times a day, But not really have a spiritual experience.
	Then there are people who are into more Eastern religious belief systems, which centers on the more sensual aspect of the experience.
	They pray, it's more meditative.
	So they're going to have a spiritual experience, a connection with all that is, while other parts of the brain are essentially silenced, as pointed out in the article.
	But not necessarily have a connection to the God of the Bible.
	Exactly.
	There doesn't have to be a connection to the Bible.
	Because the religious impulse, what that does is it compels us to adhere to some kind of church doctrine.
	To adhere to a set of religiously oriented social norms and mores.
	It also compels us to engage in ritualistic behaviors.
	So to give an example, for instance, If you take, like, Muslim prayer, they pray five times a day.
	Their religious impulse compels them to congregate in groups, to gather in a group, adhere to a certain particular church doctrine, kneel down, face a certain direction, and then what that does, that's their religious impulse compelling them to do all of these movements.
	And then what happens is that triggers the spiritual aspects of the brain, the frontal and parietal lobe, to become suppressed.
	Which then takes away sense of self and timelessness and spacelessness, in which case they then engage in a spiritual experience, which is interpreted, because we're religious creatures, those sensual experiences are then interpreted as proof that there's some kind of transcendental reality.
	Or, for example, the new wave religion in Japan right now is Nichiren Shoshu Soka Gakkai.
	And they will chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo for hours on end.
	Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.
	Hours on end.
	Same effect?
	Well, actually, a separate team of Japanese researchers have shown that repetitive rhythms, which are utilized in religious aspects in terms of chant, dance, prayer, meditational mantras, stimulates the brain's hypothalamus.
	Which induces a state of either arousal or serenity.
	It can do one or the other.
	If you think of like the whirling dervishes who just like spin themselves into this aroused, you know, religious ecstatic experience, or at the same time it can create that sense of serenity.
	So again, all of these different behaviors that we engage in, whether it's prayer or chant or meditation, stimulate different parts of the brain which trigger, which evoke different types of experiences.
	What they're finding, again, is that, you know, here we've got this impulse to engage in these behaviors, to congregate in groups and then pray.
	It stimulates this type of experience, and again, all of a sudden we're having this, we feel a loss of sense of self, we almost like are giving ourselves over to some higher power.
	And we interpret that sensual experience, again, as evidence that there is a higher power, there is another external transcendental world.
	Alright, so you've come a long way in identifying and delineating a little bit of difference in spirituality and religious belief and faith.
	That's fine.
	What I don't get is, I guess still, how you make the leap from the fact that you've identified a part of the brain that is functional for all of this and Suggest as a result that there is no God, that God is our invention.
	In other words, why should we not expect these areas of the brain to be active?
	After all, our brains is where we do all our higher level thinking.
	Our frontal lobe is responsible for a lot of higher level thinking.
	Why should that be a surprise and why should that even suggest to us That God or the afterlife are not real, simply because we've identified biological areas where there's stimulation when we think of these things.
	Okay.
	Well, there are two different issues.
	There's God and there's an afterlife.
	An afterlife implies that we have a soul that we're going to live forever.
	Correct, yes.
	That Art Bell is going to, somehow in some spirit form, you're going to be flying through the cosmos thinking, hey, I'm Art Bell and I'm living forever.
	That's right.
	Now, here we've got this neurobiological evidence suggesting that there are parts of the brain that if you're tapped in the head, if you get banged tomorrow, you know, by a falling bank vault out of a window, and it hits and it knocks you in your prefrontal cortex, or I'm sorry, your right frontal lobe, Art Bell will be a completely different person a half an hour later.
	All of your taste will change.
	So again, the fact that Selfhood, that self-identity is so contingent on all of these neural mechanisms.
	How can we suggest that somehow there's an aspect of our essential self that could live beyond the grave when we're so dependent on these neural mechanisms that can change within our own one lifetime?
	Again, the fact that selfhood, or for instance, if you suffer damage to your hippocampus, which is where Autobiographical memories are stored.
	You will lose all sense of your past.
	The only thing you will remember is everything that happens from after that bump in the head or that damage to that part of the brain.
	Alzheimer's will do much the same thing.
	Exactly.
	Well, Alzheimer's, which attacks all different parts of the brain, is probably one of the things it's attacking is your hippocampus and your right frontal lobe and all these aspects of consciousness which cause you to have a deterioration of sense of self.
	So again, for the person with Alzheimer's, when they die, are they going to live forever in that sort of Alzheimer's stupor?
	Are they going to go back to before they had the Alzheimer's?
	And even then, are they going to go back a year before?
	Ten years before?
	I mean, all humans are a work in progress.
	Some of us go from being hardened criminals to, you know, to saints.
	Some of us go from being, you know, We want to pursue music, and ten years later, we don't care about music.
	We're interested in law.
	We have a change in every kind of preference.
	Well, many believe, Matthew, that we have something called a soul, which transcends these mental abilities that you're talking about right now, or mental... I'm not sure what the right word is, but in other words, that we have a soul, That transcends this, and we have not proven or disproven the existence of a soul as of yet.
	But if the soul implies identity, then how can we suggest that there is an eternal soul when identity is contingent... But Matthew, why can't you imagine a soul that transcends any single identity?
	A soul that may have us coming back again and again.
	Many believe in reincarnation, for example.
	Well, again, then one would have to go up against a belief in a spiritual reality as a whole.
	And, again, my only argument now, I've said this before, one cannot prove there is no God.
	One cannot prove there is no spiritual reality.
	I cannot prove that there is no such thing as a, you know, invisible green dragon. Right. It's sitting on my head
	right now. However you can now prove that certain areas of the brain are responsible for these feelings, these beliefs.
	That's right. These heights of consciousness. This need to worship.
	So what this suggests, and it's not that it's the first proof, I mean there are other proofs. There's the sociobiological
	argument, the fact that any time there's a behavior that's universal to a species, it implies that there's a mechanism.
	So the fact that, like, all beavers build dams.
	Did all beavers choose to build dams?
	No, they're wired that way.
	There's a survival mechanism.
	It has an adaptive value to build a dam, which suggests that, again, the fact that they all do it means that they're wired that way.
	The fact that all humans Believe in some form of an afterlife, worship some particular deity, etc.
	That we engage in all these specific behaviors just like all beavers build dams, all humans pray, suggesting we're wired this way.
	That it's the act of a reflex.
	So even though I can't prove there is no God, all I can suggest is our entire basis for
	knowing God and for believing in one is contingent on biological mechanisms that operate from
	the brain.
	And where does the brain come from?
	It's the product of natural selection.
	So again, and then it comes down to is one going to embrace evolutionary theory or is
	one going to embrace some kind of primitive creationism, suggesting that the earth is
	6,000 years old and that life is 6,000 years old.
	I think that we live in a time where there's enough evidence suggesting otherwise.
	We have whole sciences, genetic sciences now, that are based on evolutionary theory.
	Genes and the transformation of genes through evolution is the basis of evolutionary theory.
	Anybody who wants to contest that we're made up of a set of genetic components at this
	point has taken on the entire rational world.
	So we have all this reason to believe that we're the products of evolution, therefore
	our brains are the product of evolution, and if there are these mechanisms in there that
	were wired this way genetically.
	Again, it's not indication that there's a God, it's just indication that nature works in a particular way, that it selects particular mechanisms that have an adaptive value, one of them being a belief in an afterlife, a belief in a God and some higher being that would provide us with a sense of comfort.
	Because the minute you take away that God, the minute you take away that belief in an afterlife, you know, there we are left standing, facing our inevitable death.
	We're going to talk a lot about that.
	What about when you're confronted with what certainly the religious community would say is historical record?
	The Bible.
	The Bible is a pretty interesting document to say the least.
	It's been translated from early texts that are thought to be pretty unimpeachable.
	There's an awful lot of evidence that you've got to get over to try and suggest that Jesus did not walk as a man on earth.
	Do you believe he did or do you believe that that and the Bible and all the historical records we have of what happened on earth is just so much mythology?
	Look, the Bible in itself doesn't impress me because when we say the Bible it's so Uh, Judeo-Christian centric.
	I mean, every culture has had a Bible, and they all refer to it as the Bible.
	And some of those cultures, before they even had exposure to Judeo-Christianity, never heard of the Bible.
	They heard of their own book.
	And before there was even Judeo-Christianity, the Jews who were from, who, you know, came up with their scriptures about 1500 BC, and then the Christians who wrote it, like, you know, the first You know, maybe three centuries, four centuries A.D.
	Right.
	Before these people even existed, you had the Greek myths, you had Hindic myths, you know, the Hindu myths, you had Norse mythology.
	You had all of these peoples coming up with very similar senses of that there's something else out there, they've created a history, a whole, you know, genealogical tree of Odin gave birth to Thor, who gave birth to... Yes, so you believe them to be basically mythology?
	Yes, they're all equally mythologies.
	And we basically, because we have this component in our brain which compels us to believe in miracles and to believe in these transcendental realities and a god, we project these belief systems onto our cultural environment.
	We create what are called mythologies.
	And that's the mechanism.
	So again, the The Christian Judeo-Christian Bible, what we call the Bible, contains no more import than any of the Bibles of the world, and they're equally manifestations of the God part of the brain.
	So you most obviously then believe the God part of some man's brain in the past wrote the Bible?
	He was definitely heavily influenced by that part of his brain, yes.
	All right.
	Hold it right there, we'll be right back.
	And we'll talk a little bit about Brookings.
	The Brookings Report.
	stay right there but you have you ever heard of the brookings report
	Oh, yeah.
	No.
	No.
	All right, let me tell you what it is, all right?
	I deal on this program a lot with the question of extraterrestrial life and aliens and UFOs and all that kind of thing.
	The U.S.
	government years ago had Brookings do a study, and the question was, if the American people, or the people of the world for that matter, but most specifically the American people, were to suddenly become aware of the presence of extraterrestrial life, what would the implications be for society?
	You know, for For religion, for science, for every aspect of society that you could imagine.
	And so they quietly did a thorough study on the matter.
	And the conclusion they reached was that it would be so disruptive to these various social organizations that it would be better if the people were not told.
	I repeat, not told.
	And a lot of people believe that, you know, there are UFO sightings and they believe the government already knows about all this.
	And be that as it may, true or false, the fact of the matter is that study did conclude that.
	Now, there's a pretty good parallel here with the work you're doing.
	And that is, if people became aware that the probabilities are That there really isn't a God, and there really isn't an afterlife.
	If anything, this would be more disruptive, considerably more disruptive, than finding out there is alien life.
	Institutions would crumble.
	Religions would crumble.
	Crime, many believe, would increase because people would no longer have anything to lose Nor would imagine a punishment for any bad deed they might do in this life.
	So I would imagine a study done along similar lines would be even more drastically saying, you better not tell them.
	What do you say to that?
	Well, the question ultimately is, is it good to know?
	And it really is the ultimate question and it's also why the last chapter of my book is titled What if anything is to be gained from a scientific interpretation of human spirituality and God?
	It's sort of where I, you know, encapsulate, where does all this lead us?
	Yes.
	Where does it leave us?
	Yes.
	And I had, when I wrote this, I had away the pros and cons of even suggesting an idea like this, and the reason that I did was because I hoped that its benefits would outweigh its disadvantages, which I still do.
	And the reason for that is because As dangerous as it might be for us to come to terms with what might be the reality of our circumstance here, more dangerous, I believe, than that is this hazardous religious impulse that we've been instilled with that has propelled us into a history of repeated religious wars.
	In which case, any time that we go into a world recession, which cyclically is the You know, basically that's the status of the human species as we go through a cycle of economic prosperity and then recession.
	Quite correct, yes.
	In times of prosperity, it's not a problem.
	In times of recession, it becomes a problem.
	And what happens is people band up into their tribes.
	And the most primitive primary tribe we band into are our religious tribes.
	And we go to war, and we kill each other in the name of our God.
	That's what we use as a defense, as a justification for why we should survive, you know, before that group there.
	And because of this, because it's inevitable that the Earth, that, you know, we will continue to go through these economic cycles... You know, what you're saying right now is very profound, and I hope it's sinking in out there.
	I mean, these cycles that you talk about, economic cycles, do in fact Coincide with war where they have certainly in all of our remembered and recorded history Now maybe Greenspan can change that That remains to be seen but we now appear to be headed for the possibility of recession
	Well, we're always, like, teetering, but I mean, I don't, you know, there's no reason to believe right now that we're headed for, like, a deep world depression.
	I hope you're right.
	I hope I'm right, too, because, you know, you never know.
	It just, it can come at any time, and almost like death.
	But, I mean, you certainly are correct when you say all of history has shown that, indeed, when this occurs, we have a war, and then we proceed To generally kill each other in the name of our God.
	I mean, that's just a truth.
	We're a potentially very volatile animal, and of course we have to be.
	We're talking about survival on the line.
	So what I'm suggesting is that not all religion is bad, and that not all spirituality is bad.
	spiritualities and or religions that promote tolerance and acceptance and compassion and
	all of these things.
	Obviously, there is nothing bad about that.
	A spiritual experience in itself, there is nothing wrong with it.
	It is a very sensual experience.
	It has medical benefits.
	It reduces blood pressure.
	Would you promote spirituality as a generic kind of spirituality over religiosity?
	Well, it is just that the two need to be disentangled and we need to learn that the excesses of
	... See, the spiritual impulse really in its excesses, it would just be someone who has
	like an excess of spiritual experiences.
	They spend half their day kind of stoned on the spirit, and they're people who do.
	You know, you could even say that a dedicated monk, I mean really, he's a drug addict who's spending his life dedicated to sitting on a mountaintop and having this experience all day long, which isn't a really very practical thing to do.
	Yes, although he's very unlikely to go out and kill anybody.
	Well, that's true, and that's because, you know, religions and philosophies promote things like tolerance and nonviolence, though nevertheless not all of them do.
	You know, even the Buddhists have a history of war, too.
	They've been fighting the Hindus, you know, for all of these years.
	You know, even, well, there are different schools of Buddhism, but yes, often a spirituality can be devoid of all of the religious, you know, the potential threats involved in religiosity and religion.
	Well, Japanese Buddhism, for example, since we fought the Japanese, you may recall, they attacked us at Pearl Harbor, it's a bit different than other Eastern religions in that it's more ancestor worship than it is uh... that it is traditional buddhism
	it again it's not the state of all spirituality and or religion is bad
	because we've got this impulse wired into us it does come with its potential except that there's an
	except for every impulse even the musical impulse you know you end up with a mozart
	but if you take a person who is hyper religious
	they are going to be uh... exercising their power of thought their influence in
	trying to make others except in embrace this religion with a but often a porosity
	which is destructive
	And we call that fanaticism.
	Fanaticism is the excess of the religious impulse.
	And it's that same fanaticism when people become insecure in their lives when you have these economic depressions.
	Or even, it might not be on a world level, but just a societal level.
	So you have societies undergoing an economic depression, and then they're prone to being, I guess, influenced by The voices of the fanatics, those who would compel others, you know, compel us to fight those others who we feel have more than ourselves.
	Yes, you believe the God part of the brain to be a product of evolution.
	Is it possible in your mind that evolution will eventually break the cycle that you just described?
	That we will in some way rise above this The economic cycle?
	Which cycle?
	No, the human reaction to the economic cycle.
	I wouldn't be so bold as to suggest we could stop the economic cycle, but the human reaction to it, we might.
	Okay, and again, the only way to stop the human reaction to this would be to understand what it is that we're reacting to.
	And the only way to understand it is to say, okay, well what are the origins of religiosity?
	I.e.
	to grasp what you're saying.
	Exactly.
	I see.
	I don't rule it out.
	I really don't rule it out, and I think that you're a man far ahead of his time.
	You may be totally wrong, and I hope that you are, but I think your arguments are very, very, very strong and logical, and I think a lot of times the arguments that would be made stridently against you, and they certainly are, are not as logical. Frequently they're illogical and full
	of emotion and you tend not to be that way.
	And you also have to realize that I predicted these things before any of this neurophysiological
	evidence and I said that it would come. I called my book the God Part of the Brain before there
	was really any neurophysiological research done suggesting that these different brain parts exist.
	I just projected that they must be there and again what I was basing the argument on
	initially was the sociobiological evidence like I said the fact that it's a unit these are
	universally enacted experiences and behaviors as well as the ethnobotanical argument and that was
	based more on the fact that we have these chemicals and these plants that stimulate that evoke these
	experiences. As we know These plants, you know, they're made up of chemicals.
	So the mere fact that a chemical could alter our physiology to evoke what we call a transcendental experience for me suggested that transcendental experiences are not transcendental at all, but they're rather chemical.
	They're based in the chemistry of the brain.
	And then, in the last couple of years, with the advent of the functional MRI, where they can now stick people in this box and then like play them music and see which part of the
	brain becomes active that's correct or expose them to anything and see where
	that's affected in the brain all of a sudden there's been this rush and all of this new
	research has come out and what's coming out is all being supportive of what I
	hypothesized years ago before even this And it's also why I keep updating my book, and why I'm presently now in a fifth edition, just five years after originally publishing the thing, which is because, again, I want my book to be on top of this science.
	So every new groundbreaking, you know, experiment that comes out, I rewrite the book and I fit it in.
	Aside from a damaged person?
	Mike in Memphis, Tennessee asks a pretty interesting question.
	If we are, in effect, all hardwired in our brains, how do you explain the people who do not believe in God or an afterlife, and yet the rest of their family does?
	Well, it's a very good question.
	It's why I included in my book a chapter called, Why Are There Atheists?
	To sum up, the answer to that is, For every physiological trait we possess we fall into a bell curve.
	Let's take vision.
	Most of us have average vision.
	We fall into the bulge of the bell curve.
	On one extreme some of us are born blind, lack of vision, and on the other extreme some of us are born with superior vision.
	That can be applied to every trait we possess.
	If we apply it to a cognitive trait, like musical ability, again, most of us have average musical potential.
	On one extreme of that bell curve, there's a small cross-section of every population who are born tone deaf.
	They lack total musical consciousness.
	Then on the other extreme of that bell curve, there's a very small cross-section of every population that have an overdeveloped Musical function, musical consciousness, such as a Mozart.
	He's born a prodigy.
	Doesn't matter how much you train the average person in music, they will never become a Mozart because they weren't born with his genetic potential.
	Now take that and apply that to spirituality, again, as a physical, a neurophysiological mechanism, a physiological trait, and we can show that, again, though the majority of our species falls into the bulge of that curve, it's why religion has persisted through all of these years, from the dawn of our species.
	At the same time, because it's a trait, because of natural selection, You know, or again, the distinction in genes, we're not all alike.
	Some of us, you know, small cross-sections have either an excess or a lack of certain qualities.
	So again, on one extreme of this bell curve, you have people born with an overdeveloped spiritual consciousness.
	Those are our fanatics.
	Those are our people who, you know, as children, they are preaching from the pulpit.
	We say, you know, born with the spirit in them.
	They have an exaggerated You know, they're hyper-religious.
	On the other extreme, there are people who lack spiritual consciousness.
	They will never contemplate.
	It's just as much as someone can be born tone-deaf, they're born spiritually tone-deaf.
	Yes.
	You know, I was going to ask you, what happens, out of curiosity, when you take an avowed atheist, a lifelong atheist, and put them in the MRI machine?
	you'd probably find that they don't have a very active temporal lobe, which is where
	religiosity seems to be seated, where like religious language and icons are stored, which
	is why for these people, there are people, temporal lobe epileptics, it's a form of epilepsy,
	and people who are plagued with this particular epilepsy are often hyper-religious and during
	seizures they have religious or spiritual experiences.
	They come out of them suggesting that, like, they felt the presence of God.
	And these doctors were saying, why is it that with these particular epileptics, they're always coming out of this saying that they felt the presence of God?
	As an example, they found out that, like, Dostoevsky, who is known to have been an epileptic, was a temporal lobe epileptic.
	And he himself, in his biography, his autobiography, wrote of one of his He has an account of one of his seizures.
	I really touched God.
	He came into me, myself.
	Yes, God exists, I cried.
	These are the words of Dostoevsky.
	You all healthy people can't imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second before our attack.
	That was the first physiological evidence that scientists had that led them to believe that maybe religiosity is somehow originating within the brain.
	Then they found that certain people, when exposed to religious words or icons, just like some people, if they're exposed to flashing lights, it will trigger their seizure.
	Indeed.
	Temporal lobe epileptics, if you expose them to certain religious icons or language, it triggers off their experience.
	Okay, but again, let us stay away from the epileptics for a moment and let's discuss you, for example.
	Okay.
	If we were to get you into an MRI, we would find probably not so much temporal lobe activity.
	Yes?
	I can't say on national radio which parts of my brain would be active, but it wouldn't be the religious one.
	Certainly, numerically, from a percentage point of view, you are in the vast minority, not the majority.
	You're in the minority, right?
	I fall into that one cross-section of the population at the edge of the bell curve.
	So then why shouldn't we imagine or suggest that you are the abnormal one?
	That it is your temporal lobe deficiency that has you preaching as you do?
	Well, that's true, and it was my temporal lobe deficiency, perhaps, that allowed me to sort of see beyond the veil that corrupts or adulterates the experience of most people who inherently feel that there's this presence out there, whereas I was able to look at it from an objective scientific standpoint and say, what's going on here?
	Why is the majority of my species praying to this thing called God?
	They all have a different name for it.
	They're all going to church for it.
	They're all going to war for it.
	All right, Matthew.
	Hold tight.
	We'll be right back.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	Stay right where you are.
	There is more.
	People think God is love.
	And love is God.
	And I think you've got a word or two to say on this program about love, don't you?
	Yes, I do.
	Might as well take it all on.
	Okay.
	Well, the reason I brought that back up to you was because, if I recall, it might have been our first show, maybe the second, where you decided to take on love.
	You said, I'm trying to suggest that all of our experiences, you know, come from the brain.
	How about love?
	And I suggested on that show, I said, you said, how would you prove that that too is another, you know, experience generated from another neural mechanism?
	That's right.
	And I said, take something like a functional MRI, put people inside of it, and expose them to loved ones versus insignificant others, and then as a control group, And then see which various parts of the brain become activated.
	Let me guess, somebody did it.
	Somebody did it.
	Specifically, Andreas Bartels of the University College in London last year did exactly that with photographs.
	He took people and he put them in an fMRI, a functional MRI, which would reveal under
	different exposure which parts of the brain are becoming activated.
	He showed people a series of photographs, some of loved ones and others of either strangers
	or insignificant others.
	What he found among all of these people was that there are certain parts of the brain
	which consistently lit up when exposed to the loved ones.
	The names of those parts are the anterior cingulate cortex, the putanum, the chordate
	nucleus.
	So here again, three parts of the brain where our experience of love is being generated.
	A lot of us like to explain love as part of the transcendence, part of the transcendental
	experience.
	Love, even in itself between two people, is a transcendental thing.
	So we might call it the love part of the brain.
	That's exactly what we could call it, the love part of the brain.
	Then there was another person, Helen Fisher, a neuropsychologist at Rutgers University,
	and she started looking into the neurotransmitters involved in activating these parts of the
	brain, and she found that she reduced it to the actual neurotransmitters, the chemistry
	involved in both love and bonding behaviors.
	Actually part of what she was working toward was suggesting that it might therefore be
	possible then to come up with pills, with medications for the forlorn who are trying
	to get over a loved one.
	In the excesses of that behavior, it becomes a dysfunctional behavior, for instance, among
	people like stalkers who...
	who cannot break the bond of love.
	Mightn't.
	And so there might be pills one day where people who are so attached to another in a
	dysfunctional manner can be eased off of those feelings.
	Oh gee, if we could have a pill for that Matthew, then why not a God pill?
	Well we could.
	The only thing is I don't think that pill, it would probably just control the degree
	to which we could have a spiritual experience, but I don't know if it could necessarily,
	I mean because religiosity is bound to so many different types of behavior that it would
	be a matter of which one.
	You could certainly suppress different parts of religious behavior.
	Again, in doing so... In other words, if you came up with the right chemical combination, it would be your position?
	You could take somebody who was very spiritual, very religious, went to church every Sunday, prayed, hostilitized to his friends and you could give him a pill and pretty soon he'd be giving up church, he'd be talking to his friends about You know, going to the game on Sunday instead of going to church and so forth and so on, right?
	Well, exactly.
	That could be an example, for instance, where something like that could be utilized, applied in a positive way.
	People who actually suffer from religious dysfunction, like hyper-religiosity, like religious conversion, exactly.
	Those people who are normal, functioning members of society who are now reduced to handing out pamphlets in an airport.
	can be cured. They can be cured. That's right. They can be brought back to their original identity.
	But because the church or all churches, you know, have so much political clout,
	these dysfunctions are not seen as such.
	They're seen as, you know, being touched by God.
	They're seen as miracles, divine interventions.
	And for that reason, society has yet to, you know, have the courage to say, you know, these are not divine interventions.
	This is a dysfunction.
	This person is in pain and they need to be cured.
	We want to bring them back to themselves.
	We want to bring them back to their families so that they can have the experience of love and living a normal, functional life.
	Tell me something, if we had such a pill, Matthew, do you think the church would view that pill as even more evil than RU486?
	Which is RU486?
	That's the abortion pill.
	That's the abortion pill, probably, yes.
	That would be the ultimate anti-Christ pill.
	The anti-Christ pill.
	Well, that's an interesting phrase.
	Linda in Santa Fe, New Mexico has an interesting question.
	Mr. Alper often refers to nature, as in nature developed this evolutionary mechanism in the brain.
	What does he think nature, in quotes, is?
	Okay, a good question, a very good question.
	Yes.
	And when you apply nature in that way, you have to almost put quotes around it.
	Because I'm not suggesting nature is personified like nature in itself is its own God.
	Nature is really another, it's just a word for the physical laws of the universe.
	Really the laws of thermodynamics by which the entire physical universe abides.
	Because matter abides by certain physical laws such as gravity, etc.
	Natural selection, organic matter seen in adhering to these laws has been taking us through a process of natural selection, trying to adapt these different creatures so that they are most efficient.
	So nature is really the process of the progress of time by which matter is going through really the passing of entropy.
	You know, organic matter reach settling into a pattern of a It's the path of least resistance, of maximum efficiency, and that's what natural selection is.
	It's really just physical processes.
	So when I say nature, I'm not referring to Mother Nature or another personification, but rather the laws of physics, simply.
	Okay, the laws of physics.
	Interesting.
	Okay, nature then is just what is.
	It's evolution.
	Right?
	You agree with that?
	Evolution is sort of the passage of time, you know, the effect of time over organic matter.
	Do you favor the Big Bang Theory?
	Yes, I do.
	You do?
	That's interesting.
	Would you endeavor to explain, or have you tried to understand, what so many have been unable to, and that is, of course, what occurred just prior, or what was just prior to the Big Bang, which you say you subscribe to?
	Well, like many physicists, I think that the most accepted theory at this point is,
	which I adhere to, is cyclical Big Bang theory, which suggests that there was a previous, a prior universe,
	you know, the moment before, in its last phases of dying, before it was completely
	compressed into a single point, which then gave birth to a new universe and a Big Bang.
	Well, that would be the constriction theory.
	In other words, there's a Big Bang, everything expands, and then contracts.
	Exactly.
	Once again, in cycles, right?
	Right.
	The only problem with that is that recent science suggests to us that, in fact, There is not a contraction, and in fact, the bodies are now speeding up away from each other, and that eventually, if we could live long enough, Matthew, we'd be virtually alone.
	Are you aware of that?
	Yeah, actually, I have heard that there is recent studies which suggest that it's possible that we're in a infinitely expanding universe.
	Correct.
	I'm not sure whether I believe that or not.
	Now, these are tremendous cosmological questions, and of course, it comes down to, like, why is there anything, you know?
	Why is there a Big Bang?
	What was before?
	How can you have before nothing?
	Right.
	Well, that's where you run into a pretty good argument for creation.
	Because there's simply nothing in science, the study of the brain or anything else, that can explain to us how you create so much from nothing.
	My explanation for this is simply that the universe, the cosmos, operates in a manner Which is perhaps beyond human comprehension.
	So whereas we're trying to find these finite solutions to problems which might be persisting in universes or dimensions which are incomprehensible to us, We're projecting our own particular perceptions, our mode of perception.
	Again, the human animal, we are prisoners of our brain.
	Our brains frame the entire manner by which we process and interpret reality.
	So we're trying to apply these human notions onto a cosmos which probably surpasses our intelligence, our capacity for intelligence.
	What comes before a Big Bang?
	Is there a Big Bang?
	Honestly, I won't even, you know, there are theories, some I believe in more than others.
	Can I say I feel that I know these things with absolute certainty?
	Not at all.
	However, do I feel that the lack of knowledge implies that there must be a God, that there must be some conscious divine creator, that we as humans must be immortal, that we must be connected to some spiritual reality?
	The fact that we can't answer, like, Ultimately, where does the physical universe begin?
	Where did it all come from?
	I don't think represents evidence that there must be a God, that there must be a soul, and there must be an afterlife.
	All right, but surely the existence of a God-center in the brain, I think, scientifically now, established a victory for you, a big victory for you.
	But it certainly does not logically preclude the existence of God.
	Ultimately, no one will ever be able to preclude the existence of God.
	One can never say, I know for certain there is no God, because if God's an invisible force, for instance, that we don't even have access to.
	Right, but simply because you have pointed out biological facts to us and you are correct
	about them, why does that suggest to you even the probability that there is no God?
	Because it provides us with a physical explanation which supersedes any transcendental explanation.
	So right now, whereas before we were like, well we're having these trippy experiences
	and we're all looking outward toward a God and we're having these experiences where we
	feel like we're connected to this God, there must be a God.
	We had no reason to believe otherwise.
	And now we're finding that all of our knowledge, all of our knowledge that leads us to believe
	in these things is coming from the mechanism of the brain.
	We now have a physical explanation.
	And the fact that we have...
	There is no transcendental explanation.
	So far, no one has offered us, no one has revealed a miracle.
	And if it has been, it's been written about in ancient texts, but today, you know, we don't live in a world of miracles.
	We live in a world in a material universe, where scientists are, you know, constantly uncovering some new agenda, some new fact, and it's all It's all been defined in physical properties, not transcendental
	ones.
	None of the sciences, as much as we continue to advance, as much as we continue to expand
	with these new technologies, these technologies come from physical science, not spiritual
	science or metaphysics.
	So again, more and more, the physical sciences give themselves credibility in that their
	theories and presumptions seem to be correct in that they're providing us with all these
	technologies.
	Right now, the only knowledge we have of a spiritual reality is the fact that the human organism, that the human animal has a brain mechanism, a cognitive mechanism, which makes us perceive this type of reality.
	That means, to the best of our knowledge, if human beings died, if our species alone died out, or even before our species existed, simply a couple hundred thousand years ago, there was no God.
	Without humans, without human cognition, the whole notion of God will never be contemplated again.
	As far as we know, other, all other mammals do not, as far as we know, Contemplate the existence of a creator.
	Based on animal behavior, there's no reason to believe at this point that no animal has given evidence, you know, reason for us to believe that they are spiritual creatures.
	The only other animal that was spiritual, that we do believe was religious, was Neanderthal
	man which was basically our closest descendant and Neanderthal man for instance buried his
	dead with artifacts implying that he believed he was sending the dead somewhere else.
	So they did have certain spirits like religious icons and iconographs which lead us to believe
	that there was another animal that walked the earth at one time that looked out there
	with some form of a belief system.
	Again, it's more than likely that Neanderthal man also had an incipient sense of self-conscious awareness and therefore his own mortality.
	He must have if he was burying his dead with a ritual.
	Other than that, no other animal.
	The only other animal that people throw out of, you know, what about elephants?
	Elephants have an elephant graveyard.
	It's really just that elephants, you know, isolate themselves when they're dying and probably the adaptive value of that is simply that they're these tremendous animals.
	If an amoeba dies, it disintegrates in seconds.
	It doesn't have to isolate itself.
	If elephants live in a certain community and they just drop dead all the time in the midst of their communities, they're going to be 10 tons of rotting flesh spreading bacteria and killing off
	their animals. So they tend to isolate themselves and die in what
	we call an elephant cemetery but it's not because they're
	believing that they're going somewhere special. You know they don't erect
	edifices which are suggestive of shrines.
	They don't gather in groups and look upward at the sky and chant or pray.
	None of their behaviors indicate that they are religious creatures.
	I think your arguments are so compelling that in my view the religious community should snap your book up like crazy.
	Now that may not occur, In fact, they just may be very, very angry, which they are
	a lot of times when they listen to you.
	But I would think the objective out there, the thinking would snap your book up and try
	and shoot holes in the whole thing.
	I actually would hope that that would happen.
	Or maybe not shoot holes necessarily, but maybe start to adjust and adapt to science
	just like the church has had to do throughout the progress of time.
	Well, let me rephrase that.
	Try to shoot holes in your whole theory.
	I think that your book is a valuable tool for anybody whose mind really is open as they claim it to be now.
	So I'm giving you a book plug is what I'm trying to do here.
	The God Part of the Brain, 5th edition, huh?
	Did you ever think it would go that far?
	No, I didn't, but I'm pretty certain that this is the last.
	I feel like this one is so complete.
	It now has the neurophysiological data, and my argument is airtight, and I'm probably done with this 5th edition.
	You really think so?
	Uh-huh.
	Okay.
	This final completed work.
	Although works like this are rarely complete, there will be some new discovery.
	Nevertheless, let's assume it is reasonably complete, or you think it is, is available
	at Amazon.com.
	You can get it, folks, by going to my website and going to Amazon.com.
	It's called The God Part of the Brain.
	Is it mostly in bookstores now?
	Have you cracked that?
	Yeah, it's in Barnes and Noble.
	Oh, it is?
	Yeah, it can be ordered through any bookstore, through a Borders.
	local book shops.
	Or, again, in New York City, I suggest people go to Coliseum Books, where all the copies are signed.
	Have you ever heard the words John Lennon's Imagine?
	and I'll see you next week.
	Yeah, it's an Alpers song all the way.
	Listen, hold on.
	We'll go to the phones if you're up for it, alright?
	I'm up for it.
	It should be interesting to say the least, and I expect all of you out there to be polite.
	life. You hear me? KDWN Las Vegas.
	KDWN Las Vegas.
	No hell below us.
	You hear me? You hear me? You hear me? You hear me? You hear me? You hear me? You hear
	Above us lonely skies.
	Imagine all the people living for today.
	Imagine there's no country living more than you.
	in my country.
	In my country.
	Coming to kill or die.
	And no religion too.
	Imagine all the people living more.
	Living in life in peace.
	You.
	You may say I'm a dreamer.
	But I'm not the only one.
	That was a man ahead of his time, too.
	John Lennon.
	And, you know, if you listen to the words, it really is the Matthew Alper song.
	You know, when Lennon wrote this, people said he was a communist.
	They thought he was thinking of communism.
	six one eight eight two five five east of the Rockies at one eight hundred eight two five five
	zero three three first time callers may reach out at one seven seven five seven two seven twelve
	twenty two the wildcard line is open on the premier radio networks you know when Lennon wrote this
	people said he was a communist they thought he was thinking of communism i don't think so
	i think uh i think he was thinking about something altogether different
	But that's just me.
	And I'm a dreamer, too.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Matthew Alper is my guest, and he'll be right back.
	So, Matthew, do you think that Lennon was Way ahead of his time, even more ahead of his time than you.
	Or do you think that Lenin was singing about a perfect communist state, as somebody said back then?
	I think he was just a man seeking peace.
	And, you know, seeking world peace.
	He had very eastern values.
	And I think that's pretty much what he was singing about.
	And no religion, too, including eastern religions.
	Well, he probably just saw.
	I mean, he was a product of European society, not Eastern religions, and he was probably imagining, you know, a world where there wouldn't be these Western religions, you know, combating one another.
	I think it was really more just... Isn't that the world you're imagining, though?
	Yeah, pretty much.
	I don't know if it's possible.
	I don't know if it's possible to supersede this you know perceptual framework we're built into but I
	guess it's a hope.
	Okay, wouldn't from your perspective then the ultimate act of science
	be the deliverance of immortality from your point of view?
	Well it would be an interesting one I suppose. I mean given that science is meant to
	advance us as a species you know what would be the greatest advance?
	You know, we're constantly looking for, you know, pills and medications that will prolong our lives, so ultimately the greatest scientific invention would be immortality.
	Yeah, I thought so.
	All right.
	Good.
	Let's go to the lines.
	First time calling the line, you're on the air with Matthew Alper and Art Bell.
	Good morning.
	Where are you, dear?
	Well, I'm in California.
	Okay.
	And I'd like to say hi to my good friend in Canada, who I believe is listening.
	His name is Corey.
	And I have three questions I'd like to put up front, so you can answer them in any order, because I am very logical-minded.
	All right.
	And I'd appreciate a little... Why don't we do one at a time, so pick your favorite.
	Okay.
	Gosh, I don't have one.
	And since I'm a note-oriented person, I'll just start with the beginning.
	Let's assume for a minute that something in the brain explains our human need for a God.
	Why could it not be that the God who might have created us didn't put that in our brains
	because he wants to be recognized?
	Okay, that's a good question and it's one that's been brought up in debates regarding
	this issue and my best answer to that is simply that what kind of God would put a mechanism
	in our brain that would compel us to believe that he's so many different things that we
	should all go to war with one another by killing one another to prove that our version of him
	That would either be a very foolish or sadistic God, so I find it hard to imagine that any divine power would have implanted this thing in us in this way.
	Okay, well, that's a good answer, except I would believe that since There's a potential for a god, there's also the potential for the devil, and that may be the devil implanted these other false gods.
	But my second question would be, we talked about, you know, you mentioned the elephants, which I thought was very interesting as far as the, you know, remains and so forth.
	And as far as I know, we're the only, humans are the only level of creation that have a consciousness in the sense of guilt and right and wrong and this sort of overwhelming sense that tells them in a way what to do. And if we are
	creations of evolution, when might you find the genes that prove we have evolved a
	conscious? Because if there was not a creator that gave that to us, then there must be
	genetic proof.
	Genetic proof that there is a part of... Well, if there is a part of the brain from which
	we acquire self-conscious awareness, it means that there is a gene responsible for creating
	that part of the brain.
	Which you must admit is different than all the other levels of species, from the amoeba on up.
	Yes, it's unique.
	It is unique, and so how do you evolve something as unique as a human?
	and untangible and unphysical as a conscious. Well see that's the thing it's not that
	intangible and again these sciences are now breaking through and finding that they're
	completely tangible. As a matter of fact as you talk about things like awareness of good and evil
	it's true only humans have what I refer to in my book as moral consciousness.
	There's a chapter in my book called the morality the guilt and morality functions.
	These are two behaviors that are unique to the human species, just as much as music and mathematical awareness are.
	You know, every species is unique.
	There are other animals that have awarenesses, you know, or perceptions of either vision or hearing that supersede our own.
	And again, we're unique in that we have these other cognitive components, one of them being moral wiring.
	Okay, but how would you suggest that we evolve moral wiring?
	Well, mammals are social organisms, so they need to adhere to certain group restrictions in order to survive.
	There are some behaviors which are destructive to the group, like excessive selfishness, and there are some behaviors that are productive to the group, like altruistic behaviors.
	At the same time, we all have to be selfish.
	We all need to survive.
	But in excess, we become a hazard to the group.
	So, with other species, for instance, if an animal acts out of line in its hierarchy, for instance, or acts selfishly, the rest of the group will ostracize them.
	They possess ostracizing behaviors by which they, you know, they shun or get rid of, and in some cases, kill those animals which are a little too aggressive for the group.
	With humans, because we're such a more behaviorally complex organism, we need to evolve more complex means by which to differentiate behaviors which were productive to the group versus behaviors which were destructive to the group.
	We call those morals.
	And even more interesting, however, recently it's been discovered by a man, Antonio Damasio, a neuropsychologist He started his research when he looked into the case of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker.
	Maybe you're familiar with him.
	During an explosion, a steel rod was sent through his skull.
	And he spent the rest of his natural life living with this rod through his skull.
	And what they found was, though this took place in the 1800s, scientific historians have found It changed his behavior and what it did was it took a very
	responsible, hardworking father and turned him into a sociopath.
	Much like the John Travolta movie where he walked out one night and he saw something
	unique and it turned out at the end of the story that it was a tumor of the brain that
	accelerated his ability to learn.
	That's right.
	Okay, well that's still fictional but here in the real world this man, Antonio Damasio,
	found that the part of the brain that was affected by this rod was called the prefrontal
	cortex.
	He then went and started studying cases in hospitals.
	He looked for cases of children or people who had had some kind of disruption or damage to their prefrontal cortex.
	And he started finding that anybody who had any kind of injury to their prefrontal cortex basically went from normal, responsible, reliable people to becoming sociopathic.
	They engaged in stealing and cheating.
	Absolutely.
	I agree with you totally.
	As a matter of fact, I have a cousin who has suffered from epilepsy and I guess then my last question would be that if, for example, we may have a creator who totally made us, Then how do you know that physical science, because let's assume for a minute that it is a creator who made us, is separate from the spiritual science?
	In other words, I know if I say certain words to my child he will react a certain way and I didn't get to create his brain or my life would be a little bit easier, but I do have to work within his God I would say God-given abilities and work with him that way to teach him important lessons.
	So how could you say that a creator who is intelligent did not make us physical in a way that he knew would be equal to spiritual as far as science went?
	Because they come hand in hand if you assume, once again, a creator made us.
	I think that's the most magnificent thing on earth.
	I don't understand the question.
	If the axis of the earth, if the tilt of the earth was any different we could not exist.
	And so let's assume that a creator is so intelligent that he knows the axis of the earth.
	And he knows every part of our brain.
	But you know what?
	If you look at the majority of planets, by the trillions, the access of their orbits are off, or they are too far from the sun, or too close to the sun.
	If someone were living on Mars right now, we'd say, what kind of God is this?
	We've got ten minutes to live and we're all going to die.
	We're just talking about probabilities here.
	And that's not proof of a creator.
	Well, I'm not talking about proof of a creator, but what I'm trying to do is... Because for every planet like Earth that has organic matter that has given emergence to life, again, there's trillions, and to the best of our knowledge, that we can't even point to one that we know for certain even has life.
	She's using... So we might be the only one.
	Yeah, she's using the evidence of all that is, and so perfect to allow everything that is right now.
	And what I don't think are... The problem with that argument is, though, That it could be that it all is that way because that's the only way it could be to allow for us, and it could be evolution as opposed to creation just as easily.
	It's a very anthropomorphic view by saying, like, look, we're here, so there must be a God who wanted it to be this way.
	Well, I have one question I think will fascinate you, and I love the way you think, and I love your mind, and I love the way you just probe into subjects.
	But I believe that pretty much every cell in our body is regenerated every seven years.
	It's not that every cell is regenerated, but every seven years, because cells are constantly going through mitosis, giving birth to new ones, old ones die off, every seven years there is no cell that was with you seven years ago.
	So we're like a whole new person physically.
	If we were only physical, it would be impossible to commit or to find someone guilty of a crime.
	After seven years, because every cell in their body is no longer... Well, you've got a new legal angle, you know, because you might be able to get Timothy McVeigh off with that.
	No, that was very good, and I almost hate to even see that concept out there.
	She has a very good point.
	Wild Card Line, you're on with Matthew Albert, hello.
	Hello, my name is Matthew.
	Matthew also, Matthew and Matthew, alright.
	I agree with Matthew, because Almost every civilization believes in some sort of God and afterlife.
	And it is likely that humans created religion for an explanation of things.
	Yes, that's his contention.
	A lot of religions believe in some sort of heaven and hell.
	And I think this is used to, like, scare and prevent crimes.
	And the heaven part is meant to help people who have lost Well, I refer to it as a coping mechanism, and it's yes, exactly that.
	They are to help us cope with the trials and tribulations of life.
	You mentioned, you said that in excess, I guess in any excess, we become a danger to the group, hence the formulation of morality.
	ethics and so forth. If magically, as if a miracle occurred and the whole world suddenly
	believed as you do Matthew, describe the kind of world that we live in. What do you think
	that world would be like? That's a big question.
	Well, first of all, I think there's a difference between all of a sudden and a slow shift in
	paradigm which I think could be a much healthier way to go about this.
	Well, I used the word miracle.
	That was for you.
	Right.
	If it should so happen that, you know, tomorrow everybody felt this way, it'd be like having the rug pulled out from under them suddenly and mysteriously, and they go into a panic, and it would be like you were talking about You know, with the War of the Worlds scenario, when Orson Welles played H.G.
	Wells to everybody and said, look, the aliens are here.
	Mad Max.
	Or we'd have total disarray.
	Well, Mad Max, that's a different scenario.
	Not all that different.
	In other words, if there was no afterlife consequence, if there was no consequence to misbehavior, no consequence to stealing the big rip-off, all the rest of it, and it was sudden, then you would have the Mad Max scenario.
	The thing is when we live among society, among civilization, there are repercussions to our
	crimes.
	We do not rely, though, the spiritual threat, I suppose, of heaven versus hell is certainly
	one of the main motivators by which we try and get members of society to behave one way
	versus another.
	We don't rely on that because we know it wouldn't work and therefore every society also has
	a penal function by which we punish those who break those laws.
	And, um, for that reason, you know, we still have society upholding law As well as the fact that if we were going to look at it from a purely selfish perspective, even on selfish grounds, it's to our advantage to work among one another, to work toward cooperation.
	Because let's say we take it, like, on a group level and we look at it on a national level, there's no way that the human species is going to survive in a world with all the technologies we have today, with all of the weapons of mass destruction, unless we work cooperatively.
	For any one of us to think that, like, oh, we can rule the world without any repercussions, we can commit any evil on any other country or peoples, you know, and we'll come out on top, No one comes out on top.
	We are a social organism.
	United we stand, divided we fall.
	It's as simple as that.
	So even in the most simple, selfish way, we have to re-educate ourselves to understand that by committing wrong, by committing a selfish act, we're hurting ourselves.
	But has it occurred to you that if you were to have instant success with what you believe to be true, it would be a world that you probably wouldn't want to live in?
	Well, if I had instant success, I'd have money and fame and I wouldn't have to live in it.
	I'd buy my island and I'd live on my yacht and my mansion and that'd be the end of it.
	I know.
	No, I believe that all it would mean is that the world comes to an understanding where
	primitive mythologies and primitive primal explanations for how we got here and why we
	are here would dissolve and give way to a more spiritual, even, you know, the kind of
	stuff that someone like the Dalai Lama preaches, which is really just an ethic of tolerance
	and cooperation and harmony through understanding, mutual understanding and accord, as opposed
	to like, my group's better than your group.
	Or even just, my group is accepting of your group.
	Because the minute you have groups, again, you take the chance that the next time there is that threat of recession, that it will come down to my group is better than your group.
	You know, in times of prosperity, we have a hundred people in two separate groups, a hundred loaves of bread, nobody's having a problem.
	If you pull that away and all of a sudden there's ten loaves of bread on the table for a hundred people, they're going to abandon to their religious tribes and they're going to justify why they should have the ten loaves of bread and not the others.
	Again, it's a mechanism.
	It's a discriminating mechanism.
	As much as we're a social animal, we need to be bonded.
	We live in a global community, so tribal bonding is actually dangerous to a global community unless we embrace a global religion.
	But aren't a lot of these impulses, let's take the ten loaves of bread, aren't they much more basic than frontal lobe considerations?
	In other words, the reptilian portion of our brain is what considers the ten loaves of bread.
	Mm-hmm.
	Is it not?
	Well, in times of normal... Fight or flight?
	...circumstance, we're not in recession.
	There's a balance of community, of population growth, where we usually keep a pace where there's the right number of loaves for the right number of people.
	All right, hold it right there.
	We'll be right back.
	There's more.
	More of Matthew Albert, more of me.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	And here we go again.
	Matthew Albert, welcome back.
	Matthew, this is interesting.
	Michael in Chico writes, You speak of God, and I have trouble taking it.
	My dad just died this morning.
	I'm sorry, Michael.
	And though once religious, I don't feel it now.
	That's an interesting That's an interesting reaction that is almost universal in great immediate loss.
	People with deep religious conviction suddenly, temporarily, sometimes permanently lose it.
	Do you have anything to say about that?
	Well, again, it's not to say that all of the parts of our Religious mechanism of these functions are destructive.
	It is a coping mechanism, and you know, nature is a master architect.
	There's a reason that it put it there.
	We do need these mechanisms, and yes, they have to confront death, just like you were saying before.
	What kind of world would we live in if suddenly no one believed?
	One of the key reasons that we have this inherited belief system locked into our brains is because to help us deal with not just our own death, but the death of others.
	And in order to survive the pain, the excruciating pain and that loss, we need to feel that they're still with us.
	No, I understand all that, but what I'm saying is, one would imagine then that a religious person, Given a tragic loss, like Michael's today, would grasp their religion, grasp their religious nature, and hold on to that as tightly as you can imagine, but instead, so frequently, it produces the exact opposite reaction, and a rejection of God, and a rejection of religion.
	Yeah, well, you know, here we have this mechanism telling us there's more, and then when confronted with the physical reality of that, you know, people are being taken away, that death is inevitable, and, you know, we do not see their spirit rise and sit with us at the table, and we basically lose that person as much as we want to believe that somehow their spirit is with us regardless.
	Or we see that person suffer physically.
	That too.
	And we say, you know, what kind of creator could this be that has subjected us to so much torment?
	And it's true, it does tend to make, you know, people at times turn away from their gods, but generally it's a more protective mechanism and it actually makes more people than that turn toward their gods and toward their religion.
	They embrace religion in having to confront death of themselves or of others.
	The exceptions are interesting though.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Matthew Alper.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	I'm Dave from Lubbock, Texas.
	It's delightful to hear someone that so closely parallels my own views.
	If I may, before I get to my question, I'd like to make a comment on a question that you asked earlier, Art.
	It has to do with the universe and its creation.
	When one assumes, in my opinion, that there must have been something before and that therefore
	there must have been a God, one is assuming that something has to come from something
	else.
	If you analyze that, then it would appear that even if we assume that a God created all of this, There must have been something pre-God that created this
	God, etc., etc., infinite regress.
	Anyway, on to my question.
	You're going to give us all a headache with that.
	I tried to make it brief.
	The other question I had was if Matthew thought that there was some relationship in the higher primates,
	particularly there's a seeking for a leader, a superior over the tribe.
	I wonder what his thoughts are on the relationship of that to his other concepts.
	I'll hang up now.
	Okay, no, that's a really good question.
	He's right about that.
	There is this leadership thing, isn't there?
	Well, most animals work on, or mammals, social groups work by a dominance hierarchy.
	And it's through that that they maintain order.
	Yes, but that's a physical, until you get to the human level, it's a physical dominance.
	Right, exactly.
	What happened was, and I go into this in great detail, I go into the evolution of moral consciousness
	and one of the keys with humans is here we have these mammals, even pre-mammals, almost
	all the vertebrate species that are social organisms live by a dominance hierarchy, a
	hierarchy system.
	Among humans we don't live that way physically simply because our intelligence supersedes
	it.
	All of a sudden we live among a species where the physically weakest animal can still pick
	up a rock and use it as a tool and bludgeon to death the alpha male.
	So we're basically on more equal ground all of a sudden, the hierarchy system dissolved.
	We needed some other mechanism by which to maintain social order and the way we did that was by evolving these mechanisms in the brain that make us react in certain ways towards certain behaviors.
	So now the person who picks up where it's like among apes if one of them picked up a rock and bashed in the skull of another He would be respected as the alpha male and that would be the end of it.
	Right.
	Among humans, we can't have that kind of behavior in a social order.
	So if the smallest person did still decide to do that, we would have to have other mechanisms by which we would judge them and then ostracize them or punish them.
	So we evolved these moral mechanisms by which we can distinguish different behaviors.
	Some is good, some is bad.
	And in a sense, we've We also internalize those behaviors through feelings of guilt so that we're repelled by our own bad behavior.
	So the notion of me, as much as I might judge someone else who would pick up a rock and hurt someone with it, we're wired to be repelled by destructive behaviors.
	At the same time, we're also wired to be repelled when we think of doing them ourselves.
	So should I pick up that rock and get ready to smash it down on someone's head, there's a mechanism in my brain saying, Don't do it.
	That's destructive to the group.
	You're repelled by that behavior, and you drop the rock.
	So again, it's because of the dissolution of the hierarchy system that humans... it is what makes us different.
	It's our intelligence.
	It's our intelligence that has made us so unique from these other species that we had to evolve all these new mechanisms by which to survive our intelligence.
	Okay.
	Again... Alright, so then, it seems to me, based on that, we would Pick our leaders based on their excelling in areas of morality and ethical behavior and so forth and so on, right?
	It doesn't seem to be that way.
	That's what I was going to hit you with.
	No, it seems that we're more drawn when we look for a leader, for somebody who will have us prosper.
	I'm Dave.
	I'm calling you from North Dakota.
	Great show.
	I look forward to the book.
	I have two brief comments and then a question.
	I'm Dave, I'm calling you from North Dakota.
	Great show, I look forward to the book.
	I have two brief comments and then a question.
	The first comment is that I think if you look at this very philosophically, really religion
	as an institution should have no more trouble with this than it would have with knowing
	astronomically what the star of Bethlehem is, but I don't doubt that it will.
	My other comment is I think this kind of undertaking and understanding of human nature is so important because just the way I see it, we are in the process of kind of stepping out of what could loosely be called, for lack of a better term, a state of nature into Hopefully sometime in the future a state of civilization can have a foot on the dock and a foot in the boat both at the same time.
	Not sure we're always doing too well but I think we need to understand this part of human nature because it might be one of the best impulses of humanity but we need to have a better understanding of it I think than we do for that to happen.
	My question having to do with the spiritual part of the brain I have to kind of give a premise, which might be wrong, and please interrupt me if it is.
	My premise is that, assuming that this came out of natural selection and evolution at some point, that the brain physiology itself that your author is referring to presumably predated the linguistic, let's say, concept of God.
	And if that's accurate, then that became infused.
	Of course, it's been there for a long time, but I'm assuming that there's a more basic brain physiology, endorphins, or I'm just kind of grasping at straws.
	It's something or other that interacts with that heavy cultural overlay of supreme being and parental impulse and that sort of thing.
	And if so, does the author have any idea how that might work?
	I'm missing the boat on that.
	Well, what, how the linguistic part of our brains interact with the spiritual part?
	Well, and in particular, because I'm assuming that this capacity that, you know, you've described in, you know, kind of more emotional terms, how we generate the warm feeling and the feeling of connectedness, and it has, as I agree with you, the obvious adaptive value to kind of at least buffer some of our knowledge about our mortality and so forth.
	But I'm assuming that that would have an adaptive function, whether we had Whether anybody had thought of the idea of God or not, and that that evolutionarily, chronologically, predated humans thinking about God.
	Maybe that's not true, or maybe we don't know enough to say for sure, but if that's the case, then... Well, they're contemporary of one another.
	You know, as humans evolve, the things that distinguish us from all the other animals are, basically, our spiritual consciousness, moral consciousness, Linguistic consciousness, you know, we're the only speaking animal.
	Other animals certainly communicate through sound, but not what we call language.
	You know, they don't put together a series of consonants and sounds that have symbolic meaning.
	Again, all of these things are what distinguish us as a species from all other species, so they must have all evolved at about the same time.
	It's not like there was like the pre-spiritual humans, so that's like 50,000 years we had
	language and math and music and all these things, but we weren't spiritual.
	They all evolved in coordination with one another, which is why they all interact with
	one another.
	Matthew, we are near this break point at this hour where I can either hold you over, and
	I'm happy to do so and allow you to talk with people for the final hour of the program,
	or I know you're in Brooklyn where it's probably just before 5 o'clock in the morning.
	Oh, that's okay.
	I'm always good to go for the show.
	You're always good to go.
	All right.
	I want to remind everybody that your book is available in bookstores nationwide.
	It's available on Amazon.com, where you can always get a really good buy on it.
	My God, they give good discounts.
	And there's a store in Brooklyn where you can get an autographed copy, right?
	Well, it's in Manhattan if you go to Coliseum Books.
	And again, for those of you who would like to order it on the web but don't have access, you can also send a check.
	It's $15.95 with priority shipping to Matthew Alper, 123 7th Avenue, Suite 164, Brooklyn, New York, 11215.
	avenue sweet one six four brooklyn new york one one two one five
	is this a part of the program where we give out your home number
	I can't remember.
	No, this is not, but this was the part that we once did, and now is the last time.
	All right.
	Matthew Alper, who says we're all hooked on a feeling.
	We'll be right back.
	I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM.
	Once again, here is Matthew Alper.
	the world.
	That's a kind of a good sound for you, Matthew.
	I wonder if that's... A lightning bolt?
	Yeah, that is.
	Let me read you an email, which we haven't really had tonight, surprisingly so far, but let's have it here.
	It says, if I'm wrong when my life on this earth ends, what is the downside to me?
	If you're wrong when your life, Matthew, ends on earth, what's the downside for you?
	An interesting question.
	Wait, now... In other words, we're talking about a person who's got faith here.
	And this person is saying, if I'm wrong when my life ends on earth, what's the downside to me?
	And at the same time, he's asking if, on the other hand, Matthew, you're wrong when your life ends on Earth.
	What's the downside for you?
	Well, actually, that was called Pascal's Dilemma, because the French philosopher, mathematician from the 18th century, Blaise Pascal, asked himself the same thing.
	He was an atheist.
	And based on his answer to that question, he said, well, what the hell?
	Then I'm going to become a believer.
	and he turned around and became a Christian philosopher and a firm believer because he
	believed that ultimately there is more to be gained in believing.
	I'm suggesting, however, as I have throughout the show, that because religion has these
	destructive potentials that believing actually is not necessarily to our benefit.
	It can be very harmful, and though if we're talking about simply an afterlife, look, we
	can adapt to...
	I mean, we're talking about religion as they stand today.
	If we adapt and adjust to some kind of global world religion which preaches harmony and even perhaps some belief in an organic afterlife, it doesn't necessarily have to be as discriminating and therefore as debilitating to our species as religion is today.
	So, there are different ways to approach an afterlife.
	As it stands today, the belief in an afterlife lends support to belief in various religions, which lends support to the possibility that we're going to harm one another.
	So, there is a downside to that.
	As far as just the belief in the afterlife itself, well, I even believe there, too, there's benefit in embracing a belief in one's mortality because, A, it means that we feel I'm more obliged to live for the here and now, to try and better ourselves now within this lifetime, as opposed to hedging our bets on some dubious hereafter.
	For that reason I find that, for instance, with myself and my own personal philosophy,
	as opposed to leaving me feeling hopeless and in a place of gloom, I embrace my life
	and I say, okay, I've got this many years to do everything I want to do.
	One of those things that I wanted to do was to solve the problem of God.
	So in a sense my lack of belief has impassioned me to try and make the most that I can out
	of my life here and now, again, as opposed to banking on a dubious hereafter and thinking,
	oh, I've got all eternity to work things out and to do things and to do my best.
	I believe that I have just so many years to experience reality to the best of my ability
	and it pushes me in that way.
	Alright, one more.
	This is pretty good.
	I'm wondering how Matthew explains atheism and those of us who have no belief in organized religions nor spend any time in contemplative prayer or any such activities.
	Are we a throwback biologically?
	Are we brain damaged?
	Or are we evolved ahead of our time?
	Well, as I said before when I answered the question where I said in my book there's a chapter, why are there atheists?
	It's none of the above.
	It's simply that people who lack spiritual consciousness, where it doesn't play a predominant role in their conscious experience, they're just that end of the bell curve.
	It's natural because we're all, you know, because of the way that evolution works and gene theory works, There is always going to be a small cross-section of every society that's going to have either a lack of or an excess of every characteristic.
	But bearing the numbers in mind, why is it not at least reasonable to contemplate the possibility that you are, by your own definition, brain damaged?
	Well, it's true.
	One could, for instance, have that part of the brain removed, Or damaged, and lose their capacity for spirituality.
	At the same time, there are people who have been hit in the head.
	It's called an organic psycho-syndrome, where you're banged in the head and you become hyper-religious.
	Where it actually stimulates that part of that brain.
	That's correct, yes.
	In those cases, one could say technically either one is brain damaged.
	The atheist or the hyper-religious person.
	But in regard to just the way, if you're born that way, Um, and then brought up in society that way, you represent a healthy part of a cross-section by which every animal contains diversity in its species, and diversity is healthy.
	Because as environments shift and fluctuate, it means that there's more possibilities that there'll be, you know, a member of that species that will have an adaptive, you know, value to a new environment.
	So if we reach a place where You know, it's advantageous to be atheistic.
	There's a part of our species that will be able to then populate the world with that adaptive value, you know?
	Okay, back to the phones.
	Wellson & Rockies, you're on the air with Matthew Alper and Art Bell.
	Good morning.
	Good morning.
	This is Margaret in Middleton, Colorado.
	Margaret, you're going to have to yell at us.
	You're not too strong.
	I'm sorry.
	Is this any better?
	Much better.
	Thank you.
	Okay.
	Um, number one, as an atheist, Art, I really have to object to your apparent contention that without the fear of hell we'd all turn into raging sociopaths.
	Um, I'm not a sociopath, just because I'm an atheist.
	Um... I simply referred, uh, ma'am, Margaret, uh, to the Brookings Report, which did a study on the impact socially of, um, uh, alien presence.
	And what it would do to society.
	Well, that's nothing compared to what we're talking about tonight, in my opinion.
	Okay.
	Number two, I am an atheist, but I wasn't always.
	I was very much a believer, and when I came to the conclusion that there was likely no God, it was something that was extremely difficult for me.
	Extremely painful for me.
	How did you come to that conclusion?
	Well, it's kind of long.
	Are you sure you want to hear it?
	No, not if it's not going to take up the rest of my program.
	I mean, give it to us in a nutshell if you can.
	Okay, number one, I was a Seventh-day Adventist.
	I very much believed in creationism, for starters.
	I found out just how much of our DNA we share with chimps, and I discovered I could not I could no longer not believe in evolution.
	It was just so obvious.
	We share something like 90% of our DNA with chimps.
	Better than that, actually.
	It's like 99.2.
	I keep hearing someplace between 98 and 99.
	I'm not sure, but it's enough.
	It's a lot, yeah.
	Whatever it is.
	And, you know, when I started reconsidering If renaming portions of the Bible is myth, I decided that chances were the whole thing was myth.
	I also consider myself to be an agnostic.
	I know I can't prove there's no God.
	I just find it very doubtful.
	You're one or the other, but it's hard to be both.
	In point of fact, it's not.
	I'm an atheist because I don't think there is a God.
	I'm an agnostic because I recognize there's a chance I'm wrong.
	I'm just being honest about it.
	Then I don't think I'm wrong.
	Then I think you're an agnostic by definition.
	And I think I'm an atheist by definition and an agnostic by definition.
	I call myself an agnostic with atheist leanings.
	I would call myself an atheist with agnostic leanings.
	Let's stop here and agree.
	Either way, the loss of faith was extremely painful to me and it wasn't until I discovered how to meditate that I found something that was anything like as fulfilling as faith used to be.
	So it's not that I don't have the God center in my brain or whatever it is.
	It's that I have to be honest with myself no matter what.
	So there's more than one kind of atheist.
	I suppose so.
	Okay, well that's very interesting.
	And really, you sort of agreed with her, didn't you?
	Slight difference in words, but... Yeah, well, I mean...
	I agree also with her initial point that I think one of the problems with religion is that it presumes that if you don't hold on to their faith, or at least faith at least, some faith, then you must be lacking in morals, and that the religious always have this claim to moral superiority, which I think is unwarranted.
	Again, it comes down to actually two different mechanisms.
	Some people have different levels of moral consciousness.
	Some people have different degrees of moral, of religious consciousness.
	There are some people which are highly religious, but completely amoral.
	I mean, we know of this.
	There are also people who are highly religious and extremely moral, moralistic.
	The same with atheists.
	There are atheists who are moral.
	They're very giving people.
	They're humanistic.
	They call themselves secular humanists.
	And sure, there are atheists who are very selfish-minded and, you know, are also not wired, you know, in a very strong way toward morality either.
	So it's just a matter of balancing two different mechanisms.
	If we could actually do a survey, Matthew, and come up with percentages, what do you think the percentage of the self-centered atheists would turn out to be versus, you know, the others?
	Well, that's a good question.
	I don't know.
	I know that a lot of the atheists I know, because we're compelled toward these belief systems, often atheism is the result of sort of, I guess, the emergence of scientific learning and through rational thinking, and we've thought, you know, a lot of atheists are just people who, because of their reason, maybe when they were younger they believed, but now there's enough scientific evidence for them to feel that You know, there is no God, and there is no spiritual reality, and that's okay with them.
	But they're also very thoughtful people, with the same manner by which they contemplate the universe rationally, they also contemplate morals rationally.
	And they're humanistic, you know, they believe in a mutual harmony, a cooperation among individuals, and that's part of their atheism.
	Then again, there are the people who just like, they don't believe in religion, they don't believe in God, they don't believe in anything other than themselves, and they're just takers.
	So again, it's, I couldn't really even begin to predict statistically, but I do not think that there's any higher, there's any reason to believe that the religious-minded are more moral than the non-religious.
	The numbers would be interesting though, wouldn't they?
	Sure.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Matthew Alper.
	Hi.
	Is that me?
	That's you.
	Oh, good morning, gentlemen.
	Good morning.
	I'm glad I got you.
	I've got a burning question here.
	All right.
	Okay.
	When you stimulate the brain to induce various responses, like pain, pleasure, motor functions, that doesn't automatically eliminate other sources of these responses, like the non-brain stimulated responses You can still feel pleasure, pain, other ways.
	I could lift your arm up, for instance, and it would move.
	And I would really like to ask Matthew, how does finding the God part of the brain eliminate the existence of God, the non-brain existence of God?
	Well, like I said, it doesn't eliminate it, it just suggests that... It doesn't eliminate it?
	Well, again, nothing can eliminate it.
	You know, again, I'm not saying that I know with 100% certainty.
	Thank you for saying that, Matthew.
	Huh?
	Thank you for saying that.
	Well, you said that before you got on the line.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, you know, for me, it would be just as presumptuous for me to say that as it is for most religious people who claim that they know with certainty that there is one.
	Again, there's my agnosticism, again, with atheistic leanings.
	Nevertheless, if I think what you're getting at is you're talking about, for instance, like the experience of pain, it's usually coming from some external stimuli, correct?
	It can, but it can also come if you stimulate a part of the brain that's responsible for that, or pleasure centers.
	Exactly, so it can go either way.
	It can be stimulated, and the same thing is true for the spiritual function.
	Nevertheless, like for instance, when I see an apple in front of me, You know, visually, it's data being picked up by my visual cortex and then being translated in the brain.
	Does that then mean that the apple doesn't exist?
	Just because it's my interpretation of it, my perception of it, is brought to me by my organ, the brain?
	Not at all.
	and what's interesting about the God part of the brain, is what makes it unique from those other parts
	is most of our brain is geared toward picking up external stimuli
	by translating the world around us so that we can survive within the world.
	But unlike those other parts of the brain, the God part of the brain is self-sufficient.
	It doesn't rely on external stimuli.
	But how do you know that?
	Matthew, how?
	Because the reason we're believing in God is not because there are these,
	you know, God's sitting in a throne in front of us saying, here I am everybody,
	and now that you see me, that part of your brain is being stimulated.
	No, but you know, these pain or healing...
	We're believing in these things without any external stimuli.
	The belief system is coming from within.
	But Matthew, how do you know?
	Because unless you can show me a miracle, unless you can handle a national television, you know, there's no reason for me to believe that we're believing in miracles because we're seeing them.
	We're believing in them because we're projecting our inherent perception of reality onto the world around us.
	And we're coming up with people who walk on water, and in other religions, people who can shoot fire bolts from their fingertips, etc.
	Do we see this in everyday life?
	Do we ever see this?
	Have we ever seen it?
	No.
	We've heard about it in ancient texts, but that doesn't prove that they're real.
	These miracles are projections of this inherent perception that we have, but our perception is not based on the miracles.
	Again, how many of us believe that someone can walk on water?
	A good percent of the human population.
	How much of us have seen someone walk on water?
	No one.
	Can I ask you, can I interject here just for a second?
	Yes, go ahead.

▲