Matthew Alper, author of The God Part of the Brain, argues spiritual traits—language, rituals, and belief in gods—stem from genetic hardwiring, citing 50% higher religiosity in identical twins separated at birth and MRI scans showing altered brain activity during prayer or meditation. He dismisses paranormal claims like EVP, remote viewing, and divine health benefits as unvalidated fringe theories, despite Art Bell’s counterarguments about universal spiritual practices and historical gaps in empirical evidence. Alper insists belief in God is illogical given suffering and conflicting religious violence, framing free will as either a divine flaw or absence of control. Ultimately, the debate hinges on whether spirituality’s persistence reflects biology or unresolved mysteries beyond current science. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones.
Live, I'm thankful to say.
From the high desert, I'm Mark Bell, and this, of course, is Coast to Coast AM.
Weekend version and what a 24 hours it has been.
I'm going to tell you all about it.
That is to say what happened.
Last night was incredible, and today has been incredible in terms of why you didn't hear us live last night.
It was the broadcasting equivalent of why a shuttle blows up.
I'm not kidding.
It was a broadcasting equivalent of that.
Now, my signal is carried from me to you, ultimately through satellite technology.
And we've got a satellite dish here in my backyard that transmits an extremely reliable KU-band signal up to the satellite.
And last night when I turned the system on, the guys in Denver who received this and in Los Angeles, hey, no signal.
You know what I mean?
Signal.
And I thought, well, you know, the traveling wave tube or Klystron or whatever they've got in here to generate the power has finally gone.
It's been out there for about, oh, I don't know, 12 years, 11 or 12 years, something like that.
And we're already well beyond its stated useful life.
So I thought for sure, you know, it had finally gone.
And I was sitting here talking to Mike Hagan, engineering at Premier, and we were discussing that, essentially just about saying, thank goodness we've got the ISDN backup.
And I looked down and it went blank.
The ISDN backup just went blank, like, boom, all the power's gone.
And I, oh, great, you know, and there was no fuse immediately on the back of it.
And I had already started to tear in.
I tore, you know, I thought maybe it's on my end.
So I tore every wire in here apart.
I had my soldering iron out.
I was redoing things just to be sure, checking the audio chain, just going berserko in here.
So there was no way to get on last night, either through the primary satellite reliable or the ISDN reliable backup.
Both went down.
Now, what happened?
Well, again, assuming that we had lost the transmit side of things here, today I got a call from Denver, in the Uplink facility in Denver, that receives my signal.
And we got to talking and they said, hey, you know, we see a rogue signal on your frequency.
A rogue signal.
In other words, they have no idea.
It's not supposed to be there.
It could be from an adjacent satellite or maybe on the same satellite with the opposite polarity or something.
But anyway, a signal that should not be there.
And you can't take two digital signals and mix them together.
When you do, you get a soup that's completely unintelligible for anybody.
So some other network, some other program, some other something has a misaligned dish or what have you, and they were jamming me is what was going on.
I was being jammed.
And they're still referring to it as a rogue signal.
Well, I got a call this afternoon from Jack Rowland.
Thank you, Jack.
He's a ham, KE0VH in Denver.
He's at the Uplink in Denver.
And when I had my signal down, he said, we see this rogue signal.
He said, bring yours up.
He said, oh, there you are.
But there's another signal with you.
And so I said, okay, how about this?
See if you can find another clear frequency that we can use just for tonight while you search for this rogue.
And sure enough, they found a frequency that normally carries a television signal and gave me the frequency.
And I changed the frequency on the uplink here.
And boom, boom, locked right in.
And we were in business this afternoon.
But to see two failures like that and have a rogue jamming signal is just beyond bizarre.
At any rate, that's what happened.
So I want to thank Mike Hagan at Premiere.
I want to thank Jack Rowland in Denver, who really was top-notch.
I mean, they just really are on top of tracking this down.
And fascinating stuff.
I mean, technically, fascinating stuff, folks.
And there's been a lot of that today.
Now, if you go to the Coast to Coast AM website, here's another little bit of fascination for you.
Let me see if I can get there myself.
There was a CNN news crew that was covering an incident in Iraq.
And you'll see it right on the front page of CoastToCoastAM.com.
Now, in the original photo from CNN, in the upper right-hand corner, you can see someone's drawn a little John Madden-like circle around an object in the background.
And then you've got to go down and you've got to click on the close-ups, which you can do.
And when you click on the close-up, you'll see, well, you know, it could be a conventional aircraft of some kind.
God knows enough of them, certainly in the skies, over Iraq, right?
But this one does have a kind of a UFO shape to it.
So I, you know, as Stan would do, I would put this in my gray box, but certainly the CNN cameras caught something rather interesting.
You can be the judge.
It's obviously not clear enough to say definitively what it is, but it does have a UFO-y type shape.
You might take a look at that.
Next item.
My webcam photo this evening.
In between talking to Denver and Los Angeles, trying to get all of this worked out so we could get the show to you tonight, I turned on, you know, I got a new HD TV, which I just, you know, it's like, hey, bury me with this, you know.
It's a wonderful television, but I happened to click it on, and because I was in the middle of phone calls with Denver and so forth.
And oh my gosh, here comes this program on Discovery HD.
Lord, what a channel.
Discovery high definition.
And they were covering, thanks to the Japanese who had been working on it for two years, a total sun eclipse that was going to occur in the Antarctic.
Of all places, the Antarctic.
And the Japanese had worked out this incredible technology.
They had ground stations.
They had an airplane flying at, I don't know, 30,000 or 40,000 feet.
And they had shock-mounted this high-definition camera inside the airplane.
They had replaced the airplane's window with a piece of a window made out of clear crystal.
I mean, absolutely clear crystal, an entire window made out of clear crystal.
And they covered for an hour and a half or so this incredible sight from a place in the world that is so hostile to man, Antarctica.
It's got air so cold, so dry, so free of any particulate matter that it can be 20 below zero and you can breathe and there is nothing to see.
There's no fog that will come from your mouth as you speak.
And they covered this, it occurred today in Antarctica and it was just absolutely amazing.
And the webcam picture, of course, wouldn't begin to do justice to it.
But I got my camera out and took a picture of the screen.
And what you're seeing there, if you take a good look, again, it's my webcam.
You go to coasttocoastam.com and click on Art's webcam.
And what you'll see in the photograph is the moment of totality.
And of course, you can see this, well, it speaks for itself.
Not in a high definition, of course, because it was just me taking a picture of the screen.
But, oh, what a program that was.
If you get an opportunity to see that on Discovery, it's something you don't want to miss, believe me.
So that's up there at the moment.
And it's one of those things, it's a jawdropper.
That's what it was, an absolute jawdropper.
We'll be back with more in a moment.
Open lines, this hour.
As soon as we get to them, I've got a few things for you.
By the way, somebody just fast blasted and asked, well, why is the corona of the sun?
And that's what you see at that moment of totality.
You see the corona there around the moon, which is perfectly, actually a little better than perfectly covering the sun.
Did you know that eventually the moon will spiral out to the point where we will not have any total sun eclipses again, because the moon will actually spiral out from the earth.
It's doing that a little bit every year, and eventually it'll be too small to cover the sun.
At any rate, the reason you see the corona and the corona appears to be uneven is not because you're seeing explosions from the sun, but because the sun has different magnetic forces in it that shape the corona in the way that you're seeing it right now.
And it looks like you're seeing explosions, but you're not.
That's just the sun's magnetic field distorting the corona and pushing it out more in some places than others.
All right.
There is news of the day to talk about.
And let us begin in Iraq.
Iraqi teenagers, this one is just, I don't know, it's disgusting.
Iraqi teenagers dragged two bloodied U.S. soldiers from a wrecked vehicle and pummeled them with concrete blocks Sunday.
Witnesses described the killings as a burst of savagery in a city once safe for Americans.
Another soldier was killed by a bomb and a U.S. allied police chief was assassinated.
Nice way to say thank you for freeing that country.
Can you imagine that?
Two of our wounded U.S. soldiers were dragged from a wrecked vehicle and beaten to death with concrete blocks.
Great way to say thank you.
In Afghanistan, five U.S. soldiers were killed and seven injured when their helicopter crashed Sunday near the American military headquarters north of the Afghan capital.
Hoping to rescue energy legislation stalled in the Senate, Republicans were discussing elimination of a controversial provision to give legal protection to the makers of MTBE, a gasoline additive found to contaminate drinking water.
So they're going to give them legal protection, really?
These sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Senate and House officials as well as the Bush administration, have discussed the suggestion, but no decisions have been made yet.
And it seems a little early, but radio, some radio stations, even though we've not yet made Thanksgiving, some radio stations are changing their format, and they're going to all music, all Christmas music before Thanksgiving.
Can you imagine that?
Matt Drudge had the headlines last night.
Matt Drudge always seems to get it first today, the British publication, The Mirror, regarding the Michael Jackson story, the following, unhinged Michael Jackson, listen to this, went into mid-air meltdown and tried to flee America as he flew home To be arrested and handcuffed.
The singer, sedated by doctors, but gripped by panic at child sex charges, demanded to be flown to a South American bolt, that's B-O-L-T, bolt hole.
Trembling and swaying, he ordered aides to change his plane's flight path and spring him to a haven beyond the reach of U.S. law.
But flunkies, their word, refused for fear that the U.S. Air Control would force the 87TD private jet down for an emergency landing by knocking out its satellite navigation systems.
And they insisted that Jackson, accused of sex offenses against 12-year-old, I'm not going to name him, a 12-year-old cancer victim, should give himself up.
Muttering to himself and screaming, it's not fair, Jackson spent the journey rocking backwards and forward in his seat.
The star's deranged antics on the jet from Las Vegas to California shocked even those used to his odd behavior.
At first, he refused to board the plane at all, taking him to Santa Barbara for a showdown with the district attorney there, Tom Sneddon.
Witness said, quote, his people almost dragged him on in the end.
He was shaking and in a state of near hysteria.
Once aboard, the father of three Jackson demanded the pilot change routes and take him and his children to South America.
The witness said, quote, Jackson was adamant he was going to do a runner because he was so nervous, but his attorneys managed to talk him out of it.
There was a lot of shouting.
They told him the authorities would jam the guidance systems on the plane.
They said the plane would be forced into an emergency landing, and even if he did succeed in leaving the country, he'd be extradited back to the United States.
And then this.
And again, Matt Rudge had this one early as well.
Jackson's explicit letters seized.
Letters and poems said to have been written by Michael Jackson to his alleged victim will form the centerpiece of the sex abuse case against him.
Police seized at least a dozen letters during a raid on Jackson's Neverland Ranch last week.
The district attorney is convinced these letters will be crucial to the case against Jackson.
The boy told investigators about letters and poems and their precise location inside Michael's home.
These letters were among the evidence seized along with video tapes.
They are very explicit and intimate and show a degree of familiarity.
Basically, they appear to be love letters from Michael to the boy.
Okay, time for a couple of others here.
And again, we're going to go into open lines here after the bottom of the hour break.
So if you want to get on in the next half hour before our guest at the top.
Oh, top of the hour, Matthew Alper is going to be here.
An incredible guy with an incredible theory about why we worship.
That's right.
Why we worship.
And, you know, I've done, I suppose, in my years, thousands of interviews, and to some degree they run all together.
But Matthew Alper, I've never been able to shake.
And I'm not exactly sure why.
Perhaps after you hear him tonight, you will understand why I've never been able to shake it.
But anyway, top of the hour.
On Sunday night, Monday morning, listen to this.
Remember this from, I believe, last weekend, right?
On Sunday night, Monday morning, November 16th through the 17th, you had a caller, this is an email, you had a caller claiming to have found a shell casing in a two-inch pipe in the ground behind the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza.
I am a resident of Dallas 49 years, and I visited Dealey Plaza today.
I found the pipe the caller was talking about, and in fact, it appears to be perfectly positioned to have caught an ejected shell casing, assuming the pipe was empty at the time, from the most likely spot that a marksman might have chosen behind the fence.
Today, the pipe is filled with dirt, just as the caller mentioned.
The pipe that the caller described appears to be the below ground portion of a metal fence post that's been cut off at ground level at some point in the past, as though it had been part of a picket fence at one time.
If the caller has sent the shell casing to you, which he has not, by the way, I would volunteer to send you some dirt from the same pipe if you're interested in pursuing any type of analysis.
I record your shows every weekend, listen to them during the week driving to and from work.
Hope your back holds out.
Thank you.
And you're able to keep doing the show.
Thank you, Mike, in Dallas, Texas.
So, you know, with open lines, you never know.
You just never know.
And what appeared to be laughably wrong at the time, you never know.
Might have been the real McCoy.
So if the person with that showcasing would kindly get a hold of me and email, as the rest of you may do, I'm Artbell at MindSpring.com.
That's my email address, Art Bell, A-R-T-E-B-E-L-L, lowercase, all strewn together, artbell at mindspring.com.
The most powerful conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal exploded in a huge, fiery cloud on a Florida test range Friday after being dropped from an Air Force cargo plane in the latest developmental step for nearly actually an 11-ton.
We always have the mother of all bombs, right?
The Moab, the mother of all bombs.
So they actually let one go.
And MC-130E Combat Talon 1 dropped the 21,700-pound satellite-guided GBU-43-B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, or MOAB, over the test range at Eglin Air Force Base in northwestern Florida.
A plume of smoke rose more than 10,000 feet in the air and was visible 40 miles away in Pensacola.
And of course, there was a big UFO flap in the Bay Area.
I guess you heard about that, right?
It is still not clear what exactly caused the two bright balls of light that fell through the sky Thursday night.
KCBS reporter Holly Kwan says the National Weather Service thought it was Northern Lights, U.S. Coast Guard, said it was leftovers from the Leonid meteor shower, which happens every year at the end of November.
A military representative said, quote, it couldn't have been anything but a meteor because nothing else that we have in our arsenal flies at a velocity like that.
Top of the hour tonight, Matthew Alper, and of all the interviews I've ever done, I've not been able to shake the one I've done with Matthew, and we'll do kind of a repeat and a lot more tonight.
So if you've never heard him and about the book he wrote called The God Part of the Brain, then you stay right where you are.
unidentified
Because once you hear it, I don't think you'll be able to shake it either.
End of the world movies, by their very nature, should not have happy endings.
However, in this case, we'll have to wait and see.
Now, with regard to the movie, I would say they better hurry up and get it on.
the premiere of this may twenty eight and the way the changes are going on in the world right now for real uh...
i i hope they get a chance to show it i'm kind of kidding but yeah It is funny, isn't it?
So many times they make movies that appear at the time to be science fiction, and too many times they appear to turn into science fact either before the movie comes out or concurrent with the movie's release or just afterward.
I mean, it's almost bizarre.
unidentified
Yeah, the only thing that had me worried is that director of the Independence Day.
There was a gentleman that was interviewed, I believe it was by George, maybe eight months ago, and he talked about the coming ice storm and where the glacier would go to and where it would stop.
And he basically said it would stop at the Missouri River, which goes right through Kansas City.
And he's talking about skyscraper-sized stuff.
He wasn't talking about ground-level permafrost or anything.
He was basically saying hundreds of feet of ice.
And he said it could happen in a very rapid manner.
And he kind of tied a little bit of it into maybe the Earth changing its axis again, because that is one thing that's scientific fact.
A lot of speculation about a lot of stuff like Planet X, but one thing that's fact is the planet's poles shift and the Earth goes through dramatic changes.
Well, for the last couple of weeks, my friend, I've been covering a story about a nice green leaf down in the mountains in Peru where apparently there was lush tropical type climate at one point, and then, boom, it changed overnight, and that has remained frozen for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and the climate has not changed since.
So that indicates that literally happened within a matter of hours or a few days.
I can't imagine half the Earth's population being able to survive something like that.
Lord knows the mammoths and animals ten times the size of humans weren't able to survive it, so I don't see us being able to.
I'm just lucky I'm on the south side of the Missouri River, and the glacier won't get to my two miles south of it, but I don't feel that I'm in a safe zone.
But I think it's absolutely happening.
I hope it doesn't happen as fast as he's saying it's going to happen.
But as far as the rapid change in water, I've spent lots of time on the East Coast and in Ocean City, Maryland.
Over the summer, there was a report from documenters out there who document water temperature.
The water temperature dropped 10 degrees overnight.
That's just unheard of.
And for water to be changing at that temperature and where it's coming from, it really ought to be paid attention to.
And I don't see anything in the mainstream news about it.
That's why I'm a Streamlink subscriber, and I get the news that I think is important, not the news that we're fed.
And I recommend it to everybody.
But I really think we need to pay attention to that.
And my other question is, how familiar are you with the, for lack of a better term, death zone around the super volcano?
And at what point does that 100% death zone stop and then sporadic survival more and more?
It would depend on the, thank you, on the magnitude of the explosion.
Of course, going back to your first question.
Yes, of course.
If you observe the changes going on in our weather, which I believe are related to the changes going on with our sun, if you observe the changes at the North Pole and at the South Pole and put together all of the weather data and the climate data that we're seeing right now,
and you don't come up with a sum total of, hey, it's changing, and I tire of the argument of whether it's man's hand or a cyclic change.
It doesn't matter.
Seems to me it doesn't matter one bit because it is changing, and there's nothing we're going to do to stop it.
So what we should be doing is adjusting to that change and planning our agriculture and the rest of what we do based on the obvious fact that it is changing.
In effect, otherwise we fiddle as Rome, this being Rome in this case, burns.
So I don't know.
It's obvious it's changing, and I wish we would begin to pay attention to how to live through it instead of arguing about why.
I'm calling from Washington, D.C., and I'm listening to you on WTNT.
Way to go.
Now, I've seen a number of strange things in my life, Mr. Bell, and what I'm about to relate to you at the time I actually did not think was a very strange thing.
But the other night, George Norrie related what could possibly have been a chupacabra sighting in Toronto.
You're perhaps familiar with what I'm speaking of.
So it's somebody who thought they saw a chupacabra in Toronto, a little north for the chupacabra.
unidentified
Yeah, no doubt.
Well, some sort of creature roughly coincident with the description of chupacabra he saw in a sewer system in Toronto in 1979.
It could have been a completely different animal that we're talking about.
And to an extent, I would like to say that my training from the University of Washington was, in fact, in wildlife science.
So what I'm going to relate to you is actually what I would think of as an animal sighting.
But When I looked into the subject myself, and I guess I'll go back to the beginning here, in June of 2000 I was living on a few acres in Pensacola, Florida, and we were having a terrible drought at the time.
And so I was watering the trees around my house because, well, a couple of them had fallen on my truck, and one of them had threatened to fall on my house, and the cost-to-benefit ratio of watering the trees seemed to make some sense.
By the way, while you're talking about this, I'm going to go to an archive I have.
I had one photograph that I considered to be good of a chupacabra.
I mean, this is a real beauty and I'm going to send it up to my webcam as we speak.
So go ahead, continue.
unidentified
Oh, great.
I'll check that out in just a minute.
Okay.
Now, basically, from that story, I went on and I looked at a number of different chupacabra sites.
The story itself had sort of intrigued me.
But basically, in 2000, I was watering my trees, and during the hottest part of the day, I would spray down the trunks with a nozzle sprayer.
And at one point, the spray of my water went into the cavity of one of these trees, and they were water oaks, and they tend to form these pretty big cavities that wildlife likes to live in.
And the water sprayed in there, and out from this cavity in the tree popped these two animals, roughly about two feet long, that were white,
had somewhat powerful-looking legs, and bat-like arms, not entirely like bats, if for only the fact that they were white and they also did not have the ears that you normally associate with bats.
And I've seen a number of bats.
There's a kind of bat, you may have seen this out in your neck of the woods called the Western Mastiff Bat.
Either that or one of those magicians who can fix things.
Remember that?
Watches suddenly start working.
Tapes, too?
In Kaz?
It was Ka.
I couldn't get that.
All right, we're going to take a break.
And as I said, one of the most unshakable interviews I've ever done was with Matthew Alper, a guy who wrote something called The God Part of the Brain.
And that's where we're going after the top of the hour.
In the nighttime, running through the darkness like a freight train.
unidentified
This is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
Wanna take a ride?
Call our Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Arkill from the Kingdom of Nive.
Lamona and I will climb into what we call our land yacht and experience the outside world a little bit.
Barbara Simpson will be here, along with others.
I'm not quite sure how they have it all scheduled.
Just wanted to remind you of that.
All right, coming up in a moment, as I said earlier, and I'm going to repeat now, for Matthew's benefit since he's on the line, I've done in my career thousands of interviews, and frankly, a lot of them run together in a lot of ways.
But this interview, this man, Matthew Alper, and his book, The God Part of the Brain, certainly, I believe in a creator.
I do.
I believe in a creator.
I'm not sure about my belief structure otherwise.
I was christened Lutheran, and I didn't really attend a lot of church after asking questions that weren't answered.
So I've never been a formally religious person, but I do believe in a creator now.
What Matthew Alber will say to you tonight may challenge that.
And it may disturb you.
There are many who get very upset with Matthew Alper, and others who, if they quietly listen and consider what he's about to say, well, he'll probably be disturbed, frankly.
But it's an intellectual process that I think is a good thing for all of us.
And so tonight we have Matthew Alper back.
His book, which we will discuss, is called The God Part of the Brain.
Matthew Alper was born and raised in New York City.
He was educated at Vassar and North London University, where he acquired a degree in philosophy of science.
After finishing school, Matthew spent extensive time living abroad in Europe, Africa, and Asia, where he studied comparative world cultures, religion, and history.
After teaching high school history, Matthew went on to become a screenwriter and then to write his seminal work, The God Part of the Brain.
Since then, Matthew has lectured at various universities on the topic of cognitive science and philosophy.
He has also been written up in The Washington Post and appeared on NBC.
And when I first got him online tonight, he said, well, you must have called me because of what was it?
Okay, well, what I'm suggesting is it starts with a premise based in modern evolutionary theory, which suggests that any trait that's universal to a species must have a genetic component.
So if we take whether the fact that all cats have whiskers or humans have two hands, etc., it's not an accident.
It's because within those creatures' genetic blueprint is information that determines the creation of these parts of us.
The same, according to sociobiology, a newer offshoot of evolutionary theory, the same premise can be applied to universal behaviors as well.
So for instance, the fact that all cats meow or all dogs bark.
Even if you took a kitten away from its parents at birth and raised it by humans, it would still grow to meow.
Basically suggesting that it's not a learned behavior, but an inherited reflex.
Well, I'm kind of pointing it more toward the specific behavior.
Because what it does is now the sociobiological sciences looks for universal behaviors in any number of species, including Homo sapiens in our species.
So for instance, the fact that every culture from the beginning of our species, no matter how isolated, has created some form of a spoken language would suggest that humans are a linguistic animal, an animal with a capacity to create a language, to put together sounds that represent symbolically objects.
The next step in the science is to then look into the brain to see if this is true.
Are there parts of the brain from which this behavior is generated?
According to the neurosciences, there's the Wernicke's area, the Broca's area, the angular gyrus, parts of the brain that generate these specific language behaviors, this capacity for us to speak or read or write a language.
If you damage any of these parts, you'll suffer what's called methasia, which is damage to some part of your language ability, whether it's to comprehend written words, spoken word, to speak, etc.
Matthew, is there, and I know we investigate from time to time, tribes that have, you know, never been touched by civilization.
Have we ever come upon a case where, for example, humans did not develop in the same way?
They, for example, went on all fours instead of walking upright, that if they didn't have the example of human behavior, they might develop in some other way.
Obviously, there are deviations, but within certain themes.
And those themes are basically universal to every human culture that's ever been explored.
So now what I've done is I've applied this sociobiological premise to human spirituality.
The fact that every culture, no matter how isolated, has maintained the belief in some form of a spiritual reality, has prayed and worshipped gods, has buried its dead with a ritual anticipating sending a person's spirit to some other realm, suggesting that humans are a spiritual animal.
We generally give them some type of human form or personified form.
We call it the wind or, like you said, the sun.
But every culture has prayed to and believed in some form of a spiritual reality, a reality that transcends the limitations of our physical world.
And moreover, the belief that since there does exist this spiritual reality, we're partly composed In spirit as well, which explains the universal belief in the notion of a spirit or soul, which also then goes a step further into the universality of a belief that when the physical body dies, this spiritual component within us, this soul, will persevere beyond physical death.
And this is a universal chain of belief systems that has existed in every culture, again, no matter how isolated, from the dawn of man.
Actually, even dating back to Neanderthal, which is the only other species that has shown through its behaviors any evidence of possessing some type of a belief in another reality, because they buried their dead with artifacts, suggesting they believed that these were possessions they would be taking to some next world.
So, therefore, the premise of the theory is that humans are hardwired to believe in some form of a spiritual reality, to believe in gods, a soul, and an afterlife.
Meaning it would be an evolutionary adaptation, that it evolved in us for a very particular reason, to serve some function to enhance our species survivability.
I'll go into that momentarily, but what the ramifications of such a theory are that it's not that God created man, but that God is the manifestation of a cognitive process of human wiring.
So that basically if you take man out of the picture, there is no God, there are no gods, there is no spiritual reality, that all spirit is the consequence of a cognitive process that exists in our species.
Well, I don't believe in any form of a spiritual reality, and that encompasses all things spiritual, including a God or gods, spirits, souls, afterlives.
Okay, well, the only way one can rule it out is you have to first take your stand.
Is one a creationist or an evolutionist?
If we're going to accept and embrace the science of evolutionary theory, which has been supported time and time again by everything from the putting together of the human genome to gene splicing to gene enhancement, we use it with the food products we eat.
It's basically been tested and proven again and again.
So if we accept evolutionary theory, we have to then accept that every part of us, including every part of our brain or every part of our heart, whether it's the valves in our heart or the veins that run throughout our body, we can't say, well, everything else evolved in us except this part of the brain that was injected by God.
If there is a neurophysiological site that's responsible for generating these perceptions and these belief systems, then if we do embrace evolutionary theory, then it's an organ, it's organic matter, and we have to therefore seek an evolutionary explanation for why did this evolve in us?
Why was this process selected into our species' genetic makeup?
In the last more or less, like, you know, 10 years, not even, there's been all sorts of scientific validation of this notion that have been coming out.
The first evidence is the sociobiological, the fact that every culture, no matter how isolated, has continued to perpetuate these very similar rituals and customary practices.
That's the sociobiological argument.
The next argument that I refer to is the ethnobotanical, which is the fact that various cultures, again, from the dawn of our species spread across the continent, have used different substances to induce Religious and spiritual experiences.
So, whether it was the Aztecs' use of magic mushrooms, which they referred to as God's flesh in their language, or the use of peoples through Africa, all over South America and the Amazon, the Scythians, various, even the Greeks used various substances as part of their religious ritual to induce a spiritual experience.
The fact that chemistry can induce this type of experience would suggest that it's neurophysiological in nature.
Speaking of physiological, can we yet put electrodes in a brain and observe during worship or prayer a specific area of activity within the brain that fits into the category of what I call the neurophysiological argument.
Well, they found that there was a 50% higher correlation of similarity between religious conviction and attitude as compared to fraternal twins separated at birth.
So obviously these same people separated, raised in completely different environments when raised to adulthood ended up having a much, a 50% higher likelihood of having the same type of religious conviction or belief.
Now that doesn't mean religious conviction is in like, you know, they believed in the same religion.
They just were asked to like write out like in a number of pick out of one to ten how strongly religious you are, how often you attend church, how often you pray, et cetera.
And so they found that there is a genetic, there's obviously a connection through our genes, you know, that correlates to our sense of religiosity and spirituality.
And a 50% greater corollary as compared to fraternal twins that were given the same study.
And then the last, which is, again, going back to the neurophysiological argument, which deals with various studies that have been done specifically on the human brain to see if the sociobiological premise pays off.
The first one I'll point to, which you just referred to, was the work done by Eugene DeKeely and his assistant Andrew Newberg, where they took monks, Buddhist monks, as well as Franciscan nuns.
They took two separate groups that believed in two separate religions.
And in the midst of their, they took the nuns and had them pray and had them pull a string when they reached that heightened sense of experience that they say they feel when they pray.
And they had the monks do the same when they reached that sense of transcendental meditation that they were seeking.
And they turned on an MRI to do a brain scan.
And what they found was that they ended up with the same results, the same changes to the brain were shown through the tests of these two different groups as compared to people who were not meditating or praying.
It does a number of things.
One thing it does is when you meditate or pray, your brain's amygdala, which is a part that every human possesses.
It's a part of what's called the limbic system where emotions are generated.
You really gotta ask yourself, no matter where in the world you go, the deepest jungles of the Philippines, some of the islands in that part of world South America, areas where they found tribes that have never, ever encountered modern man.
What modern man has found is that these tribes always worship something.
Always are spiritual in some way.
Perhaps to us as Christians or Buddhists or whatever we happen to be, we consider it strange or bizarre.
But always something is worshipped.
There's a reason for that, perhaps.
And Matthew Alper has the answer, perhaps.
Matthew, I am fast-blasted by Alexi in Seattle, Washington.
We have lungs because there is air.
We have mouths because there is food.
We have eyes because there is light.
Doesn't it follow that we have a God center of the brain because there is a God?
Yeah, so when these two neuroscientists started experimenting on people's brains by putting them in MRIs while they were in the midst of meditation and prayer, they recorded the various changes that took place in the brain.
All of this can be seen in, I think it was in 2001 Newsweek, Are We Wired for Spirituality?
Yeah, well, I kind of turned that editor onto this story.
So that was its own little political thing.
Interesting.
So what they found was, one, the brain's amygdala, where fear is generated, got a decreased blood flow.
So all sense of fear is diminished.
We're overcome with this sense of serenity, of calm, of tranquility, of euphoria.
The next thing, the brain's parietal lobe, where basically our biological clock is.
It's where temporal and spatial consciousness is generated.
Also, decreased blood flow.
So we're left feeling sort of this ambiguous feeling, this loss of sense of time and space, which is often recorded when people define their spiritual experiences.
Next thing, decreased blood flow to the frontal lobe, which is where our sense of self is generated.
So we report feelings like a loss of sense of self, a dissolution of normal ego boundaries, a feeling connected to some greater whole.
And the last thing that was found was there was an increased blood flow to the brain's temporal lobe, which corresponded with other research being done in this science, specifically with a Dr. Ramachandran who was doing studies on epilepsy.
And he found that within the people who he was studying, within these various epileptics, there was a particular type of epilepsy that started in the brain's temporal lobe.
He called them temporal lobe epileptics.
These specific people, these temporal lobe epileptics, it also happened, were generally, they happened to be what he described as hyper-religious.
And during their seizures, they would go into this state of religious ardor, often crying or going into some religious ecstasy, sometimes falling to the ground and just like a reflex behavior, almost like spouting, just saying, God, God, God, God, coming out of it, running through the streets crying, God is here, God is here.
Again, finding that possibly this might be one of the locations where our religious instincts and impulses are generated.
So a fellow scientist, a Dr. Persinger up in Canada, who had created a device called a transcranial magnetic stimulator.
It looks like a football helmet.
You put it on your head, and it basically, it will send a focused magnetic wave into some specific region in the brain, wherever you point it to.
And it will stimulate that region in the brain.
So based on Ramachandran's experiments with these temporal lobe epileptics, Dr. Persinger decided to take his helmet and point it at people's temporal lobes.
Well, no, but there was also a stimulation of the brain non-chemically, I think with some sort of electromagnetic apparatus, which did produce, I believe, what they called an NDE or something of that order.
The last I heard of Persinder and his helmet was in pointing at the temporal lobe.
Perhaps he redirected it to some other specific part of the temporal lobe and found that it triggered something close to a near-death experience.
What I'm knowledgeable of are his experiments where he pointed it to the temporal lobe and found that not consistently, but more consistently than pointing it to any other part of the brain, people felt that they reported feeling the presence of God, and it was also determined by religion.
So, you know, Christians said they maybe felt the presence of Jesus in the room, whereas Muslims said they felt the presence of Allah.
So again, it stimulated their religious proclivities, their sense of a religious belief system, all done by pure neuromechanics, just neural hardwiring, no divine spirit being infused in them, just a little electricity.
Similar to what these various primitive cultures have been doing using different chemicals to, again, induce the same experiences except chemically instead of electrically.
Well, I remember our first interview, Matthew, and in that, I think at about this point I asked you why our brains would be so constructed by evolution, if you wish, or whatever.
And in your answer, I thought was interesting.
You said we have, all humans have, instinctually, a terrible fear of our own mortality, of death.
And that the brain's only way to handle that and to have people remain sane was to give them something to look forward to.
In other words, this God part of the brain is genetically there because otherwise we'd go crazy in fear of dying and utter nothingness, presumably.
I mean, more specifically, I mean, after I'd come upon all this science and these various arguments that seem to support that, yes, we are hardwired this way, well, the next thing I had to do was say, well, as with any part of our body, whether it's a part of any other organ or the brain, if it did emerge in us, if it does exist, it must have provided some sort of function.
It must have some adaptive value for why nature would have selected this.
There must have been some need.
So I started separating those traits that are unique to humans from every other species.
And the most profound difference that correlate also with parts of the brain that give us these capacities is that humans, unlike any other species, possess self-conscious awareness.
They're the first self-conscious organism.
And what that did was it enhanced our species.
It's the primary factor that makes us the strongest species on Earth.
Because once we develop self-conscious awareness, we sort of took the reins from natural selection thereafter.
So for instance, if another ice age occurs, we don't have to wait passively 10 million years to grow thicker coats, to have thicker coats of hair selected in us.
Instead, we'll just say, I feel cold, and we can modify ourselves.
So we will sew ourselves a coat of fur.
So in developing self-conscious awareness, humans develop the capacity for self-modification.
If there's some slight change in the environment, we no longer have to wait to be selected, and we can change ourselves.
We can alter our own environments.
We can build walls to fortify ourselves.
We can build weapons to make ourselves stronger than any species with claws and fangs and wings, etc.
Well, with the current change going on globally with our weather and the changes in the globe, I wonder if that ability isn't slightly stalled at the moment, because we seem to be arguing about why it's changing as opposed to adapting, which I think we should be doing, to the obvious change at any rate.
Well, regardless of that issue in itself, what happened was humans becoming the first self-conscious animal, the first self-aware creature, what happened was at the same time that evolutionary adaptation backfired on us because it made us the first creature also aware of our own mortalities.
Once we became aware of the notion that we are, we exist, humans became the first species to realize that one day we won't.
And empirically, we see it validated every day.
Things die.
Living things die.
So we're running on a clock and that clock is ticking and one day it's going to run out.
And that's inevitable.
All life is wired to survive.
It's the primary motivation of all living things, self-preservation.
From up until man, all life was wired with these mechanisms that if some life-threatening situation occurred, that organism would be repelled by it and it would try and avoid life-threatening circumstance.
All of a sudden, a species comes into the picture that becomes aware of the fact that no matter what it does, it cannot escape death.
All of a sudden, humans were subdued by a perpetual mortal crisis, a constant sense of peril and dread.
And so you think our brain in its own defense, and the only defense possible, would be the creation of what you call the God part of the brain.
Hypothetically, Matthew, our scientists right now are getting closer and closer to a life extension and ultimately, perhaps even within our lifetimes, eternal life.
In other words, even to the point where brains might be downloaded into machines, and that's really going off the cliff.
But basically, suppose science were to make that giant leap, and all of a sudden we were immortal.
What do you suppose then would be the change in man?
How would man's brain adapt to that immortality when it's stuck with its God part?
Well, I mean, it's all very compelling questions, and the notion of consciousness being downloaded is, you know, that's material for a screenplay right there.
Oh, yes.
But how would we deal with that?
Well, first of all, the notion of eternal.
I mean, even if somebody, you know, some scientist said, take this Pill and you will never age.
It still doesn't mean that I'm eternal.
I mean, you know, I could step outside my door and some drunken driver could smush me into goo.
As long as we're not spiritual, we have to be connected to some physical mechanic.
Even if they can take our brain out and put it in an android, which has like three layers of steel that is very hard to penetrate, ultimately, you know, a meteorite shower, any number of things.
And it's what makes us unique from the other animals.
It's basically almost what compels us to almost separate ourselves from the other animals, like those are the animals and we're men, as if that's somehow different.
It made us the most, you know, aware, powerful, astute.
You know, we're capable of seeing things that no other species could ever dream of.
And, you know, in many ways, it's an exciting and wonderful existence, but at the same time, we know that it comes with a timer.
So the fear of knowing that death could come at any given moment, we just don't know when, we just know that it will, left us in a chronic state of panic.
And nature therefore had to select some type of modification, some type of cognitive modification that would help, you know, would allow us to survive our unique intelligence and with it our awareness of death.
So what I suggest is, and the reason I say this is, I mean, there are a lot of people who are coming up with different theories now as to why this evolved.
The fact that a burial ritual or a funerary rite of some sort is so universal to every culture, to the belief in a soul and the preservation of that soul, whether we call it reincarnation, heaven, hell, the transmigration of spirit, every culture has come up with a sense that we're immortal.
We have an immortal soul.
So I believe that the universality of that belief system points to that fear of death must have played a critical role in the evolution of these belief systems.
So I think that that's probably, again, what marks us more unique from the other species than any other capacity we have, whether it's for musical ability or mathematical ability or language ability, all of course which interconnect even with our spiritual awarenesses.
I think that the most compelling argument, again, is that it's a consequence of self-conscious awareness.
And again, if one wants to look at November 10th, 2003's cover story of Newsweek, God and Health, Is Religion Good Medicine?
Why Science is Starting to Believe?
The cover story with a picture of a woman praying.
Yes.
They cite various studies.
And what they say is that it has been in question whether people prayed for who have no knowledge that they're even prayed for, whether that has any consequences.
Whether one wants to trust Newsweek as an authority, as a respectable source of information, that's up to one's subjectivity.
Personally, I don't believe that it's possible that the act of prayer without one's knowledge.
Now, I believe a lot of people might think that because I believe there's no God, then I believe that praying wouldn't even have a beneficial medical consequence.
Well, Matthew, even if it's true that prayer does have effect, that the aiming of consciousness in an effort by many does have an effect, that still doesn't ruin your theory.
It fits in perfectly well because it's part of why I'm suggesting that all of this evolved in us in the first place.
But before there was modern medicine, before there was scientific method from which to derive modern medicine, humans pretty much, you know, they dealt with what were, you know, the shamans or the priests of their tribes who were often the same as sort of the witch doctor.
They were the person you went for to be healed, to be cured.
And it was often ascribed to from a spiritual way.
You know, someone would dance around you and wave smoke around your body and paint you and all number of things, all meant to whether it was to chase out evil spirits or to summon the good spirits to cure You and they found that it does make a difference.
Surely, some areas of the paranormal would challenge Matthew Alper pretty seriously.
Catherine, I don't want to give her last name, I guess, of Morgantown, West Virginia says, Art, you know, I'd be tempted to believe your guest if not for the fact that I grew up in a very haunted house.
I know there is a spiritual reality.
I'm talking about beds that move all the way across the room with three people in them, witnesses to the fact.
Are there aspects, certainly there are, of the paranormal, Matthew, that would trouble you greatly if proven?
Yeah, well, for instance, the notion of a ghost, of some ectoplasmic remainder of a conscious self, would imply a spiritual reality and spiritual life after death.
It's just that nothing I've seen has surfaced beyond first-person accounts.
I mean, think of all of the equipment, all of the scientific equipment we now possess, all of the video cameras and potentials to pick up all kinds of signals.
How come like the ghost at 857 Smith Street, you know, and it's an interview with the dead Mr. Smith and some new sciences like electronic voice phenomena, for example, voices recorded on tapes or even digital equipment that do in fact appear to come from the other side and scientifically have no other reasonable.
What kind of scientists can confirm the fact that they've created a technology that has contact with the other side?
And again, if they did, then I will look forward to, I will relish the article of the interview, which is the cover story of Newsweek that talks about the interview with the ghost.
Or the interesting research going on at Princeton, which I hope you're aware of, regarding mass consciousness.
And they have these little eggs, they call them, which are really random number computers scattered around the globe.
Matthew and these all report back to a master computer at Princeton, and they're able to, through the reporting of these computers that normally issue just random numbers, there are these spikes in non-randomness when large events occur, like 9-11, for example.
It just goes right up off the chart.
Now, these are a few modern, new, but real things I'm explaining to you that would seem to indicate some sort of mass consciousness reaction or some sort of reaction to contemporary events.
Okay, well, again, for me, I'll wait for the validation in accepted authorities like the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, you know, whatever news channels, Fox News.
When I see the proof in anything more than some, you know, runaway PhD article on random number generators or ghosts that affect random number generators and every number of paranormal stories that most people have.
Most people, if you ask them, because most people do believe in a spiritual reality, you know, will tell you some story about the ghost of their deceased grandmother or some such paranormal phenomena that they bore witness to.
But even with all that you've told us about the brain and the God part of the brain, you have to allow for the possibility that, yes, there is a God part Of the brain, because I think you make a good logical argument.
There is a whole bunch of books, and they were written by every number of cultures, each with their own definition of who that God is.
Like you were saying earlier, you know, when we discover these people lost in the Amazonian jungles and we think that their beliefs maybe are weird, they think the same of Christianity.
Yes, but Matthew, since you brought up the book, let him deal with the book.
I mean, as much as you might want to believe, and I do frankly, that I'm sure that it was changed, modified, rehashed, retranslated, whatever, and it may not have come to us word for word.
The first writings of a Jesus of Nazareth came hundreds of years after it was even suggested he existed.
There are no first-hand accounts like, you know, Jesus my neighbor, written by Abraham across the street.
You know, there are no first-hand accounts.
So basically, we had, you know, Paul, who was, you know, Saul the Jew from Israel, walked across Asia Minor, went to Rome, and then started this cult, which, you know, was a cult at the time, or at least that's what the Romans considered it.
Hundreds of years later, Christianity emerges to the surface as the predominant new belief system in Rome, and then people start writing books about it.
There's no first-hand account.
Now, again, I'm not suggesting that there was no historical Jesus.
There might have been a guy, Jesus, but was there ever a person who, I don't believe there was anyone who walked on water or rose from the dead any more than I believe there was a guy who parted the Red Sea or someone who sat on Olympus on his, you know, throwing thunderbolts down at like the bad kings who disobeyed him and every other number of deities that every world culture has created in our time or in times before us.
All right, Matthew, here's an interesting question for you.
What do you suppose would happen to humanity if incredibly, suddenly your beliefs were embraced universally?
And people, for whatever reason, magically began to believe that all of this is nothing more than a wired genetic, evolutionary demand that we worship, and so it's all not real.
Okay, and this was one of the moral dilemmas that I personally had in even writing a book like this because I realized that the majority of the species is wired this way for a reason, because they have this need to believe.
Well, and I explained this in the last chapter of my book, which is called What If Anything is to Be Gained from a Scientific Interpretation of Spirituality and God.
And I discuss the unfortunate historical consequences of us being a religious animal, of having been wired with this religious impulse.
Now, see, the thing is, maybe at the dawn of the emergence of man, when we were a small nomadic species that wandered the earth in these isolated nomadic communities, having these belief systems gave them a sense of hope, gave them a sense of relief from their anxieties, from this perpetual fear of death, of imminent death.
It bonded communities by giving them a common belief system, a common set of values and customs and rituals that bonded them.
Well, it's not a vestige because it's still with us, but it has become obsolete.
It's become dated.
And the reason for that is because since our Homo sapiens first arose on Earth, the environment we were selected into is very different from the one that existed at that time.
Unlike then, unlike the past, in today's world, basically humans have now populated the Earth.
We are a global species, and every one of these once sparsely spread apart nomadic tribes with all their unique belief systems that didn't represent a threat to one another, one of the inherent problems with this impulse is when two of these tribes get together and realize that they're praying to two different gods and only one can be right, one represents a mortal threat to their very belief system.
Because if they're right, it means you're wrong and you've been praying to some false god.
You've been praying to thin air, to some comic book creation.
And as we've seen, you spoke of 9-11, more than a random generator being misfired.
What's being misfired is this biological impulse in us that is going to destroy the Homo sapien.
I believe more than any fear of a climatic change or a meteorite hitting us or a shift in tectonic plates or even some plague, I believe the greatest threat to our species is the religious impulse in us because it's like wildfire and it creates a fervor that makes groups hate other groups with such fervor that they will kill themselves in the name of their God just to kill the enemy.
Well, first of all, the ethics that we live by today, if we're basing this on various world religions, particularly Christianity, we live in a Western civilization which is predominantly Christian.
We're basing all of our conduct on a book written by a bunch of guys who got together one day, who had visions of some supernatural reality, and decided now they were now the moral compass for all people.
They were going to decide what's wrong and right for everybody.
Since that time, we've now developed a very methodical science that it can also be applied to the social sciences.
We apply it to our economic policies, our political policies, our sociological policies, to education policies.
Why should we not apply these same sciences, these social sciences, based on methodology, on testing, on statistics?
I personally, I could never take on the responsibility of saying I will represent all of the social sciences, and therefore, it would have to be based on such a broad-reaching span of tests and controls and research and statistics, which would show us what is the best way.
And we have such a thing.
In our country, because there is separation of church and state, we already have such a thing.
But too many times, Matthew, I pick up a story from the Associated Press or, I don't know, whatever your favorite magazine is, or Nature, some scientific journal.
And it starts out, scientists thought so-and-so.
It has been thought by science for thousands of years that so-and-so.
Maybe you know it because the electricity came back the next day and there was no headline article saying scientists realize electricity was a fluke mistake, worked for a hundred years, but now we realize that the fundamentals of the science of electricity and electron flow were completely mistaken and there will never be an electric light ever again.
On the following situation, it's too much speculation for me to, you know, you're asking me to presume that this would be the take that the new order scientific community.
And what kind of world would we have in a world where there was no fear of death any longer?
That alone is worth considering a world in which science would make all the new rules.
The God Part of the Brain is the book.
Matthew Alper, the man.
we'll be right back The photograph of the chupacabra on my webcam is now gone, and one very much like it, my own face, is replaced by it.
I popped a live webcam photo a moment ago.
Listen, you're going to get an opportunity to talk to Matthew, and oh, I know you want to talk to him.
I'm well aware of that.
We'll begin that at the top of the hour.
So you're going to get your chance to talk to Matthew.
Not to worry.
Matthew, in the meantime, from Rochester, New York, Joe says, why wouldn't evolution have removed the adapted fear part of the brain relating to mortality instead of creating the God part of the brain to mitigate its own adaptation?
Fear repels us from those things that threaten our existences, whether it's fear of cold or heat or strangers or, you know, territorial enemies or wild animals.
You know, if we could walk in the woods without any sense of fear or acknowledgement of fear, we'd walk up to a bear and shake its hand while it bit our head off.
The rules have provided a unique chance for us, Matthew.
for example in the christian world in america the uh...
the rules the original rules you know spit out on the tablets uh...
were basically used to construct term what we know as our constitution now and i don't know that right now i was a very well i mean it's a Well, I know, but still, the basics of it would seem to risk.
Thou shalt not kill is kind of a standard in every society.
I mean, if you don't have as one of the head rules of any community, thou shalt not kill, you're going to end up with one person and a bunch of beheaded people around him.
So I'm saying, so, A, on the most simple level, I would fear punishment from my peers.
And then on a, you know, let's say deeper level, or not even, on an equally scientific level, one could just apply the rule that sort of life is sacred?
No, no, no, nothing like life is sacred.
The rules that protect my neighbor from me protect me from all my neighbors.
So it's like signing a mutual contract.
I agree, I, Matthew Alper, agree not to harm my neighbor regardless of my beliefs in heaven and hell, because by not doing so, they all sign the same contract, and I don't have to worry about, well, I'm only one person, you know, the four million other people that live in Brooklyn are going to start banging on my doors.
Instead, I've signed a social contract with my neighbors.
I guess at the beginning it annoyed me, and then it was just like, oh, whatever.
I'm not going to let this rile me.
It's silly stuff.
I mean, look, I know when I came out with this theory that the majority of people around me were going to disagree with it, and many of them be offended.
And all I can do is try and convey an idea.
One can embrace it or not, but certainly perhaps one will garner some value or some intelligent thought from it or something that will challenge their own beliefs in a way that maybe they can gain from or strengthen their own beliefs.
And, you know, for those who contend that they won't accept, you know, other belief systems, including mine, and they would therefore want to harm me or insult me, you know, like all I can do is point to the Taliban and say, well, they're in good company, you know.
but but in other ways so your philosophy your feelings about virtually You know what, the difference between me after I conceived of this notion and before was simply I went from being an agnostic to an atheist.
You know, at that point, I was like, you know what, I don't believe in any of these different contradicting religions that all claim they've got their finger on the pulse of truth, and they all contradict one another.
None of them make sense.
They're all full of inconsistencies and loopholes, etc.
But as much as I would like not to believe in any of them, I have no grounds for an alternate theory.
And once this alternate theory came into the picture, I said, ah, here it is.
Here's a physical thing that I can touch that explains why we have these thoughts.
And so I basically, it reaffirmed my sense that before there probably was no God.
It's like, wow, is it possible that we can read each other's minds or I can levitate things?
This was the most immediate fascination because it didn't even entail needing God to help me.
I might have had powers built within me to do these wonderful, magical things.
And as I explored them, I just found that not one of them held through.
And I never saw one validated case of someone who could do any of these things.
Now, I wanted to point out, like before, you brought up this, you know, people who claim that there are experiments done that suggest that people have been healed from those who, you know, as an example of, let's say, a paranormal force.
Okay, and again, I don't know what your source is.
I just know that they've yet to make it to mainstream media.
Nevertheless, let me just point out possible inconsistencies with that theory.
For instance, it suggests that if a bunch of people pray for someone, then there are consequences, even if the person doesn't know.
So it's not based on that he feels loved or he feels that he's part of a community.
We're talking about like a paranormal force.
One of the problems with that is it would suggest that God's attentions are a popularity contest, and it doesn't take into account at all the person that's being prayed for.
So for instance, if all of Germany during World War II were praying for the life of Hitler, then God would say, hey, what's this?
I'm getting a lot of buzz here down in Germany.
There are actually millions of people all praying for this same guy.
Let me help him out here.
So basically, appeals to God for help become a popularity contest, where it's like the lone saint who lives in the desert, who's, you know, a Lancelot who's pure and incapable of sin because he's alone in the woods and there's no one there to pray for him, God's not going to perk up his ears and save him.
So A, it means that, A, it doesn't take into account the person that we're praying for, whether they're good and evil, which means that God is very susceptible to the voices of the masses and doesn't have any gauge of morality whatsoever because he doesn't care about the person because these studies don't say, you know, this was a good person that everyone was praying for.
Originally, Matthew, I thought that a very good argument for creation was, and people will say this to you, look around you.
Look at the perfection of every leaf and tree and everything down to the atoms in the air we breathe, which is all perfect in the birds and the animals.
And it's just impossible this could have just happened.
But then I realized one day that, you know, from our point of view today on Earth, mankind would, of course, look at it that way, except that it couldn't be any other way because that's how evolution delivered it to us.
So, of course, it would seem perfect.
Well, perfect in the environment is perfect for us essentially to be here anyway.
But in terms of our being able to survive, everything is just right for us to survive.
The oxygen mixture available, the water that we need, all our needs, even the oil in the ground, people will point to everything and say it's too perfect.
Yeah, if evolution then has, if we've already passed the point where we need the God part of the brain, then why hasn't evolution taken care of this for us?
Why hasn't it so modified it that we still have fear that we need to remain healthy and wealthy and alive, but that the God part of it would have faded away because, according to you, we don't need that anymore.
Well, I can't say definitively whether we need it anymore.
I know that it's part of our wiring.
I know that, therefore, I believe that probably a large number of the species, I couldn't pinpoint a statistic, but I'm sure that a very large number of people will always need God, will always need religion.
It gives them a sense of hope, it gives them a sense of community, all of these things which are essential to their mental survival, to their mental health.
But let's say then that the process is just underway, then the number of Matthew Alpers out there should be growing exponentially as evolution delivers.
I mean, it's not like all of a sudden a good idea comes around and those who don't believe it get weeded out.
First of all, because we're wired to believe, the only way we could do that is if we started tampering with our genes.
So we said, okay, these people who are excessively religious, we're going to sterilize Them and maybe after many generations we could start to tamper the religious impulse so that maybe the more fundamentalist aspects could be weeded out.
You know, when we're talking about some serious tampering with individuals.
Otherwise, nature's not going to select.
We're not a species that's going to be selected anymore because we live in social communities.
We protect even the weakest.
We're no longer part of a species, whereas with others, if like a kitten is born handicapped, the mother's going to carry it over to a corner and let it die.
Wouldn't there be ways then to tamper with the temporal lobe and cause somebody to become very, very non-religious?
Take a very religious person, tamper in some way that you could experimentally determine with the temporal lobe, and then all of a sudden they wake up and say, why did I believe all that stuff?
Yeah, well, actually, it's called when people suffer head trauma to the point that it changes your personality.
Like people who've had accidents and they come out of it and for the rest of their lives, they're deeply depressed.
Even people who have become like amoral, responsible people that have their frontal lobe damaged and they're now finding that that's where like moral, our capacity for gauging moral behavior is designed within the frontal lobe of the brain.
All of these things can be altered if damaged.
And there have been cases of people recorded who have had damage to their temporal lobe where their religious attitudes have changed.
It's called organic psychosyndrome.
And there was work done by a Dr. Sadwin at University of Pennsylvania at the neuropsychiatry department.
And he found that there were cases of people who were bumped in the head, who were extremely religious, whose families then came and complained after they recovered from their accident that they're not interested in going to church.
As well as people who have been in accidents and have the same head trauma and the opposite happened, where the light went on and they were completely secular.
Look, I might be doing the next show after my first car accident and I'll be doing my show as a born again, you know?
Because maybe that part of the brain will get jarred and all of a sudden I'll get zapped and all I'll be thinking about is God all day.
Again, it wouldn't contradict my theory, just I won't believe that any longer.
I will be enmeshed in a perception of belief and there'll be nothing you could tell me.
You could show me my own book and say, you wrote this book, dude, and I'll say I was blind.
And again, I'm going to ask you to come along, if you can, and intellectually challenge him.
I know there's going to be an almost irresistible temptation to simply call and express your Belief in your faith.
Please don't do that.
For the sake of the continuity of the intellectual exercise that we're engaging in tonight, come at him intellectually, if you would.
And if you can, tear him to pieces.
That'll be alright.
But let's do it intellectually.
And above all, if possible, let's be polite.
Now, his book, The God Part of the Brain, indeed, you can get that in all the usual suspected places like Amazon.com, and I really do suggest that you do.
How does that form that question so we can all get it?
The meaning of jokes.
In what context with regard to what he says?
unidentified
Well, the context of our brains generating words that other people across the country, around the world, simultaneously generate within their own brains.
Like I could give an example.
It would sound ludicrous, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear it tomorrow.
But this phenomenon of communal jokes or thoughts or...
In other words, Matthew, the fact that many people think of the same thing at the same time.
He's reaching out trying to say, well, here's an indication of some commonality of consciousness or something, you know, which is a paranormal category.
Okay, my explanation would pretty much for something like that fall into just pure coincidence.
I'm sure that right now, if there were a computer that could, you know, statistically generate figures on such things, that maybe there's 10,000 people right now saying the word cat in different languages.
Maybe there's 20,000 saying some more curse word that I can't say here on public.
A number of things that could be 500 people telling the why did the chicken cross the road joke in 300 different languages.
Does that mean that somehow there's some connective consciousness?
I don't personally, I don't think so.
I think that would be an example of coincidence.
A more general example that people have sometimes thrown at me, something closer to, you know, how do you explain the fact that the other day I was sitting in my living room thinking about a friend that I haven't seen or spoken to in 10 years and the phone rings and it's them.
And I say to that person, think of the number of times you were sitting in your living room and through stream of conscious you thought of any number of people, any number of things, and the phone didn't ring.
It's just a matter of time, just pure probability, before our mental life will coincide with the real world.
My name is Wesley, and I live in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in eastern Tennessee.
Okay.
I'd just like to pose three things, and I'll make them as concise and as speedily as possible.
The first one being that the evolutionist would have me believe that we go from the simple to the complex in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
He would have me believe that if I had a completely disassembled Rolex watch in a cigar box, and if I just put it in the right conditions with the right humidity and the right temperature and came back 300 million years later, I'd have a completely assembled Rolex watch in perfect working order.
Well, first of all, I mean, to me, that in itself is a ridiculous presumption.
Watches don't make themselves, but there are things inherent in the molecular makeup, in the positive and negative charges that are inherent in all matter, that are also inherent in organic matter, in the macromolecules that make up life, that do link things together.
All of a sudden, one molecule will, like glue, start to pull to the other one.
The spring does not necessarily magnetically pull itself to the coil of a watch piece.
So to compare the two, to say if you shake up a chain of amino acids and all of a sudden have a one-celled organism doesn't necessarily mean that if you shake up the parts of a watch that you're going to end up having a functional time X. Caller?
unidentified
No, that's okay.
I'll let the second law of thermodynamics speak for itself.
In terms of programs, I find it interesting, Art, that a lot of the guests that you've had on that talk about experiences and contacting the dead and programs that talk about crossing over, that not one single time have I ever heard one of those deceased relatives speaking to their living relatives from hell.
And that's a good comment because, well, first of all, usually when they ask somebody to, you know, make contact with the deceased, it's not like, well, it only works like one out of every ten times.
You know, they generally say, okay, give me a thousand bucks and I'll get you to talk with the dead.
And sure, it's just an amusing comment that they're never in hell.
They're always in some nice place and everyone's content.
Okay, now, a quick anecdote, because that's the only way I can get the message across.
And that is, when I lived 24 floors up at Tremont on the Common, overlooking the river, having sailed that afternoon with a young lady who was going back to Hong Kong, a Chinese girl who had just completed her PhD in MIT and was very scientific and also an artist, which I am, so I can visualize things.
And we actually, when we ran to the balcony, I said, yeah, there are four community boats about a boat length apart headed for the Mass Ave Bridge about a half a football field length away.
She said, what about the MIT boats, five of them going around the Red Markaboy?
I said, yeah, I see it, because we were visualizing the river.
and then i said what about the twenty and and and and the other story is well All right, all right, all right, all right, all right, thank you.
Well, I mean, I've looked through all the journals that do research on the Skeptic Society, et cetera, that do research on every type of paranormal phenomenon.
But I also read Time and Newsweek and the New York Times and the major papers, and I listen to the major news channels.
And when there's one instance, one positive instance of somebody proving the paranormal, we're now talking to Ingo Swan or Steve Smith or whoever it is, who he can guess whatever number you're thinking.
And they'll take people and they'll have all kinds of people come on the show and they'll say, we're now with this celebrity.
Okay, let's stop here and go to the question for Matthew.
unidentified
The question I have is, Matthew, have you absolutely tested with your mind the reality of God, not let it enter from your mouth, but keep it in your mind and in your heart, and ask him to reveal himself to you?
I would, you know, I would appeal for his assistance.
I would ask him questions.
Why are things this way?
And I never got an answer.
And then as I got older, and I started to see that there was a lot of darkness in the world and a lot of suffering.
And then I started asking him, you know, gee, God, if you're so powerful and you're supposedly really good, why are all these evil, bad things happening to lots of innocent people all the time?
And then my questions got a little, you know, a little darker and a little more pointed until I was like, you know what, there's no God.
I might as well be asking for Santa Claus's appeal.
If there is a God and he is truly omnipotent, and he's also all good and all-seeing, so he can see, he has prescience, he can see into the future, he can see into the past, he has knowledge of all things, which supposedly God does, why would he play a game with himself?
All right, I'm going to create this creature, and I'm going to play a game with my own head, even though I know what the outcome is going to be.
And I'm going to create a creature, and he gets to make his own choices up, and it's kind of on a random thing.
And every now and then, his choices, which are really my choices, because I'm creating him, I'm programming him, I'm making him the way I want him to be, because I make all things the way I want him to be.
So I'm going to make him evil, but it's not really his evil, or it's not my evil.
You know what?
It's so full of logical loopholes that if you ever try to take it to court, it'd be thrown out.
It's a ridiculous, this whole notion of, you know, God gave us choice, well, God gave us free will, then either God is retarded or God is evil.
There's no other possibility.
Either God, with this foresight, created a creature knowingly that would be evil and said, well, I'm calling it free will.
But if, yeah, sure, there are good acts and there are bad acts.
There are good things and there are evil things.
But again, if God is all-powerful and all-good, so either God's all-powerful and he's only good sometimes, so we're actually dealing with a fairly chaotic God who's all-powerful, but sometimes a little sadistic, or God doesn't know what he's doing.
He'd like to be good, but he's not that powerful, so sometimes he spazzes out a little.
Oh, my guest, Matthew Alper, believes in miracles.
It's just that he calls them coincidences from Hugh in Richardson, Texas, a very interesting Fast Blast, who wants me to remind you, Matthew, of a segment, I think it was on 2020, of a dog recognition study.
And this was a study in which the master of the animal, you know, the animal stayed home every day while the master was normally at work.
And they filmed these dogs.
And just for the fun of it, or to prove something or another, they decided that they would have the master come home at an odd, unexpected time.
And in virtually every case, Matthew, the dog that we were watching suddenly got agitated, would start barking, jumping up at the door like it absolutely knew the master was coming home.
This implies some sort of mind connection between the dog and the master, and they did this again and again and again.
Maybe they turned the cameras on at the point where they decide they're going to start filming the dog to see its response.
And maybe the dog reacted where all of a sudden the camera went on and it was used to the camera going on when the master comes home.
So even though it wasn't at a nor ordinary time, you know, for me, I would just explain it that some sense, smell, sight, sound, or touch, was triggered in the dog.
No extra sensory perception because I have yet to see adequate evidence to suggest that such a thing is real.
I'm open to the possibility.
But you're not.
I spent many an hour sitting on my suit with my friends saying, pick a number.
It's between, you know, being a skeptic is fine, but you're operating with blinders.
It's like you've got your head in a different pile of sand, and you won't look over at some of these proofs that are pretty compelling, I mean, scientifically compelling.
And I think that you should do that, but we should also go to the phones.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Matthew Alper.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi, Ark.
This is Leah from Parkside, Pennsylvania, and I'm listening to you on WDEL.
And I'd like to ask Matthew, as long as we're talking a scientific fact, we know that it's a scientific fact that when everyone dies, they lose 21 grams.
If that's not the soul leaving the body, what do you think it is?
If you think of what you've considered an accepted scientific fact, the scientific community, including the American Medical Association, would have a bone to pick with you right there because they would not accept such a thing.
That was based on, I think originally, Art, you probably know more about this notion because I'm sure that there have been guests of yours who've spoken on the topic.
Oh, actually, Matthew, I think it was one of my own previous programs, maybe even with you, when I brought forward the study, the actual medical study that did show a weight loss at death, an actual scientific study.
It was back in the 1800s.
We live in a modern day when it's very politically incorrect to put dying people up on scales.
I do not believe that the reason that the statistics that we have on that are based on one individual from over 150 years ago, as opposed to something that can be validated today, because we don't like weighing dead people.
We carve them up and take out their body parts to put into other people.
I know that there was some scientist in the 1800s who came up with that conclusion, but I've yet to see, again, the American Medical Association's take on it.
I yet see them.
unidentified
All right, the AMA hasn't, you know, you know, they have not verified that notion.
Well, Matthew, what about that as at least a possibility that the living human brain does, in fact, have abilities that we haven't yet scientifically found a way to measure and verify?
Again, the guest could call and say, I have proof that there's a leprechaun in my backyard, and he's going to take me over the rainbow to the pot of gold.
And all I can say is, look, I'm not in your backyard.
I can't witness what you're telling me.
I've yet to have the scientific community write it up and verify it for me.
So all I can say is, you know, I can't base my beliefs on the faith of one individual.
And I'm sure if I spoke to 1,000 individuals, each one would tell me with certainty about how they can prove that their grandmother's ghost lives in their house or how they can prove that they know they're people who can lift things off a table with their mind.
And there'll be a hundred people, or they'll be telling me the miracles of their religion.
They'll be telling me about the powers of some Hindu deity that they believe in as much as someone else believes maybe in remote viewing or clairvoyance.
And all I can say is, until the scientific community tells me that, like, yes, there is a Zeus and he can throw lightning bolts, you could believe it, but I don't.
The guard part of the brain is, I believe, supernaturally there because God built in an area of our consciousness to receive and perceive his presence.
Would you not say that this is quite possible, Matthew?
What kind of God would, let's say, and there are someone who wrote a book, The Transmitter to God, and, you know, kind of took a newfangled approach to this science that's emerging, saying, okay, yeah, if there's this part of the brain, then God put it there, like a little transmitter in our brain through which we can communicate or experience him.
However, what kind of God would put this transmitter into the brains of our species and have us believe that he's a thousand different things, each one compelling us to kill our neighbor to prove that our version is the right one?
Again, he's either a spastic mechanic or he's no mechanic at all.
unidentified
Do you know within yourself, Matthew, the difference between good and bad?
You know, I think everybody, you know, in this discussion right now, we need to have a little bit more humility and a little bit of understanding that, you know, we really can't know everything and we need to have an acceptance that to be able to live comfortable with the feeling that I don't know, that we don't know who God is.
And I just think the arguments against God with atheism are just semantics.
I mean, doesn't the existence of a material world prove that there is a God?
My take on that is simply, first of all, we're presuming, we're projecting our very small vision of reality, which is based in terrestrial rules that made us a survivable terrestrial organism.
And we make presumptions of the greater universe based on the way we're designed to perceive Things.
One of the ways humans are designed to perceive is to seek beginnings and ends, to seek cause and effect.
And therefore, we look out at the world and it's our natural inclination to say there's an effect, there therefore must be a cause.
We will never have any conscious awareness of the true makeup and design of the universe.
unidentified
There could be dimensions within dimensions within dimensions.
We're just wired for a very small, three-dimensional sense of reality.
We anthropomorphicize, so we have a tendency to project that if there is a cause, we can call it a he.
It must be personified.
It must have human-like qualities.
It must have human-like consciousness.
To me, it's just the forces of nature, the laws of thermodynamics.
Devoid of consciousness, devoid of any greater moral agenda, but just a series of forces at work that lent themselves towards existence, whatever that means, greater than my own perception of it.
So yes, by no means could I ever claim that I have knowledge of why things are here.
But just because things are here, I also don't make the presumption that there must be some humanoid-like, human-like conscious designer out there who made things.
Well, why don't you allow for the possibility, though, and go back one step from atheist to agnostic?
West to the wildcard line, I'm sorry.
You're on the air with Matthew Alper.
unidentified
Yes, good evening, guys.
Rick from Calgary.
Mr. Alber, while you've kind of got me a little bit of a loss here because you use the words belief, belief, faith, proof, science rather extravagantly.
And you've only have your limited amount of field.
And you're, to me, I'm not sure if you're actually an atheist or just a pure skeptic.
Well, first of all, I'm not looking to win any popularity contests with this book, and I'm not looking to necessarily fit in.
And just because the mean of my species happened to be wired to believe that there's a supernatural force out there doesn't make me feel like I need personally to comply.
If other people have that need and they're built with that drive in them and that perception in them, so be it.
But as far as worrying about whether I'm going to be alienated, I mean, you know, hey, that's part of the responsibility that we could say we all take when we make personal decisions, whether it's what God to believe in or not to believe in one at all.
Well, in a roundabout way, I think that he was saying essentially the same thing that I have been, and that is that you really have not come over, for all the investigation you've done, and as sound as your theory seems to you, you speak more like a skeptic than you do, frankly, an atheist.
And you haven't come over and investigated that which you really sort of say you have.
I mean, that much I've got.
You really haven't made an adequate investigation yet of the paranormal.
And you need to do that.
And you need to put that in your equation.
And then once you've done that, if you want to reject it out of hand, then I frankly would respect that.
But I don't think you've done that investigation anyway.
Matthew, we're out of time.
It has been, as always, it's absolutely been a pleasure and energizing to do this interview with you.
And I want to thank you for being here.
I hope people go out and buy your book.
And I hope they're challenged by it.
And I hope they're electrified by it.
And I think they will be.
And they should take on what you have written in the way I'm suggesting to you.
You should take on that which you obviously haven't yet studied.