Washington National Cathedral

The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith

The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, host

Cathedral Dean Samuel T. Lloyd III and Barbara Bradley Hagerty take on a very big question: What can science tell us about God?

Bradley Hagerty explores the possibility of defining “spirituality reality” in scientific terms. Born into a Christian Scientist family, Bradley Hagerty “was raised to think … that thoughts have power, that prayers actually affect your world. I never lost that sense.” She has since left the tradition of Christian Science, but she retains her belief that prayer works.

Some years ago, Bradley Hagerty visited Saddleback Church to prepare a newspaper story. While conducting an interview about a melanoma patient’s view of God’s purpose in her disease, Bradley Hagerty sensed a strong change in the atmosphere: “As she was talking … the air grew thick and moist, as if someone were breathing on us.” The interviewee shared the sensation and briefly stopped talking. Unnerved, Bradley Hagerty ended the interview shortly thereafter, but she continued to wonder what had happened. Was she crazy, or was she seeing evidence of God?

Several years later, Bradley Hagerty got up the nerve to interview eighty people of different faiths. She found that they shared an “encounter with the divine that was very similar.” Common elements included a sense of overwhelming love, a sense of light, a sense of oneness with an Other, and often an out-of-body experience. Many of her subjects had a moment of transformation that redirected their lives, goals, and ambitions.

Some scientific research has focused on the temporal lobe of the human brain as the possible seat of spirituality. Bradley Hagerty has trouble believing that Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus (and transformative experiences in other religions) was merely brain activity. However, she believes that God might use the temporal lobe as a “receptor,” created by God as a means of connecting with human beings.

Michael Persinger, a Canadian neurologist, believes that false “experiences” of God can be created by manipulating the temporal lobe. Bradley Hagerty agreed to undergo one of Persinger’s experiments to simulate an interaction with God. Her later reaction? “To me it was kind of silly,” Bradley Hagerty says. “I did not feel God.” Nevertheless, the experiment convinced Bradley Hagerty that the temporal lobe can be manipulated, by a scientist or by another force.

According to some studies of the brain, certain practices of prayer and meditation stimulate the frontal lobe, and the parietal lobe “goes dark,” according to Bradley Hagerty. That change in the parietal lobe could explain the physical means whereby people of faith feel at one with God or the universe.

Scientific explanations do not disprove God’s existence, in Bradley Hagerty’s view. Instead, they may show some particular ways in which God created human beings to commune with God.

About Barbara Bradley Hagerty

Barbara Bradley Hagerty is the religion correspondent for National Public Radio and the author of Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. Prior to joining NPR, Barbara worked for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper and the World Monitor television program. She is the recipient of a Religion Newswriters Award, the 2009 Gracie Award for Women in Radio and Television, and a 2005 Templeton-Cambridge fellowship in science and religion at Cambridge University.