Is Worship Hardwired?

March 7, 2007

How would you feel about your faith if you were to learn that worship is a reflex response to fear that helps humans survive?
That’s the belief of Tal Hiebert, who is a physician, medical research scientist, neurophysiologist, clinical physiologist, and health care delivery specialist.
His family moved from Kansas to California during the Depression years. There his father, a theologian and college professor, created and built up a successful Mennonite church. Among his seven children and their childrenwere artists, musicians, educators, journalists, doctors, and scientists, and among his siblings’ children, some outstanding theologians.
His life’s work is fascinating. He developed a treadmill test that helped identify Olympic hopefuls in the tiny country of Bahrain, researched bacterial warfare in World War II (despite his conscientious objector status), and wrote the definitive manual on long-term Social Security disability.
Yet Hiebert’s true passion has been studying religion and science. He has devoted much of his time toward studying the limbic system, which is responsible for autonomic functions such as breathing, blood pressure, and sweating. In other words, functions you don’t have to think about.

SURVIVAL RESPONSE
Worship, he posits, is a survival response to fear—the fear of the unknown, of not knowing what is going to happen next, and, especially, the fear of death—the biggest unknown of all. It is purely neuro-physiological, and starts with neurons firing off in the limbic area of the midbrain, where all survival reflexes originate. It interacts with the higher functioning part of the brain, cognitive thought, which is influenced by a person’s upbringing and life experiences.
Archaeologists have found early evidence of ritualistic behavior and worship even among prehistoric man. There is also quite a bit of interest in researching the biological nature of worship. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, for one, have been taking magnetic resonant images (MRIs) during worship activities that show distinctive cortical changes, as do electrocardiograms (EEGs), he said.
“When I speak of worship, I am not talking about church ritual or mantras or meditation or what is generally conceived of as ‘prayer’. I define worship as ‘obeisance’ to an intangible something that is considered greater than ourselves, something that defines our lives—fate—and rules our existence,” Hiebert said.
Essentially the biological impulse
to believe leads to the genesis of God
and gods.
“When we talk about god, we talk about people who have ideas of god, and your idea of god won’t be the same as mine. Still, it doesn’t change the fact there isn’t a god, but how we understand this concept.”
The biggest problem is trying to define god. “I’ve worked every day and every night on that definition—force and creativity, something intangible, bigger than man. Fate. Those are attributes of god. One thing is for sure—what people worship as god, makes that a god. And since everybody worships, there’s always going to be a god. It’s a peculiar concept of life, isn’t it?”

ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Hiebert said that worship requires consciousness; a person, for example, who is in a coma does not feel the impulse to worship. Animals do not have the brain hardware to understand god or to worship.
Atheists might use Heibert’s theory to bolster their argument that God didn’t create man, but man created God. They would agree that religion has delivered the elements man needs to survive in a larger community -- respect for property rights, taboos against murder, telling the truth, respecting elders, loving thy neighbor, compassion for the poor, and working hard.
Hiebert believes worship is an evolved trait, but he doesn’t support an atheistic or even an agnostic conclusion. “Because an atheist says the sun exists, doesn’t mean the sun doesn’t exist. The same with God,” he said.
Hiebert believes the importance of his theory is that it will create more tolerance for divergent beliefs. Once people understand that worship is biological (not a choice) and that each individual has his or her own belief system, they will no longer be so quick to judge.
“Knowing the ‘how and why’ of worship will save man from himself and from exterminating others,” he said.
“The viciousness (of the world) will be reduced only when there is appreciation and respect for differences in how someone worships, whether it is Shia or Sunni, Catholic or Protestant, Conservative or Reformed Judaism. These conflicts of belief and the worship response have been at the heart of most human conflagrations throughout all time. Certainly military action, torture, subjugation, thought control, and hatred will not do it.”
Hiebert has laid out his theory in a manuscript he intends to publish, “The Anatomy of Worship.” The book is well titled as it dissects the impulse to worship, the brain’s several different parts, and thumbnail descriptions of the world’s major religions.

WEIGHING IN
How do others weigh in on this?
Michael Sullivan, a Traverse City family therapist, said that Hiebert’s theory is in line with the findings of Robert Sopalsky, a stress expert, who sought to answer why zebras don’t get ulcers. To reduce anxiety and stress in life, humans need a sense of control and predictability in life. They also need a belief model that helps them to anticipate future events.
“The model is usually a super human agent that comes into play—that there is something organizing the world beyond the individual. The comforting thought for most people is, ‘There is a god, even if there’s a mean god, and there is some organization to this.’”
Another writer, D. Jason Slone, has already touched on cognition, culture and religion in a book, “Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t.”
“He writes that we have this sort of battle between religious concepts and our intuitive nature, and it’s a sort of paradox of what people profess and what they actually do. He’s been looking at the evolution of religious behavior and that holding religious beliefs is one aspect of signaling that you’re a desirable mate,”
In his book, Slone looks at “why Theravada Buddhists profess that Buddha was just a man but actually worship him as a god. Then he explores why the early Puritan Calvinists, who believed in predestination, acted instead as if humans had free will by conducting witch-hunts and seeking converts,” said the book’s description.

SURVIVAL THREAT
Sullivan believes that violence is not always triggered because of religious intolerance, but rather when one religious group threatens the very survival of another. The Arab Islams in northern Sudan in 1983, for example, murdered several Christians and dumped a baby down a well, not because of their religion, but because the community refused to move off land where oil had been discovered. So was the seed of one of the worst genocides in recent history.
Corey Sanderson, minister at
The Potter’s House, believes that reducing worship to a biological, reflex response is potentially too reductionist. Understanding worship goes beyond the brain’s physiology, just as understanding a television goes beyond simply looking at its internal components. There are external and mysterious forces that also influence our impulse to worship, he said.
Sanderson argued that there is evidence that dolphins and chimpanzees, as well as humans, understand death and have even exhibited worship-type behaviors.
“Jane Goodall noted that back in 1966, when polio started spreading in Africa.One of the mother chimps carried around her baby chimp that had died of polio. She carried it around for two days, trying to revive it, and finally went off in the woods and basically tried to bury it. She had some kind of innate ritual that responded to that death,” said Sanderson.
Sullivan said that religion is often considered a “placebo” effect, giving people a feeling of safety, security and well-being. But that’s good! The placebo effect is now understood to transcend the psychological realm; positive belief creates actual physical changes and can make people healthier.
What seems to make people happiest, what seems to work (if I may be so bold as to sum up the comments of these three remarkable people), is a religion or belief system that is tolerant and thoughtful of others, is congruent with your own intuitive beliefs, and is long-lasting.
“Belief is the most important thing in anybody’s life,” Hiebert said.

Editor’s note: For more on the long and productive life of Dr. Hiebert, please go to www.talhiebert.com.