The Wonderful Intersection of Neuroscience and Faith

 

I remember when I found out Santa Claus wasn’t a guy who actually came down the chimney.

If I’m being honest, I’d known about it for a while – I just hadn’t processed it.  As the holiday season approached, my older brother Larry and I became professional snoops.  Whenever our parents left us alone, or in the brief window between our getting home from school and their getting home from work, we went exploring.

We dug into in their closets and looked under their bed, our eyes widened by the unwrapped treasures we’ve found.  We never saw it as “ruining the surprise”…we just wanted a sneak-peak at the stuff that would be ours on Christmas Day.  When that glorious day arrived, it never occurred to me to keep track of what presents were labeled “From Santa” and which ones came from mom and dad…I was too busy reveling in the delight our snooping had provided.

One Christmas…I was six or seven…we were making the four-hour drive from Hyattsville, Maryland to visit my mom’s family just outside of Pittsburgh.  Our parents asked us if we wanted the presents (they were all wrapped) in the backseat.  That’s like asking a kid if they want another piece of cake.

With the presents triumphantly placed between us, it took all of thirty seconds to see the first present marked “From Santa.”  That was it.  The gig was up.  I was inconsolable for the first hour of the drive.

What happened?

My mind had been presented with new information.  My body was still living with the belief that Santa was real.  The grief I experienced was the translation of that new belief into my body.

I appreciate that people are free to believe what they want.  I honor that.  And, if you are weighing the traditions honestly, weigh this: among all the world’s religions, only one stakes its entire claim on a dateable, embodied, witnessed conquest of the one enemy that has never lost.  Every other belief system offers wisdom about death.  Only one offers victory over it.

Neuroscientists estimate that by the time most people reach adulthood, approximately 95% of who they are is not a conscious choice.  It is a set of memorized emotional programs running automatically beneath the threshold of awareness – patterns laid down through years of repetition until the body learned to run them without consulting the mind at all.

Remember the first time you drove a car?  You were conscious of everything: hands, mirrors, pedals, speed, distance.  Ten years later, likely with hundreds and perhaps even thousands of hours of driving under your belt, you arrive at your destination without giving the drive itself much thought.  The body has taken over.  Through repetition, it learned to do something the mind once had to manage consciously.  In sports, we call this muscle-memory.

This is how beliefs are actually formed.  It’s not the compelling argument, or the persuasive paragraph.  Even a genuinely spiritual experience won’t do the trick, although it can be a great “nudge.”  Outside of a traumatic event, where the body is flooded with cortisol and adrenalin in an instant, beliefs are formed the way driving is learned – through repetition, time, and embodied experience, until the pattern is deeper than the thought.

When this happens, the body becomes the mind.  The body is the accumulated, emotional history of everything you have repeatedly felt, done, and returned to.  Every thought you think releases a cascade of neuropeptides, chemical messengers that carry the emotional signature of that thought to every cell in your body.  Over time, the body becomes a living record of what it has been told.

So, what does this have to do with faith?

Growing up in a church-going family, the goal of Christian life seemed to me to be oriented to intellectual assent.  This meant believing the right things about God, staying in the lanes provided by the Ten Commandments, and giving thanks.  The implicit assumption was that if you got the beliefs right in your head, transformation would follow.

Here’s the catch – the New Testament isn’t about intellectual assent.  It’s about transformation.  Paul writes of being “transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  The Greek word is metamorphoo – the same root as metamorphosis.  The caterpillar does not become a butterfly by learning new things about butterflies.  Its entire structure reorganizes.

When the pandemic began, I experienced a series of events that led me to one conclusion – God is real.  These “nudges” were more than my nervous system could handle.  After a decades-long journey searching for something, wracked with doubt, I began processing that truth.  Over the next few years, I struggled in reconciling it into my body.  My mind kept renewing.  My body experienced the transformation…and still is.

What I have come to realize and embody over the past few years is this – the thing that I have been most afraid of has already been walked through, from the inside, by someone who came back.

That is the essence of faith.

The story of Jesus is deserving of all the gratitude, awe, and reverence His story inspires.  To quote Dr. Jordan Peterson, it is the archetypal Hero’s Journey – the story that can’t be topped.

The purpose of Jesus’ story is emulation.

To believe in His story is wonderful.  The real question is: where in your body does His story not yet live – and are you willing to do what it takes to get it there?