Spirituality means much more than belief in God. It is made of feelings, thoughts and insights that are often hard, if not impossible, to describe, and it is linked with one of the most widespread areas of human life: religion. But religion is more than a public expression of spirituality: religious institutions act as schools, courts, temples, landowners and advisers, as well as places of worship and prayer. So what is the link between these different roles and the biology of spirituality?
Recent studies show that religiousness has a genetic component, but a much weaker one than spirituality. Unlike spirituality, religion is passed on mainly by memes, not genes. Memes are self-copying units of culture: ideas passed from person to person through writing, speech, rituals and imitation. So while our genes make us receptive to spirituality and faith, our memes carry religion from one generation to the next, which is what makes each religion distinct (the idea that marrying an unbeliever is a sin is one of the strongest memes).
Spiritual beliefs have been with us since the start of recorded history and have shown no sign of weakening, despite the growth of scientific questioning in the last century. Still, there is a strong tendency to set science and spirituality (or religion) against each other as if they were real enemies. In fact they are not. As Albert Einstein said: "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."
Psychologists and theologians believe most people have some spiritual capacity, one of the most powerful and pervasive forces in human life. It appears in the recorded history of every civilisation and culture, in every corner of the planet, and is the centre of gravity of many people's lives.
Our spiritual beliefs are still strong today. Surveys show that more than 95% of Americans believe in God, 90% meditate or pray, 82% believe God performs miracles and more than 70% believe in life after death. This is not peculiar to Americans: even in China and the former Soviet Union, where powerful governments did everything they could to replace God with communism, more than half the population kept their faith. The strength of these beliefs is not necessarily reflected in going to church or other places of worship. In fact, church attendance in the United States has fallen steadily since the 1950s, and more people feel that churches care more about organisation than spirituality: there is a growing "separation between believing and belonging".
This gap between weak commitment to formal religion and the high share of people who believe in God can be explained by the fact that spirituality is quite distinct from the intellectual beliefs of any religion. More than three quarters of those surveyed feel that God can reveal himself in different ways, so there is a growing feeling that it doesn't matter which church you go to, because they are "all equally good".
Why is spirituality such a strong and universal trait? Why do so many people believe in things they can't see, smell, taste, hear or touch? Why do people everywhere, whatever their religious background and whatever gods they worship, value spirituality as much as, or even more than, pleasure, power or wealth?
The answer lies, at least partly, in our genes. Spirituality is one of our basic human inheritances. It is, in fact, an instinct.
At first, "instinct" may seem an odd word to pair with spirituality. We are used to thinking of instincts as automatic, unconscious reflexes or behaviours carried out without thought or training: birds flying south in winter, blinking when a punch comes at us, a newborn learning to suckle at its mother's breast, or arousal at a sexual stimulus. Spiritual behaviours such as meditation or taking communion, by contrast, are neither automatic nor unconscious: they are deliberate, learned activities.
But spirituality is not a simple instinct like those above. It is a complex whole in which certain inherited biological patterns and states of consciousness are woven together with social, cultural and historical threads. This interweaving of biology and experience is what makes spirituality an ornate tapestry, with nature as the loom and nurture as the weave.
By Dr Ayham Ahmad
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