Matthew Alper begins The God Part of the Brain with an explanation as to why belief in a supernatural being is important. If God does not exist, absolutes do not exist. For the most part, he says that our laws, our morals ... are as flawed and imperfect as the humans who created them. Any notion of good or evil, truth or falsehood would be left to the subjective interpretation of each individual. These concepts become relative terms.
Death would provide a constant anxiety we could never escape. This angst includes not only fear of dying at some remote future time but also the immediate, daily fear of death by sheer happenstance: accident or disease. We see the fate of both old and young: the elderly die, sometimes in agony; we see the young die, maybe with leukemia or in an automobile accident. Alper posits that this fear of non-being would gnaw so heavily on our consciousness that it 
would destroy evolutionary development, leaving our race to face emptiness, meaninglessness, and ultimate despair.
Next, The God Part of the Brain explains that unlike religious beliefs, the scientific method has provided mankind with a systematic way of observing, testing, and measuring reality as it is perceived by our brains through our senses. Alper only allows himself to believe whatever science can discover about God, including the very nature of this deity from a strictly physical, that is, from a scientific perspective.
From his perspective of a time-line dating back to the Big Bang, Alper emphasizes that science has now explained the origin and evolution of the entire physical universe. This would include the 3.5 billion years of evolution of terrestrial life
leading up to the appearance of thinking, conscious man. Yet, every truth mankind knows as certainty has come strictly from science; what we can know with conviction about God is this: God is a three letter word on a page.
Alper explores behavior patterns characteristic of brute animals. Those exhibiting the same instinctual behaviors must be genetically wired to do so, he says. One example he gives is the intense labor behavior in an ant colony. Here, some insects are born to be workers, others become soldiers, some forage for food, one becomes the exalted queen. Without this innate caste system, the ant colony could not survive. Evolution has worked its miracle on these tiny creatures, building into their nervous systems the specific role each will play so that the fittest colonies survive.
Article comments
1 - duane
Interesting stuff, Regis, Nice synopsis, well peppered with your own arguable assessments. A few comments:
Alper emphasizes that science has now explained the origin and evolution of the entire physical universe.
Well, not quite.
Yet, every truth mankind knows as certainty has come strictly from science;
Science doesn't deal in "truths." Scientists know nothing with what most people would call certainty. What humans know about the physical universe is all based on models. Even if a model works extremely well, there is always the likelihood that it is an approximation to "the truth." The history of science bears this out.
The God Part of the Brain reasons that if evolution had not genetically built in a genuine but false belief in the supernatural, all motivation for self-preservation of our species would be gone.
I've heard this before. I'm not yet ready to believe it. The tendency toward self-preservation at the species level might be based upon much more immediate concerns than those stemming from philosophical meanderings originating in higher-brain function, such as a sex drive, just for example.
If evolutionary adaptation instills in our brain the false notion of the supernatural so mankind has a reason to survive, why was continued existence necessary in the first place?
I think this is somewhat bogus. Natural selection at work does not imply necessity, as if there were a purpose to it all.
Also, how then can an atheist exist?
Atheists just wanna have fun. That leads to procreation. Simple as that.
He claims that atheists fall at the lower end of the standard deviation of the religious bell curve. These folks are spiritually deficient in the same manner that some people are musically deficient. They have little or no talent nor are they able to appreciate melodies.
I'm not buying that. It's a gross over-simplification. I do accept the notion of the bell curve. I don't buy the underlying assumption that it's one-dimensional.
Evolutionary adaptation of a God brain center so the species can survive is quite different than adaption of a music center.
Not necessarily. Recent studies have suggested that those "selected" to possess artistic ability have an enhanced attractiveness to the opposite sex based on a hard-wired disposition.
2 - Dr Dreadful
I'd be surprised if some of the smarter primates and cetaceans didn't have an awareness of mortality - if not pertaining to the individual then at least in general. Chimpanzees in particular surprise us all the time with displays of intelligence, ingenuity and cleverness of which we hadn't previously believed them capable.
Yet, as far as I'm aware, none of these species has ever been observed in any sort of religious behavior. (African elephants, possibly, have - although it's important to avoid ascribing an anthropic motivation to what they do when they 'mourn' their dead.)
3 - Robert Westafer
Brain Identity
Suppose we have all been misled by language invented by our predecessors and the simple truth turns out to be that we are not “human beings” or “persons” but rather human brains that are intimately connected to all the organs and other parts of the particular human body in which we reside.
What if the word “person” and the “personal pronouns” we commonly use such as “I”, “me”, “we”, “you”, etc. are only linguistic inventions of human brains that for one reason or another were unable to identify themselves correctly as actually being human brains?
It can be shown that a human brain has the ability to create and use spoken and written language through the use of certain areas of cerebral cortex located usually its left hemisphere. Strokes or other damage in these areas cause impairment or loss of a human brain’s ability to produce and understand spoken and written language. Precisely which linguistic abilities are impaired or lost in any given instance and to what degree depends upon the exact location and extent of the brain damage.
We know that every human brain and body has been built from a new combination of parental DNA that resulted from the union of a particular egg and a particular sperm which formed a single new cell; and over about a nine month period the information stored in the DNA inside that first new cell allowed it to divide and grow into trillions of new cells of various types, all of which were organized into the complexity of nature that in our linguistic simplicity we refer to as a newborn baby.
We also know that having been built by DNA, each brain and body " beginning even during the building process and continuing ever after - has been continually modified by an enormous amount of environmental variables and experience which includes the present moment.
Suppose for the sake of argument that I actually am a human brain that is continuous with a spinal cord and connected through nerves to all the organs and other parts of the body in which I reside. Such an identity may take a bit of time getting used to. But if that is my true identity, does that fact automatically mean that it is impossible for anything else to exist that is not made of atoms and molecules like I am? Or is it possible that something might exist that may be many orders of magnitude more intelligent and powerful than I am? Is it possible that something might exist that is in some way related to the awesome complexity of nature that is evident in the cosmos and can be seen throughout the living world on our planet and of which I am a part? Is that something that human brains might choose to call a “Supernatural Power”, or perhaps “God”?
I am thrilled to be able to understand the basics of what I am and how I came into existence. But having such an understanding does not somehow automatically enlighten me as to the nature of everything else that may or may not exist.
If I am only linguistically a “human being” or a “person” - a fictional entity invented by my predecessors that does not exist except in language, and that can be theoretically thought of as perhaps “owning” a brain and a body - but in reality I am actually a particular human brain that has been built by my DNA and modified by a ton of experience and that is intimately connected to and living within a particular human body, my body, then the brain inside my head " the brain that thinks precisely what I think, feels exactly what I feel, remembers everything that I remember, knows what I know, and has experienced everything that I have experienced - that brain located behind my forehead and inside my skull cannot be called “my brain”, as if I am somehow a separate entity that “owns” that brain, because that brain is, in fact, “me”.
4 - Ruvy
Professor Gerald Schroeder deals with this issue in his various books, "Genesis and the Big Bang", The Science of God", and others, but to be precise, he dealt with how the brain receives consciousness of the Almighty at a lecture he gave at the Israel Center some years ago. I was master of ceremonies and made extensive notes of the lecture. Dr. Schroeder went over those notes, correcting my errors.
Concerning the brain, Dr. Schroeder explained,
I ended the article (which was an explanation of Dr. Schroeder's lecture) with
This is a five year old lecture, and information has been gathered since then to modify the concepts that Dr. Schroeder presented in July, 2004. But it appears, from what little I know, that the evidence for the universe being Mind rather than Matter has grown stronger rather than weaker, further backing up the idea that the brain is a receptor for data from a Universal MInd - the Mind of G-d.
5 - Rege Schilken
Interesting comments, Ruvy!
"We are emerging from a false perception of the universe to finally begin to perceive its true nature - the Thought of G-d. This is the point of the word b'reishít at the beginning of the Torah. This is why we can't seem to find so many sub-atomic particles whose presence are sensed and detected. They are products of Mind, of the Thought that brought the universe into existence 15 billion years ago with a Big Bang."
If we are moving toward the next stage, I wonder what that might be? I'm convinced that the REASON we search for the unknown is because we have a HINT that there is an answer. It is this HINT that keeps each generation, each person, each scientist hunting for answers to their questions.
A wonderful book written by Michael Polanyi (physicist/philosopher) titled, PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE, points out this search. When science seeks its answers by first stating a hypothesis and then trying to prove or disprove it (null hypothesis), this certainly seems to be true.
Regis
6 - Rege Schilken
Regarding Robert Westafer's comment above:
"Or is it possible that something might exist that may be many orders of magnitude more intelligent and powerful than I am? Is it possible that something might exist that is in some way related to the awesome complexity of nature that is evident in the cosmos and can be seen throughout the living world on our planet and of which I am a part? Is that something that human brains might choose to call a "Supernatural Power", or perhaps "God"?"
Seems that a certain consciousness pervades the universe -- perhaps keeps it in existence. I think one of the reasons why the ultimate particle cannot be found is that it is an object of our consciousness.
The directions that science keeps hunting for -- that instructs DNA -- that tell an arm or a leg when and where to grow -- that tell a tiny seed how to grow into a giant oak -- that tell natural selection when and what to select -- these directions are not within, but without. These directions come from a consciousness outside of matter and form and nature as we know it.