Theology Journal Club!

Our theology journal club consists of people who have graduated from Northwind Theological Seminary under the tutelage of Thomas Oord Ph.D. We recently reviewed the article, “Spiritual Experience: Scientific, Philosophical and Theological Implications” by John C. Chatlos who is a psychiatrist at the Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. The article is open access and the link is here.

The article is published in Zygon which is the theological journal for the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS). IRAS is a very good organization, and you should join it or support it if you are interested in religion addressed objectively while also considering the intersection of religion and science. I am a member of IRAS.

This article is quite long, and I will attempt to summarize it kind of quickly. Chatlos basically looks at how humans work in the setting of the “Framework of Spirituality” (FOS).

FOS is defined as follows: “FOS refers to a non-ordinary experience that occurs with a sense of awakening or unveiling of a wider truth or reality with a noetic or revelatory quality, associated with mystical-type experiences, including a sense of direct connection, communion or merging with some non-ordinary source.”

I think this definition is quite good, and Chatlos then goes into various potential causes affecting FOS. The list, in my opinion, is quite exhaustive. I will describe his theories of FOS and will comment on them.

This list is as follows:

Science and Medicine: FOS encompasses how many of us view the world. We live materially in the world but also have spiritual ideas. Thus, medicine has to be practiced scientifically while considering a patient’s faith background. One’s faith background may lead to a patient having specific moral ideas about illness and treatment options.

Fundamental Theoretical Foundations: Chatlos suggests that human brains have a “dual process of cognition.” The dual process includes a “fast” process that is emotional, not logical, and unconscious and a “slow” process that is logical and conscious. These two interacting pathways produce how each of us develop a FOS.

Psychology: Chatlos proposes that one of the deficits of modern psychology is that the field has medicalized psychological conditions to such a degree that it often forgets to include a person’s FOS when considering treatment options. I am a big believer in pursuing mental health therapy with board certified providers, but I think the author has a point here. Psychology, done well, should be scientifically sound. However, one should think about a patient’s spirituality when addressing anxiety, depression, etc.

Psychiatry: Chatlos has the same argument here as with psychology. He describes the “biopsychosocial model” of medicine (which includes psychiatry) as containing the domains of psychology, sociology, and biology of each patient. He then states “For years, there has been a noted lack of spirituality within this model.” I am not sure what he means here. Is “spirituality” a new domain that should be added? Wouldn’t one’s spiritual beliefs fall within the domains of sociology and psychology? Good psychiatry follows science, and psychiatry in recent decades has become very scientific when it comes to a person’s genetics and medication response.

Image from Harvard

Neuroscience: This aspect of the article is basically a good review of what part of the human brain is active during religious or spiritual experiences.

Anthropology and Evolution: I loved this section. First, is there some type of evolutionary advantage to religion? Per Chatlos, “…the theory proposes that at a bottleneck in time, the characteristics of spiritual experience were socioculturally developed for the survival of the pre-human, possibly hominid, tribe. This included an increased sense of connection and empathy with compassion for protecting and caring for each other, a vitality necessary for success in their short, survival-threatened twenty-year lives, and a sense of wholeness and integrity with peace and serenity. Each person had their own role as in a beehive, with constrained flexibility for conflict due to the vagaries of life and the need for survival. Finally, this created an extreme cooperative and communal sense of meaning and purpose. Experientially, a capacity for self-worth was developed neurologically with survival value, as a hominid with poor self-confidence would have little initiative, one with low self-esteem with depression would likely be left by the wayside by the tribe, and poor self-competence would make for fatal mistakes. As a group, choices with reason needed to prevail and compassion and protection for each other were crucial; very little needs to be said about the survival value of courage among leaders. Thus, self-worth and dignity became personally integrated with the identified social characteristics of spiritual experience—connection, vitality, wholeness, peace, and meaning and purpose. Spiritual experience was a by-product of what was needed for survival, it was not what made survival possible.” So, perhaps spirituality was a by-product associated with the survival of the genes of early humans. I also like to consider a non-scientific idea in which the growth of the human brain was part of God’s desire for co-creation with all of life to more fully continue love between God and Creation as well as Creation and God. This love , includes each of us. This idea is somewhat an “emergence” idea for spirituality in which God want to fully be integrated with all of nature through time. It’s woo, but I like it.

Ancient cave art from South Africa

Creative Forces and the Soul Function: Here, Chatlos states, “Science, including psychology, has avoided, if not denied, the reality of the soul and currently has no place for its study or understanding.” I think this statement is true, and I think avoiding a consideration of the soul in medicine is fine. In medicine, we are trying to improve or save a life. We are not trying to improve or save an afterlife. Thus, I really can’t make a good comment here. I do want to point out that many Christian ideas of the soul have a resonance back to ancient Greece, so the soul that many Christians identify with today is actually a combination of Christian theology and Greek philosophy. A good reference is here. By the way, you can see the Greek influence when you read Plato’s Phaedrus (“The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing—when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground—there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature.”)

Universal Moral Direction and Values: In this section, there is a discussion as to if morality (and probably ethics) is universal in nature. I vacillate on this idea frequently in my thoughts. At least in H. sapiens, there seems to be the potential for a better human-wide morality or ethics occurring through time. I don’t know if this subjective directionality is a universal objective trait of nature. I love Chatlos’s quote here: “Opening of the spiritual core moves persons into a new awareness of non-dualistic thinking processes about experience. Experience within this spiritual core is not about judgment, good or bad, right or wrong, but rather accepting that ‘all is the way it has to be’ as a reality principle; therefore, ‘all is good’ because it is reality—and it can be better! “

Veil of Illusion and the Mystical Experience: This idea is the metaphysical barrier between what we humans perceive and what is the source of ultimate reality. This barrier can be explored scientifically (particle colliders and big telescopes) but can also be considered theologically. In my mind, the “barrier” is a type of idealism. I also think that our existence on a tiny planet in a non-descript galaxy obscures the ultimate reality of a perhaps infinite universe.

Image from the Webb space telescope

Transcendence versus Immanence: I don’t have much to say here. We can’t prove God. We also can’t prove a no God.

The “Causal Joint Problem”: In this section, Chatlos discusses ideas regarding the potential for communication with the Divine. Are we a “receiver” of God’s messages and meanings? Is God some type of “communicator”? I have no clue, and to be honest, I don’t think about this idea very often. One can believe in such ideas which is fine. I just think it is absolutely impossible to prove that we have some type of communication with God (even if I personally believe it is possible).

The Faith Process and Applied Spirituality: Does faith in God allow one to make a “meaningful commitment to the worth and dignity of all people, including oneself”? I think religion, done well, reaches this goal. Honestly, on a personal level, I try to attend churches that emphasize the “worth and dignity” of the other. No church does it well. No religion does it well. Many atheists, I think, also work for the worth and dignity of others. None of us do such work perfectly.

The Nature of the Soul: In many ways, this section was a recapitulation of the above.

So what do I think?

I think that our human experience is both objective and subjective. We objectively see human interaction, human experience, and change over time. This objectivity can be studied using science and science-adjacent fields. However, we also experience the world subjectively. This subjectivity is controlled by neurons, neurotransmitters, and perhaps (just perhaps) a spiritual element that cannot be defined. This undefined aspect of the human experience can be studied by the arts for which theology is often contained.

Refining our objective and subjective values both spiritually and otherwise should be a goal for each of us.

image made by Gemini Advanced