Biology and Belief -- Reflections

With Charles Darwin's 200th birthday just barely in our rear view mirror, it is useful to contemplate the connections between science and faith. I've just begun reading Philip Clayton's Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action (Fortress, 2008). Clayton posits a new context for theology, a context in which there are significant questions about the viability of the Christian tradition (p. 23). Science plays a significant role in this conversation -- and it would appear that for Clayton the dialogue with science is an important one.

With that as a back drop, Time Magazine published an intriguing article last week entitled "The Biology of Belief: Science and religion argue all the time, but they increasingly agree on one thing: a little spirituality may be very good for your health," by Jeffrey Kluger. In the article Kluger explores the ongoing research that suggests that religious people are much more likely to live longer and healthier lives. Now, this conversation can go two ways -- it can suggest proof of religion's validity -- though it doesn't appear that doctrine is a factor. One caveat on that last statement -- health is more likely to improve if you believe in a benevolent/loving God than if you believe in a wrathful one.

Now, all of this could offer support for religion, but it could also suggest that religion is a biological/evolutionary development. We needed God so we created God?

Here's what's surprising: a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health. People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don't attend. People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God. No less a killer than AIDS will back off at least a bit when it's hit with a double-barreled blast of belief. "Even accounting for medications," says Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief, "spirituality predicts for better disease control." (Read "Finding God on YouTube.")

The article discusses how scientists have been able to show how prayer and meditation effect certain parts of the brain. For instance, meditation seems to effect the frontal lobes of the brain so as to improve memory. From the article we learn that science is doing all kinds of studies that show interesting results.

What is interesting is that people in the medical field are beginning to wrestle with ways of drawing in faith -- or at least being open to it -- as a way of improving their patients' healing opportunities.

While churches are growing increasingly willing to accept the assistance of health-care experts, doctors and hospitals have been slower to seek out the help of spiritual counselors. The fear has long been that patients aren't interested in asking such spiritually intimate questions of their doctors, and the doctors, for their part, would be uncomfortable answering them. But this turns out not to be true. When psychologist Jean Kristeller of Indiana State University conducted a survey of oncologists, she found that a large proportion of them did feel it was appropriate to talk about spiritual issues with patients and to offer a referral if they weren't equipped to address the questions themselves. They didn't do so simply because they didn't know how to raise the topic and feared that their patients would take offense, in any event. When patients were asked, they insisted that they'd welcome such a conversation but that their doctors had never initiated one. What both groups needed was someone to break the ice. (See pictures of Billy Graham, America's Pastor.)

Kristeller, who had participated in earlier work exploring how physicians could help their patients quit smoking, recalled a short — five- to seven-minute — conversation that the leader of a study had devised to help doctors address the problem. The recommended dialogue conformed to what's known as patient-centered care — a clinical way of saying doctors should ask questions then clam up and listen to the answers. In the case of smoking, they were advised merely to make their concern known to patients, then ask them if they'd ever tried to quit before. Depending on how that first question was received, they could ask when those earlier attempts had been made, whether the patients would be interested in trying again and, most important, if it was all right to follow up on the conversation in the future. "The more patient-centered the conversations were, the more impact they had," Kristeller says.

It is interesting to read this article. From a faith perspective, as one who has spent time as an on call chaplain for a local hospital and who as a pastor goes into hospital rooms and prays, I'm intrigued about how we might be partners with medicine. I don't believe that it's an either or -- medicine or prayer. I think they go together. But, the question is how do we connect with each other?

The article offers intriguing possibilities for our consideration. It fits into Clayton's suggestion that science will prove to be an important and challenging partner in our theological and pastoral conversations.