“The God Gene”
April 27, 2008

Do we need any more proof that God is, and that God is good, other than this fine morning? Perhaps the birth of Dylan Conner MacDonald on April 24^th helps, or the feeling you get when we participate in Holy Communion on the first Sunday of the month, or the quiet time you spend in prayer and you hear God whispering to you that you are loved and that everything will be just fine.

Genesis tells us that we are created in the image of God, and that God was very pleased at our creation. The Gospel of John tells us that God loves us so much that God sent Jesus, the divine, son, to walk among us and show us the way. Today’s reading reminds us that we are beloved children of God, for Jesus promises his disciples that we will not be left as orphans.

The Orthodox faith believes that God placed within each of us the image of God, the divine icon, so that we may always turn back to God. Most eastern non-Christian religions believe that we are all related—we are made up of the same divine stuff as all the universe.

We believe that all life is directly related to God. Perhaps we even have the God gene. In Time magazine a few years ago the cover story dived into one of the hottest questions debated in the worlds of science and religion—which came first, God or the need for God? Did we humans create religion from cues divinely sent to us, or did we evolve the concept of the divine so that we would gather into communities in order for the species to survive? Did we create God in our image? And a related question—If some people seem more spiritual than others, is it nature or nurture that made them so?

“The need for God may be a crucial trait stamped deeper and deeper into our genome with every passing generation,” according to the Time article, which went on to report on a new book, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Lives, by Dean Hamer, molecular biologist and chief of gene structure at the National Cancer Institute. Hamer claims to have located one of the genes he believes is responsible for human spirituality. He recruited 1,000 men and women who agreed to take a standard 240 question personality test called Temperament and Character Inventory. One trait it measures is “self-transcendence,” which consists of 3 other traits:

1. self-forgetfulness—the ability to get entirely lost in an experience

2. transpersonal identification—a feeling of connectedness to a larger universe

3. mysticism—openness to things not literally provable

Hamer then ranked his participants along the self-transcendence scale from least to most spiritually inclined, checking their DNA for any clues—quite a task with 35,000 genes with 3.2 billion chemical bases. He narrowed it down to 9 specific genes known to play a role in the production of certain brain chemicals that regulate mood and motor control, and found that a variation on a gene known as VMAT2 seemed to be related to the ability to feel transcendence.

Of course, science will never be able to prove or disprove the existence of God. One can go both ways with this information. Humans have evolved on our own and learned how to create god in our own image because of certain needs we have; or the Creator of the first particle of matter and the genius behind the big bang, did indeed plan for humans to evolve with the ability, even the necessity, to seek out our creator.

This idea comes as no surprise to United Methodists, because one of our founders, John Wesley taught 250 years ago that God did program us for the possibility of reverence, but it is still our choice. He called it prevenient grace, the grace that comes before all; the grace with which we are born that allows us to turn to God in the first place. We also believe that we are created in God’s image, and that image, though sometimes lost in shadows, can never be deleted.

In our mid-week class this past week, we had this same discussion. Traditional Christianity, tracing itself back through St. Augustine and St. Paul, emphasized the belief that humankind is born sinful and can never rescue itself from that condition. Therefore, God must offer a divine sacrifice in order to pay the debt of human sin, and Jesus’ execution on the cross, either as God’s son, or as God himself, was that sacrifice. However, our United Methodist tradition, along with other religious traditions, suggests that humankind is basically good, having been created that way by a loving God, and we are capable of choosing the good or the bad, having been created with free will. Of course, most of us recognize that is very difficult for humans to always choose the good. We need help, and thank God Jesus Christ was and is that divine guidance, the one who shows us the way back to God. It’s all about grace, amazing grace.

So does science add to our faith, or detract from it? There are many studies being done and books being written as we continue to map the brain and dig deeper into our genes.

Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, Vince Rause

Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth by Andrew Newberg

The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience by Eugene G. D'Aquili, Andrew B. Newberg

The "God" Part of the Brain: A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God by Matthew Alper

So why wouldn’t everyone God created have the same variation on gene VMAT2? After all, aren’t we all God’s children? Wouldn’t God want to make it easier for everyone to be spiritual?

I believe that the struggle, the search, is an important part of the journey. It would be easy for God to simply program us for reverence; it’s more meaningful when the door is opened but you’ve got to walk through on your own.

I’ve never had a Big Bang conversion experience. My sense is that slowly and gradually, out of a rich experience of the world, one builds faith.  Such experiences may ultimately be at least as important a part of our spiritual tool kit as the genes we’re born with.

Deuteronomy 30: ⁶ The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.

Psalm 139: ¹³ for you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. ¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made…

So do not despair:

• When you cannot pray, the Holy Spirit prays on your behalf.

• When you cannot look upward or outward, you will discover the image of God within you.

• When you can no longer bear to look inside, you will find Christ in your neighbor, your friend, a stranger, or most especially, in your loved ones.

• When you feel you can no longer go forward, you can look back and see that trail of the saints which brought you this far.

• When you feel you cannot trust anyone else, you can trust that you are hard-wired for God, who will never let you go.