Faith and Healing: A Forum

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Sloan: But why? To understand how the brain works so we can develop interventions to treat depression and to treat memory loss. And that's absolutely appropriate. Are there interventions that will come from [imaging religious experiences]?

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Handzo: Well, certainly some work is pure research in order to fathom things better. There are no particular interventions that come from picking up rocks on the moon, but we do it because it teaches us more about the world around us.

Sloan: Fair enough, but there's a seductive appeal about neuroscience explanations, that there must be something significant here because you can see it in the brain scan. We're infatuated with neuroscience because of the very beautiful images that we can see, but the real question is, What do those images tell us that's of any value, whether it's basic science or applied?

Handzo: Neuroscience may be a smaller case of a larger reality. We live in a culture where I think science, the evidence of science, trumps the evidence of faith. If you give a drug that's supposed to work in six months, and three years later you get a remission, that's called delayed effect. And I've said to my oncologist colleagues, Why is that not a miracle? What evidence do you have, because you have no evidence that this is delayed effect--it's just what you're calling it. Tell me that that's not a miracle?

And the same thing in psychiatry. To be ordained in most religions, at least in Christian religions, you have to prove to a group of other people that God has spoken to you. This in psychiatry is called thought insertion. It's a diagnosis. So if I believe God has spoken to me, in the religious world I get to stand for ordination; in the scientific world, I could be diagnosed. Maybe both are right.

If you walk into my hospital room, and I say I don't believe in God, and you still provide a service, is this really spiritual at all? Could the care be the equivalent of such secular practices as meditation or yoga, and how would you distinguish that?

Handzo: Well, I think it's important to differentiate and to define spirituality and religion. Religion has to do with an organized set of beliefs. So I'm a Lutheran; I adhere to a set of beliefs that has been defined as Lutheran, and I identify with a community that's Lutheran.

Spirituality, I think, is a much broader concept, and it has to do with probably a personal quest. Lutheran is what some other people have said Lutheran is. Your spirituality is what you say it is, and so my job as a chaplain is to discover what you say it is and to help that spirituality be helpful to you in coping with the illness or whatever is going on in your life.

Newberg: I think trying to define it is absolutely one of the areas that we really need to get a handle on, because one of the mistakes that is often made in the medical context can be that, oh, somebody is this particular religion, so they believe in these things. We have to be careful about how we define and slot everybody into these different categories. Atheists as well.

Getting back to brain structure--Dr. Sloan, would you see the varying degrees of spirituality in people as being rooted in something as simple as brain architecture?

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