Is God in Our Genes?

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The simple answer might be that just because we're given a gift, we don't necessarily always use it wisely. Fire can either light your village or burn down the one next door, depending on your inclination. "Religions represent an attempt to harness innate spirituality for organizational purposes—not always good," says Macquarie University's Davies. And while spiritual contemplation is intuitive, says Washington University's Cloninger, religion is dogmatic; dogma in the wrong hands has always been a risky thing.

Still, for every place in the world that's suffering from religious strife, there are many more where spirituality is doing its uplifting and civilizing work. A God who would equip us with the genes and the smarts to cooperate in such a clever way is a God who ought to be appealing even to religious purists. Nonetheless, sticking points do remain that prevent genetic theory from going down smoothly. One that's particularly troublesome is the question of why Hamer's God gene—or any of the others that may eventually be discovered—is distributed so unevenly among us. Why are some of us spiritual virtuosos, while others can't play a note? Isn't it one of the central tenets of religion that grace is available to everybody? At least a few scientists shrug at the question. "Some get religion, and some don't," says Virginia Commonwealth University's Eaves.

But this seeming inequity may be an important part of the spiritual journey. It would be easy for God simply to program us for reverence; it's more meaningful when the door is opened but you've got to walk through on your own—however hard those steps may be for some. "I have never had a Big Bang conversion experience," says the Jewish Theological Seminary's Gillman. "My sense is that slowly and gradually, out of a rich experience of the world, one builds a faith."

Such experiences may ultimately be at least as important a part of our spiritual tool kit as the genes we're born with. A poor genetic legacy but lucky spiritual circumstances might mean more than good genes and bad experiences. "Fortune includes the possibility of divine grace as well as environmental influences," says Cloninger.

No matter how the two factors balance out, scientists may eventually find that trying to identify the definitive cluster of genes that serves as our spiritual circuit board is simply impossible—like trying to draw a genetic schematic of love. Still, they're likely to keep trying. "I am personally convinced that there is a scheme of things," says Davies of Macquarie University, "that the universe is not just any ragbag of laws." In the end, genes may prove to be a part of that scheme—but clearly one of very many.

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