Barbara Bradley Hagerty - Official Website

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Interview

1. How did this book come about?

Back in 1995, I was reporting a story in Los Angeles about evangelical churches, interviewing a woman whose melanoma had returned after a remission. It was nighttime, and we were sitting outside. She was talking about how she felt God would heal her, and the disease was not meant to kill her but give her a transcendent purpose – to help others. Gradually, the air grew thick and moist, as if someone had moved close by and was breathing on us. I felt a palpable presence. We both felt it, we both stopped talking – and then it receded. It was a pivotal moment – something had happened and I thought maybe, just maybe, I had felt the presence of God.

Afterwards, I questioned my experience. Was it a delusion, or was it real? Is there a spiritual reality that exists beyond our everyday physical world? Is there more than this? I pondered it for a decade, and tried to find books that looked at this very simple question: Is there evidence of God? Not just people’s beliefs, but hard, scientific evidence? I finally decided to investigate the question the only way I knew how – as a journalist.

2. How did you research it? What kinds of people did you talk with?

I talked with scores of people who had had dramatic spiritual or mystical experiences. Some had had spontaneous mystical experiences, right out of the blue. Other mystical experiences were triggered by a trauma, others by drugs, or epilepsy, or near-death experiences. Some people spent hundreds of hours in prayer and meditation to cultivate the ability to connect with the divine. I also talked with dozens of scientists who are studying the physiology of spiritual experience – more precisely, what actually happens in your brain when you believe you are having a spiritual experience.

3. What are the common elements of an intense mystical experience? Are these experiences the same across faith traditions?

Absolutely. There is an awareness of overpowering love. There’s a sense of being at one with the universe, as if there are no boundaries between you and nature or other people. Often there’s a feeling that a benign force has temporarily taken over, as if you’ve been pushed from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat for a wild ride. The feeling is physical, often like sexual ecstasy (which always made me blush a bit when people described it)! And it happens to people from different faiths or no religion at all. I talked with Catholics, Episcopalians, Jews, Sufis, Buddhists, people who claim to be spiritual but not religious, and they all describe the same “Other,” the same spiritual presence and experience.

What’s so cool about this is that these are the elements that mystics like Teresa of Avila have described down through the ages. So did Williams James, the Harvard psychologist who wrote a seminal book on the subject more than a hundred years ago, The Varieties of Religious Experience. It’s all the same stuff they’re talking about, and it’s clearly a fundamental part of being human.

4. What was your own life-altering spiritual experience like?

It was gradual at first, and then sudden. After the experience with the woman with cancer, I felt I needed to learn more. The next day, I bought a Bible and began reading the New Testament. For some reason, it struck me as it never had before. That’s why the Bible and the Torah are called sacred – there’s a power to them, if you’re open to it. I was at an uncertain time in my life, regarding my career and the man I thought I would marry, and I think that allowed me to be open to this experience. At any rate, while thinking about this, in one moment, I felt my heart stir and grow warm, as if it were changing. That sounds small, but it was huge, and frightening. Later, I learned that the famous preacher John Wesley had had the same experience – “My heart was strangely warmed,” he said.

That moment was transformative, and I started thinking about everything differently – why I was here on Earth, my relationships with people, my ambitions, what was important, and so on. Many of my modern-day mystics in the book described exactly the same kinds of changes.

5. How many people say they have had a life-changing spiritual experience?

According to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, just over 50 percent of Americans say they’ve had a life-changing spiritual experience, one so dramatic they could circle the time and date in red ink on a calendar.

6. What is your religious background? What kind of preconceptions did you bring to this subject?

I was raised a Christian Scientist. We were known as the people who didn’t go to doctors or use medicine. The theory behind that is that we are spiritual beings, first and foremost, who are subject to the spiritual laws of God, not the laws of matter. And so, in Christian Science teaching, thoughts and prayers can change the physical world. In other words, prayers are more powerful than medicine in getting rid of a cold, or even the cancer you’re struggling with.

I left Christian Science when I was 35, after discovering the wonders of Tylenol during a bout with the flu. But I retained my conviction that thoughts and prayers can have a physical effect. I had seen too many healings, which are a part of Christian Science practice. So when I approached this book, I was predisposed to believe that there is a spiritual realm that we can touch, and when we do, we change – physiologically, emotionally, philosophically.

7. Why has science been dominated so long by materialists, who don’t believe in God or a spiritual dimension to reality?

It’s been mainly the past hundred years that materialist reductionism has held sway. Basically, around a century ago, scientists developed the idea of behaviorism – that if a scientist cannot observe something directly, then it is not relevant to science, and in fact, may not be real. So you can see how spiritual experience would become suspect – it’s not like a cluster of cancer cells or a flu virus that you can study under a microscope. A scientist can’t follow a person as he or she experiences God and confirm that the interaction occurred. So spiritual experience was shunted off into the world of parapsychology, along with UFOs and other claims scientists couldn’t prove. And yet, people continued to have spiritual experiences.

8. What tools has science recently developed that offer new insights into the biological basis of spiritual experiences?

The most revolutionary tools are those that measure brain activity – EEGs and brain scanners. These allow neurologists to see what happens in the brain when someone is having a spiritual experience. And guess what? There is brain activity that correlates to mystical experience, a supposed encounter with God or a spiritual dimension. Now, that’s not saying that God exists, but it does suggest that people who claim to have encountered God are going through something physiological – it’s unlikely to be just delusion or madness.

For example, when they feel a unity with God or the universe, it’s because their parietal lobes – the part of the brain that fixes you in time and space, that tells you where YOU end and the rest of the world begins – that part goes dark. Now, is it just a neurological experience, and nothing else? Or is the neurological experience recording something that’s actually happening to you spiritually? That’s the question science can’t answer yet. But the people in the brain scanner having the experience will swear on their lives that they are encountering God.

9. What do you mean by “fingerprints of God”?

If there is a God, science can’t measure Him, Her, or It directly. God is invisible, beyond the crude tools of science. So all we can do is look for fingerprints of God, circumstantial evidence that He exists and that we are intricately wired to be able to perceive Him.

10. What are “God genes” and “God chemicals” and the “God spot”?

The terms are a little tongue in cheek – but, play along with me here. If there is a God who wanted to communicate with us, how would He do it? Well, one way would be to create human beings with the ability to perceive Him. So he might engineer our brains and our genes with that ability. There is no one God gene, but some people are clearly more spiritual than others, and scientists think there is a genetic component to that. It’s why spirituality often runs in families. There is no single God chemical, but the serotonin system seems to play a large part in mystical experiences. There is no one God spot, but the temporal lobe in the brain seems to be involved with spiritual experience. It seems we are hard-wired to connect with God.

11. You sat through a Navajo peyote ceremony and talked to scientists who gave LSD to terminal cancer patients, with amazing results. Can drugs induce a mystical experience?

Absolutely, drugs can induce spiritual experiences. They trigger chemical reactions in the brain that make a person feel like her or she is in the presence of God, or at least swimming in another, non-physical dimension. Johns Hopkins University is conducting some fascinating research in this area. But the question is – and this is a theme throughout the book – does the fact that a physical thing like LSD or psilocybin triggers a numinous experience mean that the experience is merely brain chemistry in action? Or do drugs open the window to a spiritual realm that is there all along, but goes unnoticed (like a person who suddenly has a dog’s ability to hear a whistle that is pitched too high for a normal human being to hear)?

The fascinating result of some early drug studies is that when people with terminal cancer were given LSD, they had a profound spiritual experience, and were deeply changed. First, they often came back convinced that life does not end when their bodies die, but that their soul continues on to the next phase of existence. That conviction had the effect of quelling their fears about death. Probably as a result, their pain decreased tremendously. And of course, this makes me think of Christian Science, which says that when you change your thinking about your circumstances, your body responds, and heals.

12. What can near-death experiences tell us about the possible existence of an afterlife?

Near-death experiences, in my opinion, do not prove there is an afterlife – although anyone who has had one will insist that the soul does survive death. And I’m not sure science can ever prove there is an afterlife, because a scientist will never be able to follow Mrs. Jones through her near-death experience and witness that she walked into the light where she saw Jesus, for example, or her long-deceased grandmother. Mrs. Jones can swear up and down that she saw Jesus and her grandmother, but she could never prove it.

However, I think near-death experiences do make a revolutionary claim about consciousness, and specifically whether consciousness continues after the brain stops functioning. Take the case of Pam Reynolds. In 1991, Pam was found to have an aneurysm right at the brain stem. To remove it, she underwent a daring surgery, called a stand-still operation. Essentially, the doctors put her under deep anesthesia, covered her eyes and plugged her ears, lowered her body temperature to about 65 degrees, and drained all of the blood out of her head, as you’d drain oil out of a car. Then the aneurysm sac collapsed and the surgeons could snip it off.

Now, Pam’s brain was essentially dead for an hour – no blood, no brain activity, no ability to observe, hear, or form memories. Yet when the operation was over, she remembered many of the details of the operation, including conversations between doctors and the instruments they used. There are countless stories of people who saw themselves from above as they died and were resuscitated – but those have all been dismissed by scientists because it is impossible to corroborate them. Pam’s case is unusual in that the doctors in the room, as well as the surgical records, corroborated her account. This seems to me a strong piece of evidence that consciousness can operate when the brain does not; and to many people, that suggests an afterlife.

13. What do skeptical scientists say about near-death experiences?

Skeptics dismiss near-death experiences out of hand, and I can’t refute their arguments. Skeptics say the brain often hallucinates when it is dying. When the brain is shutting down, it is a bit of an OK Corral, with all sorts of chemical and electrical activity going on, in the brain’s attempt to keep functioning. It can draw sights and sounds from a person’s memory, and those could seem real, even though they’re just brain activity. But I think that out-of-body experiences, like the one that Pam Reynolds had, are more problematic for the skeptics. I’m not sure they can explain away every instance of consciousness functioning when the brain isn’t – or at least, they need some new arguments.

14. What do the latest scientific studies show about the effects of prayer?

The studies are mixed, and the most recent, large ones suggest that praying for someone has no measurable effect on the patient. But a lot of people believe these studies are flawed, because they have complete strangers praying for someone else, often reading from a scripted prayer. People don’t pray that way. They pray for someone they care about, and it is a passionate thing, not a clinical thing. So a new type of study is emerging, some sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Not all of them involve one person praying for another person’s healing; some involve one person simply focusing his intentions or thoughts on a friend or loved one.

I looked at one such study, called the Love Study, out in (where else?) California. The researchers separated a “bonded couple” – partners, or husband and wife – and had one direct his thought at random times toward his partner. The question was, when he directed his thoughts, what would happen to his partner’s physiology – things like pulse rate, or brain waves, or perspiration on her hands? And the answer was, there was a big correlation – she seemed to “respond” to his thoughts. There have been a fair number of studies with the same outcomes, but this is usually dismissed as parapsychology. At any rate, I think these researchers are trying to get at the question of prayer with a new, better-thought-out model.

15. Can science prove or disprove the existence of God?

No. Both belief and skepticism are a matter of faith. If there is a God, He is outside our capacity to measure. But I do think new scientific tools – in particular, brain scans – are putting the materialist assumptions on the defensive. Because what’s clear is that spiritual experience is a real, measurable, physiological event – something is happening in the brain, in the body. The question then becomes, is it only a physiological event, or does the brain activity reflect an encounter with another dimension? Think of a CD player versus a radio. Materialists think that the brain is like a CD player: the content – the song, for example -- is in a closed system, and if you take a hammer to the machine, then it’s impossible to hear the song. In other words, there is no God outside the brain trying to communicate, all spiritual experience is in the brain, and when you destroy that, any notion of God or spirituality dies as well.

But say the brain is like a radio, which is only picking up a transmission from Studio 3A where the hosts of “All Things Considered” are sitting. If you destroy the radio, the transmission – the words uttered by Michele Norris and Robert Siegel – is still operating. If the brain is a receiver, then it is picking up God’s communications, which never stop even when the brain does. But whether you believe the brain is a CD player or a radio is a personal choice. No one can prove it’s one or the other, at least not with the current science.

16. Are we heading toward a paradigm shift in science, in which there will be some kind of acknowledgment of a spiritual aspect of the universe?

I think so. I think we’re just beginning to understand the brain, thanks to very new technologies. I think some experiences are both too common and too mysterious to be dismissed by skeptics; they have to come up with a better counter-argument to Pam Reynolds’ or other people’s stories than simply saying, it couldn’t happen. We don’t know the mechanism, and therefore it didn’t happen.

As recently as 1988, a major scientific journal dismissed the Big Bang theory as religious nonsense that was only trying to posit a God who created the universe. (The argument being, if there was a Big Bang, there was a Big Banger who pulled the trigger). But that paradigm fell, because slowly but surely, the evidence supporting the Big Bang accumulated. That’s how paradigms shift – at first the new theory (for example, that the Earth revolves around the Sun) is thrown out because it doesn’t fit prevailing theories. Then the evidence in support of the new idea accumulates, until one day a Copernicus comes along and presents irrefutable evidence, and the old paradigm falls. I think we’re at the cusp of that now – the evidence is growing that there is more than this material world, and one day, the materialist paradigm will collapse. Of course, I’m a religion reporter, so what do I know? But there are a lot of scientists who secretly believe the same thing.

17. Were you ever concerned that writing this book would tarnish your reputation as an objective journalist?

I was worried when I started my reporting, but now I’m not. I just reported what I found. Some of my evangelical friends will be very disappointed in my findings, and some of my atheist friends will be equally unhappy. But I played it straight. I’m ready for controversy, but I’m not worried about it.