That’s the subtext to The New York Times columnist David Brooks‘ recent piece on religion and science, “The Neural Buddhists.” He’s taking up recent developments in neuroscience, and coming to the conclusion that present and future debates between religion and science will not be over the existence of God, but over whether or not organized religion contributes to or harms the brain’s intuitions toward transcendence and spirituality.

Thus, the title: science leading to a “neural Buddhism.”

Or, as he says: “The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.”

In other words, it’s the standard line: “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Whatever that means.

But, consider Brooks’ summary of recent literature in neuroscience:

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

Brooks thinks he’s talking the language of science, but everything he says here has deeply theological resonances as well. You could find this paragraph just as easily in an introductory textbook in systematic theology.

And it is a striking set of statements in light of the fact that many Christian churches just celebrated the mystery of the Trinity, that God could simultaneously be one being in three persons. Were this a seminar in systematic theology, one of the first lessons would be that the “self is…a dynamic process of relationships” because it is the imago of a Dei that is itself deeply and intrinsically relational in its very being, which is what makes God “the unknowable total of all there is” in the first place.

Or, consider Brooks’ paragraph in light of this paragraph by contemporary theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg:

The immanent dynamic of the life of creation may be more precisely described as a process of the increasing internalizing of the self-transcendence of creatures. Organic life is the fully developed basic form of this internalized self-transcendence. The stages of the evolution of life may be seen as the stages of its increasing complexity and intensity and therefore of a growing participation of the creatures in God…

That’s pretty heady stuff. But it shows how deeply theological language can overlap with scientific understandings of the world. What public and polemic religion-and-science “debates” often leave out is the vast middle ground in discourse between science and theology, and the ways of seeing the world that organized religions have developed over centuries, as brilliant brains have thought out loud about both God and this material world. Pannenberg himself has been at the forefront of that middle ground.

It’s what folks are missing out on with the flip false dichotomy of “I’m spiritual but not religious.”

It is fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.” It is what theology does at its best. Perhaps science too.

Photo courtesy of my wife’s ultrasound technician.