Kevin Sharpe, 'Happiness and God'

MT40. 19 June 2006.
Copyright © 2006 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
Submitted for publication.

· Add perspectives on this (non-projection theology) from Karl Peters, Gordon Kaufman, Charlie Hardwick, Wentzel van Huyssteen, Don Crosby. Be critical of them. Especially that of Hardwick.

Happiness and God[1]

Kevin Sharpe

Graduate College, Union Institute & University, Cincinnati, Ohio
Harris Manchester College, Oxford University

10 Shirelake Close, Oxford OX1 1SN, United Kingdom
ksharpe@ksharpe.com
www.ksharpe.com

ABSTRACT. Genes and circumstances contribute equally to our happiness in the short term, but genes and neurotransmitters cause 80% of the range of happiness we feel in the long term, according to research in behavioral genetics and neurochemistry. On the other hand, theology suggests that, from living virtuously, we obtain happiness in this life and ultimate happiness in the life to come. A clash looms between these scientific and theological perspectives. What do genes and neurotransmitters say about we feel in the afterlife? Do the genes of believers predispose them to greater happiness? This paper examines and argues the inadequacy of theological responses to the scientific challenge. It suggests instead that, in the light of the scientific research, the theological notion and implications of happiness require rethinking, including reconstruction of traditional notions of God.

KEY WORDS. Behavioral genetics, evolution, genetics, God, happiness, neurochemistry, reductionism, science and theology.

CONTENTS.

Happiness and Religion. 1

Happiness and Biology. 1

Theology versus Biology. 1

Conclusions. 1

Notes. 1

References. 1

We long to understand, to gain knowledge, to describe. The science-driven twentieth and twenty-first centuries reflect this longing: we seek an intimacy with our universe and ourselves and, through such pursuits as medicine, genetic engineering, and computer technologies, we seek to use our knowledge. Similarly with us and God, however we perceive that greater than ourselves. We yearn to appreciate God and to understand God’s relationship with the universe and with us as integral parts of the universe.

Religious believers facilitate their understanding of God by using projections. In this activity, they turn toward familiar turf – human qualities and characteristics – and project them onto God, turning God into an exaggerated version of ourselves. Projections typically produce an image of God, within the Christian tradition at least, as a personal, loving, good patriarch who desires nothing but happiness for us. Believers also view God as the greatest conceivable being. Theologians mirror this predilection, ascribing awe-inspiring properties to God: God is omnipresent, the creator and sustainer of the universe, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good (thus the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong), and everlasting. To conceive of God at all, theologians speak in terms we understand – power, knowledge, creativity, goodness – and then magnify them. This same process happens with happiness and God, both the happiness of God and happiness as related to our spiritual selves.

Scientific research, however, has brought this view of happiness with respect to God under attack.

Happiness and Religion

Many religions and philosophies focus on happiness and advise us to seek out happiness in everyday life. For example:

· Happiness comes to the person who lives a life of intellectual contemplation; so thought philosophers in ancient Greece. Epicurian and Stoic philosophers similarly proposed ‘happy wisdom.’ Aristotle thought of happiness as the highest good, equating happiness with virtue. ‘There’s no fool who is happy, and no wise man who is not,’ the Roman philosopher Cicero reiterated.[2]

· Augustine accepted the basic tenet of the ancients’ ethical theory: we should aim our behavior toward the achievement of happiness, the only universal desire. Aquinas concurred with Aristotle and Augustine by declaring happiness the basic human pursuit, agreeing that it has to do with intelligent reflection. Its highest form derives from the highest use of the intellect, namely, thinking about spiritual matters and, in particular, about God.

· Theologians and artists of the Renaissance believed in happiness and pleasure as the aims for life, particularly for the Christian life. Virtue forms only one route to happiness; happiness supersedes virtue.

· Reformation Protestants focused on justification by grace through faith. To their eyes, the Bible presents a picture of a gracious and loving deity who desires everyone’s happiness. Happiness thus arises from God; through God’s grace, we could share what God offers, a positive loving action.

· Contemporary spiritual leader Robert Schuller writes about The Be Happy Attitudes: Eight Positive Attitudes that Can Transform Your Life.[3] Along with charismatic and Pentecostal tendencies in the spiritual traditions of the contemporary world, such books and movements assume that religion intends for happiness. Happiness is nearness to God.

These beliefs work. Highly religious people declare themselves very happy at twice the rate of those with the lowest spiritual commitment, according to a Gallup survey. Another study of 166,600 people in 14 countries demonstrates that happiness and satisfaction with life increase with frequency of attendance at worship services.[4] A religious life does lead to greater happiness here and now.

Several spiritual traditions and churches also emphasize the promise of happiness to come in the afterlife. For example:

· A friend with a staunchly Roman Catholic upbringing talks of her constant sinning because she fails to say grace before every meal, pray every night, and attend church as often as possible. She must overcome this tendency through acts of penance to achieve happiness in the afterlife. In Christian orthodoxy, happiness lies elsewhere, a place of original bliss and innocence (the Garden of Eden) or of future joy (the Promised Land where we will find happiness and complete satisfaction, or Heaven, our eternal and happy home where we will see God face-to-face). ‘Heaven is destination and reward,’ writes David van Biema, ‘succor and relief from earthly trials.’[5] Adds Jeffrey Russell: ‘[Heaven] is an endless dynamic of joy.’[6]

· Islam views the paradise of afterlife in heaven as a garden of pleasure where the righteous enjoy the highest of spiritual and sensual happiness. Happiness embraces divine delight and physical enjoyment.

· Plato occupies a compromise position in the battle between happiness in this life and the life to come. In the Republic, Socrates describes those people at peace with themselves as being in perfect balance between the three elements – desire, passion, and reason – a condition attainable in this life. However, the Phaedo indicates that true philosophers attain utmost joy only when they retract from the senses and carnal distractions. Philosophers genuinely experience their final goal – purity of wisdom – only upon fully quitting the body.[7]

· Hinduism also advocates removing ourselves from the world of pleasure. Hindu scriptures define spiritually mature people as those who abandon desires, lose their appetite for joys, and withdraw from their senses. The Bhagavad Gita depicts the ideal person as one of discipline, one who acts without worrying about the results of the action, unaffected by praise or rebuke. Actions in prior lives influence the situation of the next life and decide the degree of happiness or unhappiness between lives in the hereafter.

· The Buddha preached life as suffering. If we observe his teachings (for instance, if we practice the virtues of sympathy, compassion, joy, and equanimity) and accept the intrinsic sorrow of life, we will experience happiness in our future life.

God loves us and, as a result, desires above all else for us our happiness. Perfect, unending happiness awaits us in the life to come, plus (some traditions teach) we can experience partial happiness in the here and now. We need to behave in certain ways, however, to receive this; our happiness reflects our morality. Though it may take different forms (detachment from worldly pursuits and desires, generosity, hard work, intellectual speculation, prayer and inner contemplation, universal friendliness), the message remains the same: living virtuously in the here and now cashes out in terms of our present and future happiness.

These thoughts reflect the idea of a divinity acting like a human being. God loves as we love; God feels compassion and protectiveness toward the beloved, as we do. Further, like a responsible and anxious parent, God possesses the volition and power to make life better for us, the children. The parallel continues. We humans reward virtue and achievement. Academic excellence may merit prizes and research grants, extreme bravery may secure a medal from the President or the Queen, hard slog and commitment may earn a promotion at work. So it is with (our projected image of) God: virtues attract divine reward, vices do not.

Religions not only believe God rewards us with happiness, but also that God (like us) experiences happiness. Happiness is a property of God. Wishing something on behalf of other people suggests the ability to empathize with them, to feel and experience as they do. God wishes for our happiness so, believers reason, God must understand our situation, must share in our experience of happiness and sadness. The reality of an existence beyond our current lives, embraced by many traditions (the Christian paradise, Islam’s al-janna, the Buddhist Nirvana), reinforces this idea of divine nature. Peace, happiness, and joy become integral to spiritual descriptions of the life to come and, because God especially permeates this reality, they must also pertain to God.

Happiness and Biology

Yet most of us feel happy and satisfied with life, whether a divine being rewards us or not. From surveys of 1.1 million people from over the globe, David Myers and Ed Diener conclude that we mostly describe ourselves as ‘pretty happy’ (happiness defined as ‘subjective well-being’). Ninety-three percent of us feel happy (which includes very happy, pretty happy, and moderately happy) as opposed to sad or neutral. Happiness appears not to rely significantly on external factors such as our education and economic class. Neither does it depend on how the scientists gather their data.[8]

As reported above, religiosity enables the religious to feel a little happier than the nonreligious. But that merits little if almost all of us feel happy anyway. What room then remains for our virtuous behavior or for God to play in our happiness or for happiness to play in God?

First, from a scientific point of view, on what does happiness depend?

‘So many people plan their lives for a distant goal,’ says David Lykken. ‘They believe that if they become C.E.O. or win a gold medal, their lives will rise out of humdrum ordinariness. This is not so. There is a rush of glory and then it fades.’[9] The sting of tragedy disperses equally as fast. Christopher Reeve, Lykken adds, probably felt just as happy a few months after falling from his horse as he did before. Studies by Lykken and Auke Tellegen assess happiness over five to ten years, and show the slight impact (two percent) of age, marital status, race, and sex (though diseases like depression can override the set-point for subjective well-being over the long term), and the short-term influence of job loss or lottery winning.[10] A report by Christopher Lewis and Stephen Joseph suggests that the Depression-Happiness Scale (which psychologists use to calculate happiness) shows happiness as a trait rather than a state, with subjects’ scores remaining relatively stable over a two-year period.[11] People may feel an initial euphoria when good fortune visits them, or a sadness when tragedy strikes unexpectedly, but in time they usually revert to how they felt and saw life before fate popped in.

A person’s level of happiness remains stable over many years. Why?

‘The “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” clearly influence mood,’ says Greg Carey, ‘but long-term equilibration to life’s ups and downs is partly a function of the slings and arrows of genetic fortune.’[12] Studies show that, for each of us, our happiness fluctuates within a small range called a ‘set-point’ that our genes largely determine. Identical twins (those with the same genetic makeup) attain the same level of happiness 44 percent of the time. In comparison, fraternal twins (those who share genes as do ordinary siblings) reach the same level only eight percent of the time. Dean Hamer adds: ‘These data show that the broad heritability of [subjective] well-being is 40 to 50%....A person’s baseline levels of cheerfulness, contentment and psychological satisfaction are largely a matter of heredity.’[13] Thus, ‘how you feel right now is about equally genetic and circumstantial,’ concludes Hamer, ‘but how you will feel on average over the next ten years is fully 80% because of your genes.’[14]

Biology also helps explain the mechanisms behind happy feelings. Hamer directs our attention to two of the more than 300 known neurotransmitters, dopamine (the brain’s chemical for pleasure) and serotonin (the neurochemical with whose reduced activity misery appears). Neurotransmitters pass information from the synapse or junction between a nerve cell and another nerve cell or a muscle. The nerve cell’s bulbous end releases neurotransmitters from storage when an electrical impulse moving along the cell reaches it. Then they cross the junction to dock at the other nerve cell’s receptor – like spacecraft docking at a space station – and either prompt or inhibit the impulses along the second cell. The first nerve cell reabsorbs excess neurotransmitters, but not necessarily all of them. Those that remain free-floating, according to biology, help create our happy or miserable states of being.

Genes carry the instructions for the construction of neurotransmitters, their receptor and reabsorption portals. They also impart information on such things as their storage and release rates. Genes can hence influence the prevalence, scarcity, and activity of serotonin and dopamine, and, in turn, whatever behaviors and feelings these neurotransmitters induce. Researchers have found, for instance, that people who differ in the gene that produces part of the D4 dopamine receptor (the part that controls the amount of dopamine binding there) differ in a parallel way in their moods. Richard Davidson comments: this is ‘the first time there’s been a specific connection between a molecular genetic finding and people’s levels of happiness.’[15]

Further evidence for a physical-biochemical basis of happiness comes from neuroanatomy. Richard Lane and his colleagues’ preliminary research indicates that feelings of happiness, sadness, and disgust all co-occur with increased brain activity in the thalamus and medial prefrontal cortex. Greater activity near the ventral medial frontal cortex distinguishes happiness from sadness, while happiness correlates with significant increases in bilateral activity near the middle and posterior temporal cortex and hypothalamus. Lane concludes that ‘spatially distributed brain regions participate in each emotion.’[16] Some scientists thus think they have located the part of the brain that registers happiness and where the set-point mechanism works.

Theology versus Biology

On the surface, a clash looms between religious and scientific accounts of the nature of happiness. Religious thinkers seek to understand happiness in the future as well as in the present, while scientists concentrate firmly on the here and now. Scientists define happiness as subjective well-being, while theologians define it as spiritual or intellectual satisfaction (though, however theologians see happiness, it will still involve subjective well-being).

The clash also reaches deeper into theology. Whether achieved in this or a next life, religions usually ascribe happiness to divine action. Do sciences like behavioral genetics mean, therefore, that the genes of those whom Jesus saves predispose them toward greater happiness? Perhaps spiritual commitment and experience draw people with these genes, maybe especially when something blocks their greater happiness. Further, do those whom Jesus saves take their genes and neurotransmitters with them into the afterlife? Though these suggestions appear ridiculous, each makes a serious point. The sciences could undermine truth claims concerning religious experience in current and future lives, specifically the activity of God toward people’s happiness. Divine deeds and biological biases seem incompatible as explanations.

Some theologians try, then, to ignore or rebut claims for the genetic basis of happiness. Several paths open to them. Divine grace and will or human will, some claim, overwhelmingly figure in happiness and biology does not. They exact a special spiritual status for happiness, thereby divorcing it from the biological stuff of genes and brains. With this, they set up a dualism: on one side lies the mind with its feelings and on the other lies the brain with its neurotransmitters. The spirit and the machine. The simplicity of the dualism unacceptably requires God’s irrelevance for the natural world and God’s continual intervention into nature to create spiritual states such as those involving happiness.

Some theologians engage a God-can-change-the-genes response and thereby require another type of divine intervention. God evolves us or physically creates us individually toward divine subjective qualities. However, our current biology evolved through an inherently random process that not even God could have predicted. God could not have set up or steered evolution so that we develop some conditions (happiness, for instance) that God had previously intended.

Similarly, gene studies indicate that we ought not to hope for happiness in an afterlife since happiness is a mental state depending on the presence of such biological things as neurotransmitters, and these disintegrate with our bodies. Metaphorical reinterpretations of happiness lose touch with reality as subjective well-being depends so much on biology. A nonphysical form of happiness generates as little sense as a nonphysical digestive tract; a Platonic realm of subjective qualities such as happiness independent of the physical cannot exist.

Religious believers also bash science by trying to undermine the genetic research. Several claims for the genetic basis of various behaviors run into trouble because follow-up studies do not replicate the original research. For example, one claim (the connection between a condition of the gene D4DR and an adventurous, excitable personality) failed to find support. Sharon Begley refers to four such claims, and the other two she mentions (Hamer’s one on happiness and a then unpublished one on neuroticism) await their follow-ups.[17] The reader might conclude from her reporting that genetic-basis research carries a poor track record and merits skepticism. The failure of researchers to replicate a particular study does sound against it, and one should approach with caution those studies for which follow-up support has yet to appear. Yet Begley fails to mention other gene-behavior studies, most of which have not met their Waterloo. Researchers have linked a specific gene to an aspect of thought, for instance: the deletion of the chromosome 7 gene, called LIM-Kinase 1, which disrupts a person’s ability to visualize and mentally manipulate parts of objects. It is incorrect that genetic research into behavior carries such a poor track record that its scientific results merit skepticism.

Begley also refers to an often-raised suspicion of twin studies, which some of the happiness research draws on. Identical twins frequently dress alike and create a private world for just the two of them. People treat them alike too. Fraternal twins, on the other hand, typically behave no more alike than do other siblings. Identicals thus share more influences from their environment, according to Marcus Feldman, which in turn means their happiness levels should show a greater similarity.[18] This criticism of the genetic explanation overlooks a technique employed in twin studies, including the ones on happiness: researchers not only look at identical twins reared together, but also at those separated at birth and reared apart. The environments of the subjects in these split-twin studies would differ. However, the results of such investigations, at least those concerning subjective well-being, reinforce the ones conducted with non-split identical twins. Both types of study suggest the influence of genes.

Most of the other objections Begley reports are either incorrect, or trivial. For instance:

· The claim that one gene generates a trait (researchers now stress that traits arise from configurations of many genes).

· Fraud in one instance (which does not mean all of them are fraudulent).

· Behavioral geneticists do their statistics incorrectly (a reaction that unnecessarily questions the use of statistics in many sciences; scientists should do their statistics correctly, of course, for their work to be considered valid).

Grant Steen reports several other skeptical but trivial reactions to split-twin studies. For instance, he feels suspicious of statistics derived from one sample of the population (say from white male twins) being applied to another (say female non-twins or black males).[19] A comparison of results from different population groupings deflates this objection.

Lawrence Wright throws further doubt on twin studies. His book, Twins: Genes, Environment, and the Mystery of Human Identity, recounts the puzzling case of a pair of identical twins, one healthy, the other with a fatal version of the genetic disorder, muscular dystrophy. John Burn, the doctor examining the case, concluded: ‘Even though [the twins] share the same genes, a genetic trait doesn’t have to be shared.’[20] In the case of happiness, however, evidence from studies of individuals as well as twins support the existence of a genetic set point. Also, muscular dystrophy is a disease involving unequal distribution of faulty genes, whereas happiness is a normal trait of healthy human beings; no useful parallel between the genes for muscular dystrophy and happiness obviously emerges.

Scientists used to assume that identical twins were born in the same gestational sac and non-identicals in different sacs. Wright points out that DNA testing has proved this reasoning faulty; roughly one third of identical twins are born from separate placentas, and occasionally placentas belonging to fraternals merge. ‘Many same-sex twins who believe that they are fraternal,’ he concludes, ‘may actually be identical, and vice versa.’[21] This observation does not sound against the twin studies on happiness, however. The bulk of the confusion Wright would point to concerns identicals who are really fraternals. Those fraternals mistakenly placed in the identical pool will decrease the degree to which identicals apparently attain the same level of happiness. Statistics for identicals attaining the same happiness levels are already high (44 percent as opposed to 8 percent for fraternals); if some of these identicals are really fraternal, the statistics for the individuals should rise above the 44 percent. Ideally, the old results need comparing with those employing the new criteria for distinguishing types of twin-hood, but at the moment it looks as if even more support for the heritability of happiness would spring from the confusion.

Other critics say behavioral geneticists like Hamer try to reduce the holistic human experience of happiness to nothing but the actions of genes, electrical activity, and chemicals. Walter Freeman, for example, says, ‘Joy comes with activities that we share with people we have learned to trust, and that enable us to share meaning across the existential barrier that separates each of us from all others. So happiness is not made by a chemical.’[22] Writes Mark Epstein: ‘True happiness is the ability to receive pleasure without grasping and displeasure without condemning, confident in the knowledge that pain and disappointment can be tolerated.’[23] ‘It’s worse to wake up in the morning without having a larger purpose in life,’ says Carol Ryff, ‘than to wake up unhappy. Just feeling good is a poor measure of the quality of a person’s life.’[24]

Such critics cry reductionism and mechanism, and claim geneticists and their popularizers ignore the real subjective realm; behavioral genetics oversimplifies the reality and misses the sacred, spiritual nature of human happiness. Yet Hamer’s and his colleagues’ work suggests genes provide only 80 percent of input into behavior: what about the other 20 percent? And a person can still move up and down the 80 percent range of her or his personal set point. ‘Though genes may determine our average set point for happiness,’ Hamer writes, ‘they don’t specify where we are within our individual range at any particular point in time.’[25] Our minds, our moods, and our environments can all play a role; we and our circumstances can affect how we feel here and now. All human traits involve environment and individual willfulness, as well as genes. ‘Temperament is what you are born with,’ Hamer says. ‘Character is what you’ve learned.’[26] We arrive in this world with our genes intact, but we make of them what we will. As our genes represent a point in the process of evolution, so we carry on that process by living and learning in the world, together with our genes. Plenty of room exists for spiritual, as well as scientific approaches to happiness.

Neither ought theologians play a wait-and-see game: they should not defer seriously approaching genetic studies on happiness until someone else adequately answers all possible criticisms. While later research may modify the results of the science, the bulk and tone of the work will probably remain. More and more evidence will probably mount to show a genetic basis (along with an environmental one) for such traits as happiness. Research may even unravel before too long the complex of genes that produce the inclination toward, and the mechanisms for creating the feelings of happiness. Happiness builds on a genetic and biochemical base, and theology must incorporate this fact.

Conclusions

The problem is more serious than an academic exercise. The human genome project and its offspring studies will (and do) connect such subjective states as happiness – as well as behaviors, physical traits, and diseases – with particular clusters of genes. What will guide society and entrepreneurs in their use of this knowledge? What constitutes misuse of this information? Current genetic engineering of plants and animals presents a challenge only in its infancy.

Apart from an occasional glance through its ethics spectacles, religion ignores this science. The finer details of the science as it develops may change, but the challenge to theology and ethics will remain and grow. The demand digs deeply into theological thought. Theologians, religionists, ethicists, and philosophers could constructively engage the findings and their implications for theology. They do not. Rather, theologians continue to deny the potential of behavioral genetics with more science bashing, continued ignoring of solid results, and segregation of subjective qualities like happiness from the physical world of genes and neurochemistry.

Theologians will hopefully also resist the temptation of the other extreme, namely to wipe happiness off their understanding of God’s agenda. Of all things, subjective well-being lures as the most common goal toward which we strive.

What is left, however, for theologians to ruminate about over God and happiness? A social action component offers itself. Suppose theologians believe in the example and teachings of Jesus Christ and the witness of the Hebraic tradition. Then they could think God produced the universe and us (the method for which science, including behavioral genetics, describes) and that God wants us to strive to maximize the happiness of other people. This will re-emphasize the need to remove the barriers to justice and equality that some people experience, because such conditions depress a person’s level of happiness. It will also mean encouraging people to change their behaviors from short-term sources of happiness (excessive TV or rich food, for instance, or even greater slayers such as addiction to tobacco, hard drugs, or alcohol) that lead in the long run to less happiness.

Perhaps theologians might also look again at the nature of God, and at God’s relationship with the universe and with us as part of creation. To take the scientific information about genes and behavior seriously means revisiting the human images people project onto God. The genetic and neurotransmitter basis of happiness suggest God feels neither happiness nor sadness. On the other hand, it empties meaning out of life to surrender all hope of images and opt for the extreme of saying nothing about God or the spiritual nature of life. Theologians ought not to give up the ghost. So, what anthropomorphic images are adequate? Theologians hold the potential of developing a more adequate understanding of God.[27]