these portrayals are rooted in the different aspects of human connections, and each is grounded in a social context. Social connection can be intimate, relational, or collective. For the member of the Vineyard Church, connection with God is an intimate two-way relationship, while in Jonathan Edwards’s sermon in the Great Awakening, the connection is relational and involves the coherence (or lack of it) of the individual with God’s approval. And the Christian theological view of connection as a higher order can be conceived in terms of one’s belonging within a whole that God’s constancy makes larger than oneself.
While religion certainly speaks to individual connection to others and to the divine, religious practices can also serve an evolutionary and social function by strengthening the human capacity for attending to the personhood of those who are sick and diminished. The objectivity of medical science all too often leads to an objectification of the patient or, more frequently, the patient’s disease. The social brain’s capacity to see others as minds rather than objects makes it possible to assign meaning to patients and the ways in which they lack wholeness.
Crescat scientia; vita excolatur
The possibility that religion and science can enrich one other, even as one sets aside truth claims about such matters as the existence of a deity, is by no means obvious. But we have come to see that science can describe what religion does in rigorous ways that benefit religion, and religion can serve a meaning-making function that science itself disclaims. Gilpin notes that rifts between science and religion “have centered on whether one can make scientific sense of the notion of divine
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mind, purpose, or intention.” Our network sidestepped this question from the beginning, focusing instead on related matters such as the consequences of believing in such a mind, and of seeing into that mind, for the one doing the divining.
Those are questions amenable to empirical investigation, and it is at that juncture that we can see benefit from our discussions. As Berntson says, “beliefs color the way we perceive the world, they direct and shape our actions, and define our personalities.” Studying and debating about how they do so has been gratifying and immensely enjoyable. We have engaged in no theological debate, but have focused on questions about human beings, their beliefs, their behaviors, and how those things affect and are affected by multiple levels of human connection.
How we conceptualize our relationships to persons and things outside our selves has implications for our health and well-being. Specifically, we have seen that viewing our relationships in terms of meaningful connections with other minds can have positive implications for individual — as well as social — health and function. The more that we can learn about those implications, the more our increase in knowledge has the potential to enrich human life.
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