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Religion Gene?

John 3: 13–21

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 17 Sep, 2006

“I’M NOT religious!” You’ve heard it. It means, “There’s something odd about you, but not about me. You have a mutation, you were mistreated as a child, but I am OK.” But is it true?

Some researchers support the idea. There is no place on earth where there is no religion, from Animism to Christianity to Hinduism to Zoroastrianism. Humans are incorrigibly religious. Why is it so?

People from all kinds of religious backgrounds describe almost identical religious experiences. They talk of a sense of being in the presence of God. They talk about feeling free of worldly concerns. They talk about a sense of unity with others.

Other experiments show that some drugs cause people to have similar experiences. So can direct electric stimulation of the brain. Scientists can even measure and detect the extent of a person’s religious experience.

Although they haven’t identified that gene, the evidence seems clear. We have an in–built biological drive to religious experience.

Dr Robert Winston, an English Peer and a TV presenter as well as a leading medical scientist, says that spirituality and belief in God may be the result of evolution. The London Times Newspaper reported:

The Labour peer stepped out of line with mainstream scientific thinking to suggest that religiosity may have a genetic basis. He argued that, in life or death situations, belief can be the key to survival and for this reason has become programmed into human genes. “I take the view, which is quite controversial among scientists, that religious values are worthwhile,” Lord Winston said...

“There may be a selective reason why we have become religious. Evolutionary pressure may have meant it was an advantage to us. My premise is that man was a deeply threatened species from the savannah. I think that having a feeling there’s something above you may have been a powerful help to survival.”

The belief in some form of spirituality led, in time, to the development of organised religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam, he said.

(Times Online, Oct 11, 2005, Dr Robert Winston)

He may have a point.

We don’t need to disagree with science, just because it doesn’t fit our preconceptions. It can point to truths we had never considered.

No one has a monopoly on truth, neither Scientists nor Christians.

Let’s hear part of our passage again. It says,

John 3:13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven — the Son of Man. ¹⁴ Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, ¹⁵ that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

^3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. ¹⁸ Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

Dr Francis Schaeffer insisted that Christian faith was propositional. What that means is that Christianity is not about feelings or impressions, it is not about some seventh sense, a religious sense that some people have and some don’t. Christianity is about response to basic propositions, to basic statements about the nature of reality.

I am happy that we might have a religious gene, because that has nothing at all to do with being a Christian.

You might not have a religious gene in your body, but you can still know Jesus.

When I was born, my mother asked my father to get a bag of my baby clothes which was sitting on top of his tool box.

When he came in, my father brought the baby bag and the tool box. Had he gone mad?

It turned out that he had no ability to visualise. He could not picture in his head the things he needed to remember. Obviously, the information was in there, because he was quite artistic. But he could not just imagine them. When he had a head scan in his 70s, they found an old scar in the area of his brain which handles visualisation, probably from when he was born.

Even if there is a gene which codes for religious experiences, some people might have lost that ability in just the same way that my father had lost the ability to visualise.

Does this stop them from being Christians?

When I heard the message of Jesus and began responding to it, I clearly pictured the world and God's love reaching out to the world through Christ. It all made sense to me.

But I did not respond to that visual understanding. There was something else.

Christianity is not about feelings. It is not about visions. It is not about imagining what the gospel message means. And that is precisely where the world has gone wrong. It has abandoned the truth of the gospel, and has believed a lie — the lie that Christianity is about religious experiences.

Of course there are often experiences associated with Christianity.

When John Wesley and his friends met for prayer one New Year’s eve, they came to that breakthrough when they felt the close presence of the Lord, and were overwhelmed with a sense of his goodness and love.

Jonathan Edwards, a leader of the religious awakening in New England, told of people laughing, running, falling down and weeping. His wife fainted and fell face-forward into her soup as she heard a visiting preacher talk about the glories of heaven.

Yes, people do have religious experiences. And the fact that we do may be in our genes.

But some religion is evil, some religion has destructive results. The same gene; different outlooks, and different outcomes.

People also have religious experiences like happened to old Miss Morris who was a member of this church and died soon after I started here.

She woke up at around 2 am one day with an overwhelming sense that she should pray for the pastor.

She prayed until daybreak, and then had a sense that she didn’t need to pray any more. She fell alseep.

A day or two later, she learnt that the pastor, who was away on holidays, had been taken seriously ill around that time of day, and had been in a critical condition until around daybreak, when the hospital was finally convinced that the illness was under control.

It's a bit hard to explain that as something genetic! Is this religious gene able to pop out for a walk while you don't need it around? Can it detect events in Port Macquarie and report them back to Marrickville?

That woman I mentioned last week who prayed for me in my struggle to yield to the Lord’s call on my life — did genes tell her that that was the kind of prayer I needed?

Genes are only a small part of the picture.

As I said, Christianity is not about feelings, or visions or an ability to imagine what the gospel message means.

Christianity is about response to certain basic propositions, certain basic statements about the nature of reality.

That is why evangelists through the ages have turned to John 3:16, which declares this set of propositions:

God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but should have eternal life.

Let’s look at that in detail;:

What are the propositions, what are the basic assertions of this verse?

God loved the world

God gave his Son

God rescues the perishing

God gves eternal life

Those are pretty simple and straightforward.

You don’t have to feel a certain way to respond to any of them. The Bible asks us to hear and to decide. Do we accept or do we reject what it says?

The first assumption is God himself. God exists or he doesn’t exist.

No one can really prove it one way or another — not scientific proof. If an atheist says you are like a madman who irrationally believes that Martians are following him, you can tell the atheist that his viewpoint is equally irrational. He can’t disprove God any more than you can prove God.

But consider this: there’s a lot of evidence for God beyond reasonable doubt, and all the atheist has is doubt. How reasonable is that?

Some philosophical arguments suggest that there may be a God. But the testimony of people down through the ages is that there is a God; and so many people have been convinced that hopeless situations have been turned around after prayer, that you have to take some notice.

Is there a God? Weighing up the evidence, most people would say so.

But what is this God like? Is he is authoritarian, angry at earthly sin, ready to punbish through earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fires?

Or is he benevolent, setting absolute standards, but aware of our weaknesses and forgiving of our sins?

Some people think he is critical, that he is angry and intolerant of sin, but not likely to punish it directly. Or is he a distant God, who set the universe going, but hasn’t visited it for a long time?

Baylor University in the US has done research on people’s views of God, and say that nearly everyone, even an atheist, has one or the other of those viewpoints, and that you can tell more about a person's likely behaviour from their theology than from anything else.

Well, the Bible tells us what God is like. It says that he loves — that he has always loved — and that he gives. He gave his one and only Son for us.

That fits pretty well with the benevolent view of God. That does not mean that God will never intervene. A just God has to judge.

But he is not unable to sympathise with our weaknesses. We can confidently approach the throne of grace, and receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

The second proposition is that our God is a God who gives. If he loves with a love that encompasses the entire world, he expresses that love with a gift sufficient for the entire world.

A rich man might give you five cents and you could say that he gave to you out of his great riches.

But God is a God who gives according to his great riches in Christ Jesus. When he gives, he gives proportionately. He gives a good percentage. He gives himself.

Jesus is so much part of God that there is no greater gift that God could give. It is not that an all–powerful God sacrifices a weak human, but it is the all–powerful God becoming a weak human in order to sacrifice himself.

You can either accept those assertions or reject them. You can say that Jesus as he is revealed in the Bible is the kind of person who fits that description, or you can say he is not. That is a reasoning, not genetics.

The author, C. S. Lewis, said that, if you look at what Jesus claimed about himself, he has to be either mad or bad, or else he truly is God. He is either deluded about himself, he is trying to deceive other people, or he is exactly who he says he is, doing what he said he would do for the salvation of human beings. And Lewis went on to say that a man who did the good that Jesus did is neither mad nor bad.

But you must decide.

There is another set of propositions in the verse.

A clear set of options open before us. There are two ways. We are either bound to perish, or we receive eternal life.

The Greek words are appolumai, to perish, and aionios zoe — eternal life.

The Greek appolumai means to become unsuitable for your original purpose. You have probably seen something made of rubber which has become sticky and cracked, and can’t work any more. It has perished.

In Greek, if you had a pot and the inside had become badly cracked so that you could not wash it anymore, it would have perished.

Although things perish bit by bit, although there is a process of perishing, the Greek word focuses on the end result.

John 3:16 says that those who do not believe in the Son whom God sent will eventually perish. It will happen sooner or later, and all who perish are not useful as human beings any more. Our ability to respond to God is lost, our availability to our fellow humans is damaged beyond repair.

The underlying idea is that we are all subject to sin, and sin is essentially self–centredness. It is radical self–interest. And that blocks us off from God and from other humans. Choose that path and you end up useless.

It is up to you whether you accept or reject that proposition, or whether it is important to you anyway. Perhaps you have decided that it is more important to look after your own interests than to respond to God or your fellow humans. But the Biblical proposition is that God wants to rescue every single human being from such a sterile, useless future.

On the other hand, those who do trust in Jesus, according to the propositions of John 3:16, have eternal life and they have it immediately.

Some of our fellow believers are too shy to put the facts that bluntly. I've seen good Catholic and even Anglican Christians who flinch when you point out that the word, have, in this verse, is in the present tense. It’s not, "will have", and it’s not “had”. It is a very definite “have”.

Eternal life — aionios zoe. It means, “the kind of life you live in God’s kingdom”. The proposition is that trust in Jesus gets it for you.

For John, trust is something you do. He always uses verbs about believing, because it is a doing word. If we believe, if we trust, we act as people who believe and trust.

You don’t need a special gene to accept these propositions. They are either true or they are not. You accept them, or you walk away and build your life on some other basis. The choice is yours.

Once you decide, there may be emotions. There may be experiences. There may be a sense of God’s presence. If there is, then thank God that you have them. If not, thank him that you didn’t need them.

Is there a religion gene, a God gene, as some are saying? I think it is very likely.

I just don’t think it is all that important.

The choice is in your hands: what do you choose today?

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© Peter R. Green 2006. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)