LONAVALA, India (UCAN) – Good health is linked to faith in God, says an Indian physician who has studied the role of religion in medicine.
Religious involvement and doing good for others can help maintain one’s physical and mental health, S. Chattopadhyay told a recent Church-organized science seminar.
Chattopadhyay researched the relevance of religion and spirituality in medicine and bioethics for his master of bioethics program. He holds a doctorate from the University of Connecticut, in the United States, and presently teaches physiology at the Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences in Bhubaneswar, in Orissa state, eastern India.
Neuroscientific Revolution, the Human Soul and Spirituality was the theme of the Jan. 1-5 seminar in Lonavala, near Mumbai, 1,410 kilometers southwest of New Delhi. About 200 people, including university professors, researchers and activists from India and abroad, attended the event.
The Indian Institute of Science and Religion (IISR), which Jesuit Father Job Kozhamthadam started 10 years ago, organized the seminar in collaboration with three colleges, a major seminary and a university, all in Maharashtra state. Mumbai is the capital of Maharashtra state.
In his presentation, Chattopadhyay spoke on Neuroscience and spirituality: beyond outright rejection and blind acceptance.
He said the human person cannot be reduced “to super-conscious matter” as asserted by some neuroscientists. Human beings are “not hard-wired for belief in God, but deep down, human beings hunger for God,” he said.
He also asserted that faith in God is beyond the intellect and is not something that can be measured. “But it triggers love, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, brotherhood and such eternal values among faith people.”
Faith in God, he said, has played a great role in healing some of the worst diseases suffered by people, such as cancer, and this has surprised doctors. “Also, studies have shown that religious people live healthier lives, and are generally happier.”
He noted that the World Health Organization had accepted spirituality as an important aspect of people’s quality of life.
The use of scientific tools to explore religious and spiritual phenomena and the knowledge thus acquired have evoked myriad responses, ranging from outright rejection to blind acceptance, he said.
“Much of modern biomedical research, including neuroscience, reflects reductionism theory, an approach to understand a system by reducing it to component parts.”
He said spectacular advances have been made using the reductionist scientific approach. However, such an approach cannot fully explain religious experiences, such as spiritual enlightenment achieved by spiritual leaders.
Such experiences, he added, cannot be researched and quantified on the psychological basis of the neuronal functions of the brain.