SPEAKER: Nell Whiteway

(Faraday Institute, Cambridge)

Monday 21^st July 19:30 – 20:45

The Meeting Place, Holy Trinity Church

Trinity Street, Norwich. NR2 2BJ

Is there a genetic predisposition to religious belief? The concept of a ‘God gene’ was popularised by American geneticist Dean Hamer, in his 2004 book “The God Gene: How Faith is Hard-wired into our Genes”. The major arguments of the hypothesis are that spirituality can be quantified by psychometric measurements, and that the variability we see in individuals’ underlying tendency to spirituality is sometimes controlled by particular genes. Studies with twins have also suggested that genetics may have a significant role to play in how spiritual we are.

In this talk, Nell discusses the scientific and social factors behind the concept of the ‘God gene’, and critically reviews recent work on the genetics of religiosity and spirituality. Proponents of the ‘God gene’ have suggested that people can be born as either ‘believers’ or ‘atheists’. If your genes pre-dispose you to be non-spiritual and you grow up in a secularised Western nation with atheistic parents, your chances of believing in any God or performing any form of religious observance might be pretty low. This is a problem if we think that God demands specific forms of religiousness as a pre-requisite to salvation but Nell argues that, at least in the Christian tradition, God asks for no pre-conditions. Grace is freely given to all. Any genetic or environmental influence that seems to push in the direction of unbelief should therefore be seen as a challenge, not as a condemnation. There is nothing in the science of religious belief to suggest that universal grace cannot be recognised and received by everyone.

Nell Whiteway graduated from Cambridge in 2009 with a degree in Natural Sciences, specialising in Genetics. For the last three years she has been working on a project with Denis Alexander at The Faraday Institute on ‘Genes, Determinism and God’. This project investigates genetic determinism (i.e. the relationship between individual genomic variation and behaviour) in animals and humans, and explores how developmental models break down the dichotomy between nature and nurture. The project asks whether genetic variation is relevant to human concepts of free-will and moral responsibility, and the role of such variation in the Judaeo-Christian notion of humankind being made in the image of God.

Contact: Prof Nick Brewin, Secretary, Science Faith Norfolk. T: 07901 884114 Email: sfnorfolk1@gmail.com