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Pain-Brain Theory Explains the Biology of Faith-Hope-Love
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International Journal of Existential Positive Psychology
2023, Vol. 12, No. 1
© 2023 International Network on Personal Meaning
meaning.ca/journal
Pain-Brain Theory Explains the Biology of Faith-Hope-Love
C. A. Soper, Ph.D.1
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Independent Scholar
Abstract
As an addendum to Wong’s (2023) proposal (“Spiritual-Existential Wellbeing (SEW): The
Faith-Hope-Love Model of Mental Health & Total Wellbeing”), I offer an ultimate and
proximate biological explanation of faith-hope-love, stemming from the pain-brain theory
of suicide. Across human evolutionary history, people who hoped for and believed in a
kind world and who put that faith into practice in kindly actions were better able to endure
suffering. Less prone to suicide and enjoying better mental health, their offspring inherited
a powerful reproductive advantage.
This commentary offers an evolutionary perspective on Wong’s (2023) editorial
(“Spiritual-Existential Wellbeing (SEW): The Faith-Hope-Love Model of Mental Health & Total
Wellbeing”). I applaud Wong’s objective of moving beyond a biomedical view of mental health
and developing a more holistic understanding of healing and wellbeing. However, I have
reservations regarding Wong’s idiographic presentation: although accessible to readers who share
Wong’s theism, it risks alienating sceptics. The challenge is to advance an argument that people
with other viewpoints can appreciate, especially the “scientifically minded” (p. 5) and those of a
non-theistic or no religion. They need a framework that is precise, in-principle testable, and
generalisable.
From first principles of evolutionary biology, the “pain-brain” theory offers a nomothetic
path to Wong’s conclusion (Soper, 2018, 2019, 2021). The following 4 points provide a scientific
substrate to the intuitive truth that Wong highlights: “now abide faith, hope, and love... But the
greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). The argument also provides an alternative to
prevailing evolutionary accounts of human generosity that lean on reciprocity, game theory and
suchlike economic exchanges or on group selection (e.g., Bowles & Gintis, 2011), approaches that
are problematic for reasons discussed elsewhere (Pinker, 2012; Soper, 2021).
Below, fitness carries its biological meaning, referring to individuals’ ability to pass their
genes to subsequent generations (Singh & Rajender, 2020).
The Root Problem: How to Reconcile Suffering with the Capacity for Suicide
For any sufficiently sapient animal, suicide—“intentional self-inflicted death” (Farias &
Plutarco, 2019, p. 1)—constitutes a severe and recurrent fitness problem because it is an
outstandingly effective, but genetically disastrous, solution to pain. Pain is an inevitable feature of
animal life; every motile organism needs some aversive internal signal with which to navigate its
physical and social environment. Pain is precisely designed to motivate evasive action to relieve
or escape the painful experience. As nothing hurts less than being dead, any animal with enough
brainpower to cognise self-extinction as an exit from pain will expectably take it—unless some
protective device blocks that path. Hence, humans have a “pain-and-brain” fitness problem.
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Human existence is evidence that the problem was largely solved. Over an evolutionary
timescale, by the process of blind variation and selective retention (Bickhard & Campbell, 2003),
we acquired psychological machinery that nearly always stops people in pain from killing
themselves, despite having the intellectual means to do so. Cognitively capable humans who were
willing to endure suffering gained a powerful fitness advantage over those who were not: they
were less suicidal, and less susceptible to the costly interventions of emergency anti-suicide
psychopathologies (Soper, 2018). Across our species’ evolutionary history, the offspring of the
less suicidal were more likely to succeed.
The Future is Worth Suffering for
Faith-hope-love is an integral, front-line, component of this suicide-prevention machinery.
A human organism’s willingness to live with pain depends on maintenance of hope (“Expectation
of something desired”; Oxford English Dictionary, 2022b). We hope the world will be kind—that
it will deliver rewards worth suffering for. This “promise of salvation” (Riesebrodt, 2007/2010),
is not open to inductive proof. It must be based on faith (“Firm trust or belief in or reliance upon
something”; Oxford English Dictionary, 2022a). The specifics of such faith are guided by cultural
inputs, although, given the universality and extreme gravity of suicide as a fitness hazard, humans
may well inherit a generalised tendency to adopt optimistic assumptive frameworks (Soper, 2021).
My Loving World Begins with Me
I assume the world is kind, but how can I tell if this assumption is realistic and not just
wishful thinking? The only incontrovertible first-hand evidence available is me: my own thoughts
and actions. I am regular human being; and, in order to operate successfully in the world, I have
to perceive myself as such. I am geared up to feel and think much like everyone else because the
human mind likely evolved as a simulation sandbox—a tool for reading others’ minds and
anticipating how they will respond (Humphrey, 1976). Like those others, I am part of the world
and one of its agents. Thus, regarding the epistemic validity of my faith in the world’s kindliness,
I am my own test case.
By this light, with the potential for suicide on the scene, the maxim “faith without works
is dead” (James 2:21) holds stark biological meaning. My subjective wellbeing and hence my
enthusiasm for life are contingent on my performing faith-affirming acts of love—defined as the
giving of oneself for another’s benefit (Underwood, 2009). I am motivated to follow the Golden
Rule: to love others as I hope they would love me, to an important extent independently of how
they actually behave.
This argument contradicts an assumption that is currently widespread in evolutionary
science: that altruistic morality, or the display of such morality, is mere social manipulation
(Boehm, 2012). It suggests instead that unconditional love, no-strings giving, is the outer
expression of an inner worldview. Human generosity may be reciprocated but is not contingent on
reciprocity. Love’s reward lies not in extrinsic paybacks but in the intrinsic “warm glow” (Elster,
2011) or “helper’s high” (Dossey, 2018) experienced from putting faith in human nature into
action. Although love has a pro-social effect, and a virtuous spiral may be involved, pro-sociality
may be a fortuitous by-product of love, not its function.
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We Love as Best we Can
There is a limit to our capacity for love. Unconditional giving is costly, and the organism
has other calls on resources. But within a trade-off of opposing fitness costs, the more we love,
then the more pain we can voluntarily bear, and the stronger our subjective sense that life is worth
living (Soper, 2021). We love as best we can, proximately because it feels good and ultimately
because doing so obtained an ancestral survival and reproductive advantage.
Hence, faith, hope, and love abide as biological features of our species, and the spiritual
axiom that “the greatest of these is love” has scientific substance. Our mental health, even survival,
require us to perceive ourselves as more than egoistic Darwin machines—and to behave
accordingly. By acting out our belief in goodliness, or godliness, that belief is made real in the
good deeds we see enacted around us by ourselves and others.
Human altruism can thus be explained without recourse to game-theoretical or groupselection arguments. And the marvel of love in the world—everyday acts of selfless service,
compassion, and forgiveness, which many people understandably construe as a supernatural state
of affairs—can be explained without invoking a supernatural force. That said, if “God” were read
as an anthropomorphised folk-psychological proxy for our evolutionary maker and protector, and
if only to side-step the unpalatable centrality of suicide in the above account, even evolutionists
might appreciate the possible utility (certainly, popularity) of a heuristic “God is love” (1 John
4:7). The pain-brain evolutionary explanation of, and prescription for, human thriving appears
compatible with Wong’s conception of spiritual-existential wellbeing and offers a workable model
for scientifically-inclined readers of any religious tradition, and none.
Acknowledgment
My thanks to Todd Shackelford for helpful comments on a draft of this commentary.
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