Neurotheology: challenges and opportunities

2025

Understanding religious experience requires navigating between deeply personal, often ineffable events and the objective frameworks of scientific inquiry. This lecture explores how neuroscience approaches religious experiences, what counts as “religious” from interdisciplinary perspectives, and how these experiences are operationalized in empirical studies. Special attention will be given to the tensions between subjective experiences and measurable brain activity, along with philosophical and theological reflections that help contextualize scientific findings. By critically examining current research, the lecture offers new directions for bridging

Neuroscience of religion is the attempt to describe and explain religious thought and behavior at the level of the brain. Unlike Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), which mainly seeks to model the cognitive mechanisms involved in religious thought and behavior, and Evolutionary Psychology of Religion (EPR), which attempts to uncover the selection pressures that may have led to those mechanisms (see chapter XX), Neuroscience of Religion aims to identify the neurobiological substrates of such mechanisms.

In Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, the title refers to a category-theoretical approach to theology that attempts cross-modal alignments of spiritual thought in order to root out structural and metaphysical similarities. Also extensively outlined by Joseph Campbell in his cycle of works known as the Monomyth, this comparison-process has even been taken as a mode of spirituality in itself, leading to many variations including such esoteric philosophies as gnosticism or theosophy that are themselves merely elaborations of these processes of syncretism. These works of comparative religion map an organization of many disparate spiritual threads that when linked to a historical account of each tradition's formation, schisms, and evolutions expose a remarkable set of commonalities. While researching methods of fine-tuning this approach I was struck particularly by the fact that these commonalities roughly outlined the set of practices often termed mysticism. An underground of highly idiosyncratic revolts against the individual practitioner's culture and ideology, mysticism universalizes a rebellion of nature and knowledge against authority, privilege, and dogma – this thread seems to spontaneously emerge anywhere cultural repression and stagnation is found and exhibits extreme similarities regardless of the conceptual, spatial, or temporal distance between origins and practitioners. In this talk I hope to present an opening case for mysticism to be naturalized as not an ideology or subset thereof, but rather an unorganised umbrella term for a set of experimental methods of which a major function seems to be to inject noise into certain types of networks and models to systematically test for stability and recalibrate relationships toward and among them. These types include, at least, social and neural networks; the self-and world-models. In order to place mysticism in an empirical light, consideration of a neuroscientifically-sound infrastructure is imperative. Not only is it necessary to examine the cognitive substrate, but even when all we ever speak of is hallucination or belief, we can with ease re-frame the entirety of the work in terms of common hallucination, common neural effects, common patterns of neural activation. Whether or not the sum total of the field known as mysticism is entirely a fiction produced by the brain in psychosis in fact matters little in a study of why and how the brain would or could produce the phantasmic displays that are the hallmark of the mystical experience and what that means for thought as a tool, while this adjustment of depth has also drawn the metafictional eyes of such creators as Borges and Bill Burroughs, Jim Jarmusch and James Joyce toward this intersection of theology and neuroscience as the ability and motives for parsing the real from the virtual; and intentionally riding, obscuring, or breaking that boundary in a creative or imaginative action become recurrent themes.

HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 2002

that the phenomenon of religion and religious experience are more than mere brain functions. The place of religion and the continued importance of religion and religious experience are confirmed. The metaphysical mind in its physical environment 1012 HTS 58(3) 2002 cluster of disciplines dealing with mental functioning: motor control, perception, recognition, language, memory and reasoning. 2 One branch of cognitive science deals with computer modelling of mental processes (Murphy 1998:14). Other important fields of study include behavioural neuroscience which tries to understand the neurobiological substrates of behaviour while cognitive psychology deals, among other things, with human learning and memory. Arbib (1999:81) distinguishes brain talk, mind talk and spirit talk. Brain talk speaks of lesion data, anatomy, neurophysiology and neurochemistry. Mind talk speaks of intention, action, perception, consciousness, and responsibility. Together they are regarded as neuroscience embedded within cognitive science. Spirit talk is construed as mind talk or God talk, or as something that regards our identity as being rooted in our relation with God. Although these approaches can be distinguished, they cannot be separated. Mind-brain sciences must take the whole person in its environment and different contexts into account to avoid reductionism. This seems to be an unattainable task. Such is the nature of complex systems, and the human person embodies ultimate biological complexity. 3 However, neuroscientific models for religious experience abound and challenge theologians to respond. HTS 58(3) 2002

2021

This is the first and academic form of the book, In God's Image: Neuroscience and Theology, giving its footnotes. Another version in hypertext for the Web, is being prepared in .html. I have already uploaded the version in William Morris type as a mockup for a limited edition book.Tonight we will discuss this multiform work about the bicameral mind, recording it in .mp4.

I survey both the methods and topics of current research in Religion and Neuroscience and also critique pervasive but often veiled Christian presuppositions driving the research agendas and interpretations.

Macmillan, 2016

Scientific and religious communities have long been at odds over scientific attempts to explain religious experience. Since the beginning of the modern era, a number of scientists interested in religion and spirituality have sought a rigorous understanding of how these types of experiences manifest themselves in the brain and in human behavior. According to this view, our deepest beliefs and most elevating experiences can be understood in scientific terms-in particular, in terms of neuroscience studying "brain anatomy, brain function, and brain chemistry" (Tiger and McGuire 2010, 113). Yet others doubt that science has a legitimate role in exploring the nature of religion or spirituality. From their perspective, scientists should not attempt to explain the ineffable at all, and they regard such efforts as a challenge to the values and experiences that they consider most personal and sacred. Aldous Huxley, one of the most prophetic science fiction authors of his generation, wrote in 1958, "That men and women can, by physical and chemical means, transcend themselves in a genuinely spiritual way… seems rather shocking. But, after all, the drug or the physical exercise is not the cause of the spiritual experience; it is only its occasion." As a seasoned explorer of the boundary between chemistry and spirituality, Huxley believed that the "chemical means" of spiritual experience do not invalidate the psychological value of the state itself. In that case, efforts to better understand those means is especially important for the scientific study of those experiences. It should be possible to undertake a scientific approach to religious and spiritual experience without reducing those experiences strictly to chemical reactions. And even if such reductionism were possible, other disciplines would likely still provide a valuable grammar for describing and understanding various aspects of religion and spirituality. At the same time, any social, cultural, or personal conception of the divine or of a higher power 277 COPYRIGHT 2017 Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning WCN 02-200-210

The Neurology of religious experience, 2006

Studia Humana

Considering that the brain is involved in human thinking, feeling and behaviour, we must also ask the question of whether finding neural correlates of religious experience is not just a matter of time. The questions ‘if’ and ‘how’ human brain responds to or generates religious experience capture the interest of researchers from various fields of science. Their joint efforts and scientific discourse lead to implementation of bold interdisciplinary research projects, with a far-reaching goal of explaining the mystery of faith and religion. Studies conducted at the meeting point of empirical and theological sciences raise controversies and criticism. Examples include the discussions on natural and theological experiments, collectively called neurotheology.

NeuroQuantology|, 2021

The comparative study of religion and neuroscience has gained increasing attention in recent years, as researchers seek to understand the neural mechanisms underlying religious beliefs, practices, and experiences. This integrative literature review provides an overview of the current state of research in this field, with a reference to the emerging discipline of neurotheology. A comprehensive search of electronic databases was conducted, and articles were reviewed and analyzed thematically for their relevance, rigour, and theoretical contributions to the study of religion and neuroscience. The findings suggest that religious beliefs, practices, and experiences are associated with specific neural pathways and brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and parietal lobes. Neurotheology, a field that seeks to integrate neuroscience and theology, has contributed to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying religious experiences, including meditation, prayer, and mystical experiences. However, the study of religion and neuroscience is not without its challenges, including the potential for cultural bias and the limitations of neuroimaging techniques. Despite these challenges, this integrative literature review provides valuable insights into the complex relationship between religion and the brain and highlights the potential contributions of neurotheology to our understanding of religious experience and spirituality.