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. (shrink)

How neuropsychology is necessary but insufficient for understanding spirituality is explored. Multileveled spiritual requisites are systematically examined in terms of their neuropsychological constituents and limitations. The central “problem of integrity” is articulated via the “modularity” of our neuropsychology, and evidence is presented for disunities of self and consciousness. It is argued that the integrity of self or spirit is a contingent achievement rather than a necessary given. Integrating possibilities include belief, emotion, and relationships. Understanding integrity, and the transformations of self-surrender (...) and sacrifice, may require explicitly stepping beyond neuropsychology and including the self in a larger system. (shrink)

. I sketch a synthetic integration of several levels of explanation in addressing how myths, narratives, and stories engage human beings, produce their sense of identity and self‐understanding, and shape their intellectual, emotional, and embodied lives. Ultimately it is our engagement with the metanarratives of religious imagination by which we address a set of existentially necessary but ontologically unanswerable metaphysical questions that form the basis of religious belief. I show how a multileveled understanding of evolutionary biology, history, neuroscience, psychology, narrative, (...) and mythology may form a coherent picture of the human spirit. Neuropsychological functions involved in constructing and responding to the narratives by which we form our identities and build meaningful lives include memory, attention, emotional marking, and temporal sequencing. It is the neural substrate, the emotional shaping, and the narrative structuring of higher cognitive function that provide the sine qua non for the construction of meaning, relationship, morality, and purpose that extend beyond our personal boundaries, both spatial and temporal. This includes a neural affect system shaped by our developmental dependency, the dynamic narratives of self formed in the development of identity and reconstructed over the life span, drawing on culturally available mythic and storied forms. Narrative constitutes our movement in moral space and may have the potential both for healing and for disruption for us as individuals and as a species, providing a contingent solution to the alienation and fragmentation of personhood, relationship, and community. (shrink)

The Importance of Neuroscience in the Study of Religiosity The article aims to determine whether neuroscience is relevant for a better comprehension of religious activities. The answer to this problem emphasizes the distinction between mental operations and their intentional content. Neurobiological studies, I argue, can be important to evaluate the psychological and neural dimension of religious acts, with caution due to their great complexity, but not to evaluate the truth and genuineness of their content, neither to solve objective religious problems. (...) Neuroscience may be helpful for the discernment of some extraordinary religious experiences and to study pseudo-religious pathologies as well. (shrink)

This article regards the field of neuroscience and indicates on the proper or erroneous functioning of the human brain. Intellectual virtues, especially practical wisdom play a significant role in capturing the truth and implementing it in life. The agile formation of the cognitive function of man encompasses both his reason as well as the sensual judgment of utility with all the bodily backup. The brain possesses great plasticity in the production of neuronal connections. Habit as a permanent wont utilizes the (...) reactions being developed to the construction of often inappropriate mechanisms, that in turn are not easy or completely impossible to eliminate. When practical reason is introduced into a false ethos, the brain responds by forming “ruts” of neuronal connections which seem difficult to consider as something appropriate. The reparation of the existing situation and the removal of the wrong habit require relevant virtues so as to unblock the psychological resistance that is deeply rooted within the physiological neuronal substrate. The learning about the virtues of St. Thomas Aquinas is the best warranty not only for theoretical explanations, but also for the practical application of virtues in dealing with the arised situation. Only well-formed virtues give the opportunity to correct the false instinctive cognition and liberate from erroneous actions. (shrink)

In modern science, research aimed at studying the functioning of the human brain under the influence of various factors of the social and natural environment, including religious practices, both personal and social, is relevant. The purpose of the research is to consider the current state of neurotheology as a new field of knowledge and to analyze the possibilities of its interaction with already existing social and humanitarian disciplines; review, analytical and critical publications of Russian and foreign scientists are used as (...) material for the study. Attention is drawn to the philosophical and methodological problems that neurotheology needs to be resolved in order to determine its place in the modern cognitive space as its organic component. First of all, according to the authors of the article, representatives of this science need to enrich the formed empirical basis with theoretical generalizations, for which it is necessary to implement the principle of interdisciplinarity declared by them and involve specialists from various fields of humanities in the common work. In the hypotheses put forward by neurotheologists, the question of the ontological existence of objects of religious experience is recognized as epistemologically insoluble, however, when constructing a philosophical and worldview concept, it is impossible to limit oneself to such statements; It is noted that the idea developed in neurotheology about the genetic translation of the qualities of the “brain/consciousness” in the process of “cognitive evolution” of mankind returns us to the social deterministic and mechanistic views overcome by modern science. The hope is expressed that neurotheology, having overcome the emerging philosophical and methodological difficulties, will play an important role in the development of Russian science. (shrink)

This article—the first of a linked set of three outlining the development and practice of a different approach to science/religion dialogue—begins with an overview of some persistent tensions in the field. Then, using a threefold heuristic of encounter, engagement, and expression, it explores the routes taken by James Ashbrook and Andrew Newberg to develop a dialogue between theology and neuroscience, discussing some of the problems associated with these and their implications for attempts to further develop neurotheology. Finally, it proposes a (...) different way of thinking about this enterprise and points toward a new methodology for supporting this endeavor. (shrink)

As human beings we inevitably try to explain our experience. In philosophical language, we deal with transcendent assertions and aspirations. The issue, then, is: how can we talk about what matters, given the structures inherent in language and basic to the way we are made? Instead of the philosophical category of Being, I advance a case for giving the human brain privileged status as an analogical expression of God, the symbol‐concept of what matters most, and then suggest the illumination which (...) can come with using that analogical expression, especially as that analogy connects us with the environment at the limbic level and constructs our world at the cerebral level. (shrink)

. The human brain combines empathy and imagination via the old brain which sets our destiny in the evolutionary scheme of things. This new understanding of cognition is an emergent phenomenon—basically an expressive ordering of reality as part of “a single natural system.” The holographic and subsymbolic paradigms suggest that we live in a contextual universe, one which we create and yet one in which we are required to adapt. The inadequacy of the new brain—specially the left hemisphere's rational view (...) of destiny—is replaced by a view of a new relatedness in reality in which human destiny comes from and depends upon the mutual interchange between the new brain and the old brain for the survival of what is significant to the whole systemic context in which we live. (shrink)

I describe the development of my work in relating brain research and religion from my personal roots in my family of origin through my professional responsibilities as a pastor, a clinician, and a theological educator to my developing what I call “a neurotheological approach” to faith and ministry. My early correlations gave simplistic attention to bimodal consciousness as an interpretive tool for understanding religion. Subsequently came a more sophisticated exploration of whole‐brain functioning and suggested cultural correlates. Currently, I am explicating (...) tae humanizing brain as reflective of our living in an open system, a universe that is unfolding and evolving, a universe in the hands of the whole‐making, integrating, emerging God whose reality far exceeds the insights of cultural construction. As we humans relate to this God, attachment and aspiration are reciprocal. (shrink)

Exploration and reflection on the interfacing of religion and the neurosciences in the last twenty‐five years provide a unique point of convergence on the relationship between science and religion. A focus on two streams of consciousness characterized the first phase in the 1970s. Scholarship suggested correlates between the styles of analytical steps and synthetic leaps of imagination and the belief patterns of proclamation and manifestation. The use of lateralized consciousness was critiqued as covering too much as well as not attending (...) to evolutionary developments and philosophical and theological foundations. A shift to whole brain functioning with more differentiated investigations came during the second phase in the 1980s. Empirical studies corroborated the earlier analytical speculations in neurotheology and advanced the heuristic value or using the whole brain as a metaphor for understanding religion. By the third phase of the 1990s, meaning‐making and integrating consciousness emerged as shaping the agenda between religion and cognitive neuroscience. The emerging methodology combines analogical continuities among levels of complexity and metaphorical leaps of inferential patterning. (shrink)

James B. Ashbrook's "new natural theology in an empirical mode" pursued an integrated understanding of the spiritual, psychological, and neurological dimensions of spiritual life. Knowledge of neuroscience and personality theory was central to his quest, and his understandings were necessarily revised and amplified as scientific findings emerged. As a result, Ashbrook's legacy may serve as a case example of how to do religion-and-science in a milieu of scientific change. The constant in the quest was Ashbrook's core belief in the basic (...) holism of brain, mind, personality, the nature of reality, and the underlying reality of God. (shrink)