Customer Reviews

Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief

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Thsi book does a good job expounding the authors' theory of the neural mechanisms behind transcendent experience, and its relationship to religious belief. They start out explicitly relying on the traditional objective realist position, and show how interaction of certain brain areas can lead us to lose our sense of boundaries in time and space. Thus the authors theorize that ineffable mystical experience arises from inhibition of a brain region that is critical for maintaining our sense of boundaries in time and space. The description is not very technical, but it is clear and should make sense to general readers without any background in neurology. The authors use their own simple terms for brain areas and functions rather than using the more obscure jargon of neuroscience. The excplanations work well up to a point.

There is another, weaker aspect to this book, which is the philosophical musings of the authors. Somewhere in the middle of the book, they decide that there are only two positions to be taken, objective realism and subjectivism. They make the reasonable point (though without supporting it in the book) that current neuroscience research reveals human perception to be constructed to a great degree, rather than directly providing a literal reflection of nature. This particular point is made in more detail by others, such as by Gerald Edelman in "Bright Air, Brilliant Fire," also suitable for general readers, and by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their writings, as well as Walter Freeman in "How Brains Make Up Their Minds."

Having made the point that objective realism is not an accurate way to think about how experience arises from the brain, and assuming that the only think left is subjectivism, he is forced to concede that "neurological reality" as he calls it, hs to reflect ontological reality.

That is, he jumps to the conclusion that since mystical experience reflects something _really happening_ in the brain, that there must be a 'reality' being perceived by mystics. This may be true in some sense, but it is very confused and confusing thinking.

For one thing, the authors claim that hallucinations are distinguishable from mystical experience in that mystical experience seems much more real. Yet hypnosis research not cited by the authors reveals that under some conditions hallucinations are as real as perceptions, and rely on the same brain areas, and that our bodies respond to them as if they were perceptions. In other words, the authors seem to get even the neurology wrong when they discuss what they call the "existential operator" that assigns a sense of reality to experience. Contrary to the claims of the authors, the brain can indeed produce a perfectly solid sense of reality, right down to the brain regions used for sensory perception, from products of imagination, through suggestion. This weakens their conclusion that "mystical experience is more real than hallucination" considerably, though of course it does not completely negate it.

Secondly, the authors don't recognize that there are options besides metaphysical dualism and objective realism. The fact that we perceive mystical union as if it were as real as sensory experience doesn't mean it has ontological reality. There are also very credible alternate views such as pragmatism (Walter Freeman, in "How Brains Make up their Minds,"), embodied realism (Lakoff and Johnson in "Philosophy in the Flesh"), and "relational consciousness" (John Taylor in "The Race for Consciousness").

These alternate views all allow for meaning to be constructed in the mind, such as through meaningful action on the environment, without making it either a delusion or an objective reality in itself. Thus, mystical experience can be meaningful and we can have theories, about its signficance as an evolutionary adapatation for example, without making mystical experience ontologically equivalent to a table or a chair, or resorting to a dualism of "objective realities."

The authors simply don't make the case they claim to make that mystical experience is 'objectively real' because it is 'neurologically real.' However, they do an excellent job of describing their evidence for the neural mechansisms in very clear and simple terms for general readers.

Science cannot determine that gods of any type exist, nor can it determine that no gods exist. However, there may be scientific reasons why the belief in gods remains strong. In the surprisingly titled _Why God Won't Go Away_ Ballantine Books) by Andrew Newberg, M.D., Eugene D'Aquilli, M.D., and Vince Rause, we get a fascinating scientific answer to the title question, and a review of the current scientific understanding of the roots of belief. The authors have done research by means of brain scans on those who are having mystical or religious experiences. The brain scans show that something is going on among the neurons that doesn't happen at other times. Most of the scans described in the authors' research show an increase in activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, an area just behind the top of the head. They call this for operational purposes the "orientation association area (OAA)," because the OAA orients a person in physical space. "To perform this crucial function, it must first generate a clear, consistent cognition of the physical limits of the self. In simple terms, it must draw a sharp distinction between the individual and everything else; to sort out the you from the infinite not-you that makes up the rest of the universe." When this area is damaged by trauma or stroke, patients have difficulty maneuvering in physical space; when it is extra active, it seems to be a source of an inexplicable feeling of connection to all creation. A meditator describes the ineffable state in terms that are typical: "There's a sense of timelessness and infinity. It feels like I am part of everyone and everything in existence."

The authors explain that the gene-driven wiring of the brain to encourage religious beliefs exists because it has been evolutionarily good for us. Stimulating the OAA or the autonomic nervous system can produce calm and a sense of well-being which may be not only pleasant but physically beneficial. Beliefs driven by neurology could reinforce themselves by building myths, encouraging ritual, uniting societies and providing social support from fellow believers. They can check worry about eventual annihilation. They can provide a feeling of control.

Those of a religious bent will find matter to argue with inside these pages, even though the authors are very careful not to argue for or against the existence of deities, only that "the neurological aspects of spiritual experience support the sense of the realness of God." Some may also find disconcerting the idea that ecstasy of religious mysticism may have its roots in the structures that bring on orgasm. Others will find the practical answer to the title's question just too pragmatic and pat, but given the extraordinary research as it now stands, it is the best that science can do as it begins to look into religious feeling: "What we know beyond question is that the mind is essentially a machine designed to solve the riddles of existence, and as long as our brains are wired as they are, God will not go away." This book is a wonderful introduction into this fascinating research.

I must admit that I'm very torn as to how to review this book. On the one hand, I thoroughly enjoyed the first 80% of it. It was new information for me, it was insightful, it was affirming, and I was devouring it. Then I came to this transition point, where the authors make the leap from neuroscience to philosophy, and suddenly my notes in the margins kept getting more and more critical. So here's what I think I'll say about it...

First, I enjoyed enormously the discussion on the biological brain functioning, and the conclusions that they derive in the first few chapters. The best way to summarize that particular discussion is as follows. Your brain is designed to keep you alive. As it developed particularly unique and complex abilities, most notably the ability for causal analysis, it discovered that there is one thing that the brain cannot do with regard to our surival...it cannot ultimately prevent our death. Since the limbic system creates an "anxiety response" to physical threats, the brain must create a response to quiet the anxiety produced by this existential discovery. If it is a normal stimulus, the brain knows how to tell the self to flee or fight. But with the ultimate death, there is no such possible response. So the brain invents answers, including God, life after death, etc. to quell the anxiety, and the neurology of the brain creates such powerful physiological response that we "feel" we have come to "true" conclusions.

I liked that part. But then they make some major leaps and begin to describe a concept that they call "Absolute Unitary Being," about which I never did get a clear idea of what they mean. On the one hand, it sounds like they are simply describing a "ground-state" of reality, from which all our neurological perceptions arise. I'm okay with that. But then they go further and posit the notion that this Absolute Unitary Being is a higher plane of reality, more real than ordinary reality, and may be identified as "God." For me, things just ground to a halt, both because I philosophically disagree (which is okay), and because I felt like they never did establish a firm linkage between the science and the philosophy. Maybe I'm too dense to get it, but it just seemed to fall apart at that point.

That said, I still think this is a book well worth reading. It's short, so it won't take you long to get some good stuff out of it. And maybe you'll get more out of their leaps into philosophy than I did.

There are only a handful of books that have attempted to map the biology of spiritual experiences (Goleman's "Destructive Emotions," Hamer's "The God Gene" and Austin's "Zen and the Brain,"for example), and Newberg is one of the first neuroscientists to use brain-scan technology to peer inside the minds of Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns as they pray. But neuroscience is in its infancy, so any book on the topic is going to be highly speculative for at least the next 10 years. Newberg's work does show that specific neurological changes take place when one intensely meditates or prays, and this accounts for the alterations in our perceived sense of reality. We "lose ourselves" or feel "at one" with god or the universe because those parts of the brain that maintain a sense of self and otherness are temporarily suspended. Thus, the person does experience a new reality, and as far as the brain is concerned, that reality is as real as any other because it is based on direct experience. The skeptic will say that it is a neurological illusion created within the brain, while the believer will say that this is evidence that a spiritual realm exists. In fact, neuroscience supports neither view, for the brain is both observer and producer of reality. The brain can operate in ways that make spiritual experiences feel real--and this is one of the astonishing facts that Newberg has been able to substantiate--but the brain does not have a way to get outside of itself to objectively verify the experience. This has been the conundrum in philosophy of consciousness arguments for years. Newberg's book and research is important because it allows both believers and disbelievers to understand how the brain perceives and interprets information that extends beyond the boundaries of everyday human experience. His next book, due out in September of 2006, is called "Why We Believe What We Believe" and it extends his brain-scan research into the minds of atheists and Pentecostalists as they speak in tongues (this was recently filmed by National Geographic on a progam called "Exorcism"). "Why God Won't Go Away" will equally provoke and inspire, depending on what you already believe, or want to believe.

Neuroscientists have an irrepressible penchant for speculating about the significance of their findings. For instance, Eric Kandel - Nobel Laureate, in his public appearances talks about his field, Long Term Potentiation, as though it were the basis of all learning in creatures with nervous systems. This is to any of us in the field stretching things a bit, but we like it.

Andrew Newberg with the late D'Aquili have put scientific observation inside the spiritual experience. They found a specific area of the parietal lobe lit up in some clever experiments. Is this area of the parietal lobe bound up with our sense of selfhood? Andrew Newberg runs with this idea in a breezy read.

Of course, as practicing neuroscientists we know that so many of these great discoveries fall down after a very short run. So, this book is not one that sets a landmark for truth, but it is a landmark in bringing neuroscience and spirituality together in a satisfying fashion.

Newberg does not pretend to get technical in this essay. Thus, those of you who are looking for new information about the brain should look elsewhere. But those of you who know about the brain already will find this book novel in its application of what is known about the brain to the spiritual domain.

As a bachelor of philosophy and now practicing neuroscientist I found it difficult to put this book down.

The title is a double-entendre, reflective of the bait-and-switch presented within.

The first half of this book is well worth reading. It offers an insightful and well-presented overview of the cognitive and evolutionary mechanisms of mystical thinking. However, just over half way it becomes clear that the authors have a very non-scientific agenda. Having reviewed and acknowledged the scientific underpinnings of mystical thinking, they then diverge off into very unscientific arguments to try to rationalize the objective reality of mysticism.

They start to diverge by making the very debatable claim that research has "conclusively shown" that mystical thinking results in greater physical and emotional health. Then they point out that science cannot "disprove" the existence of an "Absolute Unitary Being" and by doing so they appear to speciously suggest the plausibility of objective mystical reality. They progress to calling fact-based thinking just more "mythical thinking." They go on to suggest that our capacity for mystical thinking puts us in touch with their "Absolute Unitary Being." Finally they speculate that mythical thinking is so advanced that we have not yet evolved to appreciate it fully.

Overall this feels like a kind of set up, like the pseudoscientific brainwashing that an intelligent design proponent might feel is quite clever. It is a book with an agenda to lead otherwise scientific thinkers to very non-scienfific conclusions. At worst, this is an intentional if not so clever effort to promote mystical thinking. At best, it is a case study of how even otherwise excellent scientific thinkers can fall prey to sophisticated rationalizations to accommodate and support their belief-based worldview.

There is a very good overview of current scientific research and argument regarding the nature of religious and mystical exerience here. Recent research into the neurological origins of religion, the stunning compatibilities between various religious myths and inclinations, the function and universality of ritual (across the animal kingdom), the commonness of lesser mystical experience and ritual-such as music, art, or by simply taking a bath, and the social cohesian and function that religion plays in virtually any society, are all discussed.

The book also details the long standing arguments about whether various deep religious experience is an expression of some kind of mental disorder(s), or a higher brain function useful for specific purposes. It notes for example that highly religious persons throughout the ages have often also been significant achievers. This appears to be imcompatible with the notion that they are 'mentally disordered'. The book asserts that for whatever reason 'altered brain states' occur, there was/is a significant evolutionary reason for them to have been selected in the first place. This is an important point;- altered brain states, including mystical/religious experience, probably had their origin in the struggle for existance, which was then utilised for other circumstances. The origin of myth-making and ritual in the human condition for example, is discussed in this way. There are also discussions on the importance of conflict, contradiction and resolution in religious ritual and myth, and their likely evolutionary origins.

Many of the books early assertions appear to be summations and ideas strung together from elsewhere, but the book in the second half becomes more controversial in asserting that the altered mental states or 'higher reality', as described variously by mystics, may in fact BE an alternative/higher reality, and not a cultural interpretation of unusual brain functioning. This is a bold assertion, which requires some weighty evidence. The evidence presented in this book however appears to rest mostly on shaky anecdotal support, "I experienced a highly significant event, therefore my interpretation of this event must also be correct". The authors suggest that various mystical/religious experience may imply the existance of an independant 'higher reality', which brain evolution has already cottoned onto. The authors seem to suggest that whilst most people who have some kind of religious experience do in fact misinterpret them, it is still possible that they are ultimately right-an independant and profound reality exists, independent of the evolution of the senses and the self. Whilst conceding the possibility, I personally need more evidence of this concept of 'God' to accept that this experience isn't just a fundamentally important ability of the brain, to give us survival, purpose and meaning, but not necassarily a connection to an external 'God' or 'reality', however you may want to define this 'reality'.

Ultimately there are two possibilities this book suggests to account for religious experience. 1) It is fundamentally a state of mind, selected by evolution and useful for survival in predominantly past environments 2) It is the evolution into a higher reality, something we are perhaps 'evolving into'. The jury is out for me on this one. I don't know whether as a scientist we are evolving into "religion", or out of it, but I do recognise its origins in the evolution of the brain. It seems clear to me, that evolution selected the altered mental states this book describes (and some of which I have experienced) for various individual/group survival purposes, which can then be used/modified for other purposes. Whatever is the case, soemthing strange is going on in this brain of ours.

I agreed with the books view that many of the simple things we do for example, as humans, are simply variations of the 'ritual' experience-such as taking a relaxing bath, or listening to rythmical music. These have been shown to stimulate areas of the brain in a similar way to relgious ritual and association. Interestingly, there also seems to be a link between various altered brain states/mystical/religious experience and the evolution of the orgasm. There are many similarities-they are associated with the same brain areas, and they both produce deeply profound and satisfying 'brain-body' experiences. The evolution of some religious experience may in fact be linked with a kind of schism in the sexual experience within the brain. It is an interesting idea.

There is also good balance in this book between recognising that 'religious experience' is not all for fuddy-duddies. It is real, and it has played a huge and benificial part in human development. It is asserted however, that it is often misunderstood. Rather than being a window to 'God', it may simply be a neuorological ability of the brain, to deal with difficult environments. It's apparently unusual social expression is easily misunderstood.

The book only briefly touches on the negative side of religious experience, and simply notes that any human activity can be perverted, or misused. It was not the purpose of this book to focus on the negative social aspects of religion, other than to perhaps note that it is possible much of this is possibly the incomplete mental expression of these mental mechanisms.

The title pretty much covers the content-'God' isn't going away so easily, primarily because we have a biological tendancy to religious experience. Science is only just beginning to learn of the social benefits of various religious states and mental associations. This book is definitely a step in the right direction. I don't think any scientist can call himself a lover of humanity who doesn't seek to at least examine the basis and the implications of the ideas presented in this book, with an open mind.

The religious worldview has been contrasted with the scientific one for the last five hundred years, but even more so in the last one hundred and fifty, due mostly to the advances and different perspectives in biology. It would be fair to say though that the religious worldview has "survived" the scrutiny of science, and that religion, in many different forms and holding to many different deities, is alive and well. Many have predicted the demise of religion due to scientific advances, but this has not yet happened. In fact, just the reverse has happened: religious belief has increased at a time when scientific advances have been the most rapid. In retrospect it is perhaps not surprising that this has happened. Science does not answer as of yet many fundamental questions that are deemed important by many to the human condition, such as the possibility of life after death. In addition, some of the scientific and technological advances have themselves caused extreme anxiety, motivating some to seek the spiritual comfort of religion.

In the last few decades, advances in neuroscience have offered another challenge to religious belief. These advances have called into serious question the notion of free will and even that of personal identity. Further, many of the researchers in this field have claimed that religious feelings and visions are nothing other than neuronal activities in the brain. These researchers have not explained however the evolutionary advantages of these feelings, if any.

The authors of this book examine the evidence for the view that religious thought is purely neuronal, and the evidence that it can be given a purely naturalistic explanation. If religious belief or mysticism can be giving a purely biological grounding, this would be of significance to those who want to devote their lives to its practice. The authors' discussion is highly interesting, especially the first five chapters, where they discuss many of the latest results in neuroscience. The book is written for a general audience, and so no background in neuroscience is assumed. However, readers could appreciate the book more if they come to the book with some knowledge of the brain regions and neuronal processes, and familiarity with the experimental techniques used in the imaging of the brain.

One of the more interesting discussions in these initial chapters concerns the authors' notion of "cognitive operators", which represent the collective functions of different structures of the brain. As an example of a cognitive operator, they give the one that is responsible for solving mathematical problems. This mathematical cognitive operator thus represents all of the structures and functions of the brain that are responsible for arriving at the solution of these problems. The notion of a cognitive operator is thus a kind of coarse-grained representation of brain activity, as it does not make explicit reference to the activities of individual neurons. As the authors explain, cognitive operators shape thoughts and feelings, but are not themselves ideas. A cognitive operator could be viewed as somewhat similar to the concept of a `schema' that has been floated about recently in the literature on cognitive neuroscience. The authors discuss eight cognitive operators that they believe are most relevant to religious experience: the `holistic operator', which, as the name implies, enables one to view the world as a whole, and arises in the activity of the parietal lobe; the `reductionist operator', which allows the world to be dissected into its component parts; the `abstractive operator', which forms general concepts from the perception of individual facts, finds links between facts; the `quantitative operator' which allows the abstraction of quantity from percepts; the `causal operator', which allows the interpretation of events as sequences of causes and effects; the `binary operator', which allows space-time relationships to be reduced to simple pairs of opposites (up-down for example); the `existential operator', which gives a sense of existence to sensory information processed by the brain; the `emotional value operator', which assigns emotional responses to the processes of cognition and perception. The functioning of all of these operators, the authors assert, can be observed using brain imaging techniques, such as PET and fMRI.

The authors do not depart from the neuroscientific viewpoint that whatever a human experiences can be associated with activity in certain regions of the brain. Therefore if an individual is having a genuine experience with a deity, it will show up in brain activity. This opens up the possibility of doing controlled experiments that show what areas of the brain are active when certain individuals are having religious or mystical experiences.

Myth-making, ritual, and other activities associated with religion are not a cause of alarm for the authors. Many have taking these activities to be proof of the scientific inadequacy of religion, but they are very comfortable in using them as support for their belief that the brain is actually meant for communication with a deity. Indeed, religious ritual results in neurological effects that convert a religious belief into a religious feeling. This allows the actual experience of the presence of a deity, an experience that mystics have reported throughout the ages. Humans, in the view of the authors, are compelled to act out their myths due to the neurological processes of the brain. They also want to distinguish between mysticism and psychotic delusion, arguing in particular that hallucinations cannot provide the mind with an experience that is as "convincing" as a mystical one. Mystical experiences are rich and coherent, and are actually remembered in the same way as ordinary past events. Further, mystical spirituality beings as an act of free will, and results in what the authors refer to as `deafferentiation' in certain areas of the brain. This results in the "loss of self" that can accompany mystical experiences.

The authors' assertions are interesting, and they clearly believe that they have given evidence that experience of a deity is in fact real. One could just as easily argue that these brain activities are mere fantasies. The authors acknowledge this also.

As a clinical neurologist and a believer in spiritual experience, I was interested to read of the experiments of imaging the brains of meditators with SPECT. I didn't get what I needed from this book to evaluate the results. The speculation that follows is even more arbitrary. The authors use eccentric terms such as "orientation association area" for part of the parietal lobe. They then use an eccentric interpretation of the function of this area of the brain. There is nothing about the confusion of a patient with a right parietal lobe stroke that suggests the boundary between self and non-self is a key feature of the function of this part of the brain. Such a stroke patient can be very bad at perceiving both self or non-self, without the labelling of things one way or the other being an issue. The emphasis on the perception of a boundary is clearly a bias derived from the subjective experience of the subjects, who were selected for their experience. The changes on SPECT might have no more significance than reflecting a state of mind that is more open, but less stimulated by something outside of us than we usually are, more closed to something outside or inside us than we usually are, or any number of other trivial interpretations. Further experiments are the logical next step, not assumptions. In the absence of peer review, how are we to know that there are any consistent changes at all? It is significant that the eccentric interpretations written here are not in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. They are musings, not science.

Meanwhile there are the author's "operators" that describe brain function in an eccentric way and long arguments about poorly defined ideas, such as the one suggesting that there are reliable ways to separate mysticism from psychosis, despite the impossibility of defining either one precisely. It is an effort that invites circular reasoning, such as mysticism being mysticism because it's constructive while psychosis is destructive. Who says? Are cult leaders who are successful mystics while those who aren't psychotic? I know people who were once labelled psychotic, but found their experiences to be helpful to them. Should they have been labelled mystics or is it just that the labels come from the biased mind of the observer?

Like the authors of this book, I don't see God going away, but it's not because of some SPECT scans that mean nothing more than the subjective reports of meditative states do. The real reason remains a matter of spiritual discovery, not physical science.

In the early 90's Gallup polls showed that over half of American adults have had "a moment of sudden religious awakening or insight." For this large portion of our population one can image how this experience would quickly become the true pillar of their faith. Whatever Thomas Aquinas may have done to try and prove God's existence in his Summa Theologica 800 years ago is unimportant to the real, undeniable experience over half of Americans have felt in their lifetime. That "oneness" with the universe and that great surge of both fear and overwhelming joy a simple commoner can attain by just closing their eyes and clearing their mind. Skeptics may show whatever logical and empirical evidence they wish for and against the spiritual realm, but eventually they must account for that feeling of infinite harmony attributed to meditation and prayer. Thanks to the latest in 21st century technology, that is exactly what Dr. Andrew Newberg and the late Eugene d'Aquili have attempted to do in their April release, "Why God Won't Go Away."

The most compelling aspect when reading Dr. Newberg and d'Aquili's book is their experiments using a "SPECT camera" to take, as the title of the books first chapter puts it, "a photograph of God." Newberg and d'Aquili, working with eight Tibetan meditators and several Franciscan nuns, were able to use the SPECT to gain an "accurate freeze-frame of blood flow patterns" at the "transcendent peak" of mystical experience. What was found in these scans was an expected increase in the activity of the prefrontal cortex, home to your attention span; but also, and more interestingly, was a decrease in activity of the so dubbed, "orientation association area." The "primary job of the OAA is to orient the individual in physical space" but to accomplish this it must also generate a clear "distinction between the individual and everything else, to sort out the you from the infinite not-you that makes up the rest of the universe. Specifically, the "left orientation area is responsible for creating the" boarders of the self, while "the right orientation area is associated with generating the...physical space in which that self can exist." In fact, people with severe damage to this area of the brain have great difficulty maneuvering in physical space-often bumping into chairs or falling to the floor instead of successfully lying down to bed. But what the SPECT scans show is not a shut down of the OAA but that during spiritual events it becomes deprived of the "incoming flow of sensory information" which it needs to be able to find any boundaries between itself and existence. Put simply, the mind has "no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything." In his book Newberg and d'Aquili go on to describe the different levels of spiritual events leading up to the culminary, and rare, "Absolute Unity Being" state. They describe the two paths of meditation in which religions over time have used to attain this AUB and how Newberg and d'Aquili connect the origin of religion and myth to the ability of the brain to reach this state. In turn, they also give how the origin of this very "ability" lies in our ancient ancestors dread of death and a need for safety. Those are the positives.

The most dismaying aspect of "Why God Won't Go Away" is Newberg and d'Aquili's conclusions from their own research. Their regular personal interjection of factless speculation greatly harms the work and teeters onto the point of scientific irresponsibility. Through out their book they try to draw connections between their research and the existence of "a primary reality that runs deeper than material... a state of pure being that encompasses the lesser realities," whatever that means. The irony lies in how Newberg and d'Aquili often point to the flaws in their own conclusions, but then fail to correct them. Just as often as they tell us that they believe "we saw evidence of a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence," they state (rather contradictory) that their "neurological model... does not explain whether absolute being is nothing more than a brain state or, as mystics claim, the essence of what is most fundamentally real." A reader is left with the question, if your research cannot state if this transcendent and non-material world exists; then why do you at other times draw the conclusion from your very research that it does exist? They even go on to tells us that their work "could support the argument that religious experience is only imagined neurologically, that God is physically `all in your mind'" but then tries to draw the opposite conclusion later in the book with no evidence why. Newberg and d'Aquili repeatedly states that they have proven that this meditative state is not a delusion, but I am inclined to believe this is his attempt to soften the book so not to drive away religious readers and their wallets. Otherwise, how Dr. Newberg and d'Aquili are able to hold these contradictory ideas would be a true testament the brain's ability to over come reality and rationality, as well as be a fascinating matter of study for the next generation of neurologists to look into: "Why Reason Won't Stay"

Overall the book is an important work in our understanding of the religious experience. This is a field of study everyone should be ready to set aside a few hours and 25 bucks to try and gain a basic understanding of, and it would seem, for now at least, that the most accessible and up-to-date way to do that is Newberg and d'Aquili's "Why God Won't Go Away," even with it's occasional moments pseudo-science. If you do buy this book, then I recommend you draw your own conclusions from those experiments and not take Dr. Newberg and the late Eugene d'Aquili's opinions too seriously.