The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion and Neuroscience Meet (Paperback)

by James B. Ashbrook (Author), Carol Rausch Albright (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
A working-out of theology through the lens of the neurosciences. . . . A thoughtful introduction to many of these issues. -- The Christian Century, January 27, 1999

This fascinating book....offers new insights [on] relationships of the body and mind and of human beings with the divine. -- San Francisco Medicine, April 24, 2003

Product Description
"We are biased in our culture today to suppose that any appeal to the authority of fields like brain science and evolutionary theory is an inevitably reductionistic move, one that is destined to blow apart any lingering hopes we might have that words like "divinity" and "the sacred" can still have meaning for us. ...This bias is understandable. As a rule, when brain science has taken it upon itself to pronounce on the continuing credibility of cherished religious ideals, the news has indeed been gloomy. . . . . [To address this issue], Ashbrook and Albright draw . . . not only [upon] modern, evolutionarily grounded understandings of the brain, but insights as well from new fields like complexity theory.

"Looking at ourselves in the mirrors held up by brain science helps us rediscover a fruitful sense of strangeness, of noninevitability about the most familiar dimensions of our being: our exploratory curiosities, our aesthetic orientations toward order and pattern, our primal needs to connect to other human beings, our penchant for violence, even cruelty, our imaginative capacity to discover meaning and purpose in the ambiguous realities of our existence.

"But that is not all. For Ashbrook and Albright, mapping the dimensions of our humanness in this way is not just an end in itself, but a prelude to a more radical inquiry: whether these deep structures of our humanness, as we have come to understand them, can guide us in our efforts to figure out the underlying deep structure of the universe—that we may symbolize using a word like 'God.'

"The argument here begins with an . . . assertion about the nature of knowledge and ends with . . . a provocation about the possible nature of reality. It runs like this: the human brain is set up in such a way that we are incorrigibly anthropomorphic in our efforts to make sense of reality. Wired to want and seek ordered patterns, emotional connection, and larger personal meaning in the world, we cannot help but discover a "human face" in our encounter with the cosmos too. But what is the status of this discovered "face"? One answer with a hoary history is that it is delusional—a lie that we cling to, because the real truth about the "really real" would be too difficult for most of us to bear. . . .

"Ashbrook and Albright push back hard against the pessimism that favors this message of disenchantment. ‘An anthropocentric perspective is unavoidable,’ they admit, but this ‘does not automatically negate the validity of what is perceived.’ On the contrary, they dare to suggest that our habit of humanizing the universe may in fact be our ticket to understanding something very important about that same universe: ‘the brain of homo sapiens [gives us information that fosters our survival and so, apparently,] reflects something basic to the setting in which we find ourselves. . . . [It] mirrors the universe that births us.’

"The ‘voice’ of this book, more often than not, speaks using the imagery and idioms of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The authors are clear, however, that this is because they are most comfortable negotiating their understandings in the cultural currency of that tradition—not because they suppose that their local map does full justice to the larger territory. In fact, as the authors proceed in their explorations, they end up posing as many challenges to more traditional Christian assumptions about God as they do to more traditional scientific assumptions about humanity."

From the Foreword by Anne Harrington, History of Science, Harvard University

Product Details

• Paperback: 233 pages
• Publisher: Pilgrim Press; 1 edition (October 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0829812008
• ISBN-13: 978-0829812008
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,542,332 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not for the scholar, March 31, 2000

By	Jane Harper "trauma wonk, photographer" (Rockford, IL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As someone trained in neuroscience, I was curious about what kind of marriage could be made between science and theology. Reading this work, though, was disappointing for me. Supposing a Christian world-view [although this was not made plain up front], both the neuroscience and the theology were facile, lacking depth and scholarship. If you're a theology student looking for a scientific link, the level of neuroscience in this book is just about right; but for scientists, or those fluent in both fields, the book is lacking.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Theologians Need a Broader View, October 18, 2001

By	Robert Rouillard (Rochester, MN USA) - See all my reviews

I was very excited to get my hands on this book, the promise of bringing science and religion together in the brain appeared sound. My excitement however lasted only a short while, as I began to turn the pages of the book.

Page after page of description of theological points of view, view of self, view of emotion, view of perception. Then a very surface analysis of how these things relate to the structure of the brain. Rather than being a blending of the ideas where one enhances the other, it is a "See! Theology can be constructed on a neuroscientific basis." This structure is purely ad hoc, and does not emerge from neuroscience, much less erupt from their descriptions.

The authors take such pains to preserve their triune brain structure for the book, that all credibility is lost. They make a strict division of reptilian, mammalian, and neo-cortical regions of the brain resulting in elaborated behavior. Anyone familiar with behavior of creatures cannot claim that a non-mammalian structures cannot be nurturing, as the authors claim Some snakes rear their young. Geese live with their offspring for years. Octopus are highly socially evolved. Instead of looking for the exception to the rule and using such to elaborate on the validity of their personal view, the authors turn a blind eye in the interest of preserving their viewpoint.

Any serious student of neuroscience should stay away from this book, it may make you nauseated. Any student of theology should stay away from this book for the facile use of neuroscience that is almost laughable.

This area of inquiry is of intense interest to me and it has been done well in other places, for instance, "Why God Won't Go Away." It is not done well here.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Supplemental Reading for a Neuroscience Course, May 19, 2000

By	Robert Glassman (Lake Forest, Illinois) - See all my reviews

Excerpts from my 1999 Teaching of Neuroscience poster at the Soc for Neurosci annual meeting (Abstracts Vol 25, #104.77):

Top-down conjectures about parts and processes, from observations of larger phenomena, are a vital aspect of science. Neuroscience teachers should regularly look to broad human considerations. The Humanizing Brain is by two theologians who competently review a good deal of modern neuroscience for the layperson. They address a modern dilemma: Advances in science during the past three "Enlightenment Centuries" have associated much doubt with religious mythologies, yet religions continue to carry wisdoms for living and are frequently a good source of orientation in human lives. "Beginning with Descartes in the early seventeenth century, the Baconian tradition of science - with its drive for prediction and control - shoved aside awe and wonder. Pieces swallowed up the whole. The simple strangled the complex."(p. xv) I use THB as the basis for three discussions appended to three of the shorter laboratory sessions in my undergraduate behavioral neuroscience course. (The main text is Biological Psychology by Rosenzweig, Leiman, & Breedlove (Sinauer); I've also used the excellent Neuroscience text by Bear, Connors, & Paradiso (Williams &Wilkins).) For example, a discussion of the THB chapter on the upper brain stem and attention follows our lab on EEG and sleep in humans. One of my short-paper assignments requires a critical commentary on one chapter of THB, after the student looks up two of the cited sources and reviews a relevant chapter in the main textbook for the course. THB's main purpose is to educate religious people while illustrating that the discovery of areas of potential accommodation is more interesting than simplistic oppositional dialectics. For the same reason, the book may be read by students of neuroscience.