Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief Paperback – March 26, 2002

Even though this book was published 15 years ago, the research it's based on hasn't quite made it to the public sphere. And some of the work being done from this research has done everything possible to eliminate a Christian base by citing on the Zen monks as the sole research subjects. The book is even-handed in dealing with all major religions, and I'm grateful that the authors didn't succumb to the zeitgeist and eliminate their research on Christian faith and Christian forms of prayer.

I'm impressed that any scientist would be willing to suggested physical evidence for a non-rational experience, but this is what they've done.

The book occasionally skirts the atheist's assumption that science can explain everything. I wish all those scientist who assert that God doesn't exist because we can't find him (with our limited sense based perceptual capacities) would take a hard look at the research referenced in this book.

Now I want even more research.

It's a miracle!! Half like it, half don't.

Perhaps a few less reactionary and emotional responses would be nice.

Admittedly, this book is a chimera, positing reasonable hypotheses and presenting data, then waxing philosophical. However, to the rational naysayers I say that this book does NOT make any claim that the netherworlds of God exists, other than in the imaginations of the brains that conceive them. This would make the scientist smile and the believer cringe, maybe.

In the end, we are all bent in both directions, living simultaneously rational and religious/ritualistic lives; scientists and philosophers. If you can't admit to that, you are either lying to yourself, or you are headed full speed for a Jungian enantiodromia.

OK both

Good luck!

I for one enjoyed this little book

Signed,
The Devil

If you're looking for a validation of a personal God this is not the book for you. However, if you want some good science on the brain and the functionality of a harmonious or unified worldview you'll find plenty to like here.

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.

This is a great book to help Atheists understand to be more tolerant of those of faith. It explains religious beliefs are more than just early child hood development and a set of ideas forced into some one over and over. It delves more into the evolutionary reasons for the persistence of religious believe. If you want to understand why may people when presented with what some may consider a dramatic lack of evidence still cannot let go off religious thinking this book offers up some interesting insights.