Neurotheology
Well, stumbling through the Internet I've become aware of a newish sub-division of neurology--neurotheology. This discipline concerns itself with explaining the physiology behind religious experience. There are two different ways to look at this discipline, which are pretty much the ways a lot of physiologically based psychological research can be looked upon--damning or informative.
Damning use of neurotheology tries to use any research to undermine the truth of religion and/or its importance to human beings. This is the way in which the American Humanist Organization considers it, that organization, of course, being atheistic or at least secularist in nature. They see experiments in neurotheology as a means of definitively disproving religion as a mere misfiring of neurons. This same camp also tries to tie religious zeal with a comorbid psychiatric disorder. One of these disorders is a seizure disorder which affects the temporal lobe of the brain. People suffering from this disorder now supposedly show a heightened sense of religious experience, greater use of religious language, etc. Therfore, this camp implies, a sensitivity in the temporal lobe of the brain is that disorder to which we attribute the name of God. Also, hyper-activation of the limbic system of the brain (as happens during LSD intoxication) may also lead to a religious experience. One researcher has even gone so far to build a "God helmet" that activates the temporal lobe using magnetic fields. Most users have reported a religious sort of experience, except those who have no pre-existing religious beliefs (such as Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion). His results have been irreplicable, though, leading some to doubt that the God helmet acts as little more than a placebo.
Informative use of neurotheology seeks to use neurotheology as a means of understanding how religious experience is sensed and processed by the human person. This camp is full of those who are either objective scientists or those theologians and Believers of various faiths who have not condemned the discipline outright. One of the best explanations I've read of what neurothology might mean to this camp is that it might only be discovering an antenna which picks up on the spiritual. Other groups seek to condemn the research outright, but most of these groups are evangelical in nature. Most Evangelical Christianity and most Protestant theology is based on an extremely unscientific approach to God, as whatever humans discover would be more likely to be a deceitful product of our fallen nature than a discovery of God's work in nature.
For myself, I'm pretty interested in the field, being a believer and also being a student of psychology. I think that neurotheology is a bit like exploring the other senses--audition, gustation, touch, olfaction, and sight. The over activity of the limbic system during a religious experience may merely be how the brain processes religious experiences, the same way that neurons fire in other parts of the brain to process other stimuli. Neurotheology may seem a bit atheistic in its nature, and I agree that any in the field may have entered it due to an interest in debunking religious experience. This unscientific/biased attitude is the same attitude Paul Broca entered his infamous brain mass study with. The only problem with cold hard scientific fact is that it's observed and written down by human beings. The same species that took the better part of several 1000 years to discover how the circulatory system works....
An article on neurotheology (interseting if not a bit biased)
Damning use of neurotheology tries to use any research to undermine the truth of religion and/or its importance to human beings. This is the way in which the American Humanist Organization considers it, that organization, of course, being atheistic or at least secularist in nature. They see experiments in neurotheology as a means of definitively disproving religion as a mere misfiring of neurons. This same camp also tries to tie religious zeal with a comorbid psychiatric disorder. One of these disorders is a seizure disorder which affects the temporal lobe of the brain. People suffering from this disorder now supposedly show a heightened sense of religious experience, greater use of religious language, etc. Therfore, this camp implies, a sensitivity in the temporal lobe of the brain is that disorder to which we attribute the name of God. Also, hyper-activation of the limbic system of the brain (as happens during LSD intoxication) may also lead to a religious experience. One researcher has even gone so far to build a "God helmet" that activates the temporal lobe using magnetic fields. Most users have reported a religious sort of experience, except those who have no pre-existing religious beliefs (such as Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion). His results have been irreplicable, though, leading some to doubt that the God helmet acts as little more than a placebo.
Informative use of neurotheology seeks to use neurotheology as a means of understanding how religious experience is sensed and processed by the human person. This camp is full of those who are either objective scientists or those theologians and Believers of various faiths who have not condemned the discipline outright. One of the best explanations I've read of what neurothology might mean to this camp is that it might only be discovering an antenna which picks up on the spiritual. Other groups seek to condemn the research outright, but most of these groups are evangelical in nature. Most Evangelical Christianity and most Protestant theology is based on an extremely unscientific approach to God, as whatever humans discover would be more likely to be a deceitful product of our fallen nature than a discovery of God's work in nature.
For myself, I'm pretty interested in the field, being a believer and also being a student of psychology. I think that neurotheology is a bit like exploring the other senses--audition, gustation, touch, olfaction, and sight. The over activity of the limbic system during a religious experience may merely be how the brain processes religious experiences, the same way that neurons fire in other parts of the brain to process other stimuli. Neurotheology may seem a bit atheistic in its nature, and I agree that any in the field may have entered it due to an interest in debunking religious experience. This unscientific/biased attitude is the same attitude Paul Broca entered his infamous brain mass study with. The only problem with cold hard scientific fact is that it's observed and written down by human beings. The same species that took the better part of several 1000 years to discover how the circulatory system works....
An article on neurotheology (interseting if not a bit biased)
Labels: faith, neurology, neurotheology, psychology, religion, theology
posted by Nick M. at 8:49 PM
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