The Spiritual Brain: How Neuroscience is Revealing the Existence of God

by Mario Beauregard, Denyse O'Leary

Most scientists today would answer the latter. To them, physical reality is the only reality. Absolutely everything else -- including thought, feeling, mind, and will -- can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena, leaving no room for the possibility that religious and spiritual experiences are anything but illusions. But neuroscientist Mario Beauregard does not approach his work with such materialist presumptions. So when he first began studying the spiritual experiences of Carmelite nuns at the University of Montreal, he didn't doubt in principle that a contemplative might contact a reality outside herself during a mystical experience. Now, in The Spiritual Brain: How Neuroscience is Revealing the Existence of God, Beauregard (with co-author Denyse O'Leary) offers compelling evidence from his research that religious experiences have a nonmaterial origin -- and that may indeed be God who creates our spiritual experiences, not the brain.

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• Why religious experiences can't be dismissed as illusions just because they are associated with brain activity -- and more than thoughts and feelings can be

• How the areas of brain activation associated with contemplative prayer are quite distinct from those associated with hallucinations, autosuggestion, or states of intense emotional arousal -- resembling instead how the brain processes real experiences

• Scientific evidence that individuals who have religious experiences contact an objectively real “force” that exists outside themselves

• Extraordinary evidence that such experiences can occur even when clinical criteria of death have been reached and the brain is no longer functioning -- and why this suggests that such experiences are not illusory

• Are religious experiences pathological? How studies show that people reporting religious experiences score lower oon psychopathology measures and higher on psychological well-being scales than people who don't report them

• Why the high incidence of religious experiences in the American adult population also indicates that such experiences should be considered normal, not pathological

• How the transformation that often follows religious experiences can involve changes in thoughts, emotions, attitudes, core beliefs, and behaviors

• How there is absolutely no scientific evidence showing that delusions or hallucinations produce by a dysfunctional brain can induce the kind of long-term positive changes that often follow spiritual experiences

• How evolutionary psychology errs in attempting to ground spiritual experience in the qualities that animal nature requires in order to survive -- providing no explanation for the most significant evidence regarding spirituality

• How materialist presuppositions restrict the areas scientists are permitted to research to narrow, unproductive paths -- shutting the door to truth

• Why materialist neuroscientists have not succeeded in providing a satisfactory explanation of how religious experiences arise from the interaction between various brain regions, neural circuits and neurotransmitters -- and why their effort to so is doomed to failure

Beauregard and O'Leary also take on recent theories about a "God gene" and that brains are "hardwired" for religion. Such misguided and narrow-minded attempts to reduce spiritual experiences to material phenomena, they argue, amount to knee-jerk scientific materialism that cannot account for the many irrefutable accounts of mind over matter, of intuition, willpower, and leaps of faith, of the "placebo effect" in medicine, of near-death experiences on the operating table, and of psychic premonitions of a loved one in crisis, to say nothing of the occasional sense of oneness with nature and mystical experiences in meditation or prayer. Traditional science explains away these and other occurrences as delusions or misunderstandings, but by exploring the latest neurological research on phenomena such as these, The Spiritual Brain gets to their real source.

“A lively introduction to a field where neuroscience, philosophy, and secular/spiritual cultural wars are unavoidably intermingled.” -- Publishers Weekly