Product Description

Why have we humans always longed to connect with something larger than ourselves? Even today in our technologically advanced age, more than seventy percent of Americans claim to believe in God. Why, in short, won’t God go away? In this groundbreaking new book, researchers Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili offer an explanation that is at once profoundly simple and scientifically precise: The religious impulse is rooted in the biology of the brain.

In Why God Won’t Go Away, Newberg and d’Aquili document their pioneering explorations in the field of neurotheology, an emerging discipline dedicated to understanding the complex relationship between spirituality and the brain. Blending cutting-edge science with illuminating insights into the nature of consciousness and spirituality, they bridge faith and reason, mysticism and empirical data. The neurological basis of how the brain identifies the “real” is nothing short of miraculous. This fascinating, eye-opening book dares to explore both the miracle and the biology of our enduring relationship with God.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25123 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-26
• Released on: 2002-03-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.com Review
Over the centuries, theories have abounded as to why human beings have a seemingly irrational attraction to God and religious experiences. In Why God Won't Go Away authors Andrew Newberg, M.D., Eugene D'Aquili, M.D., and Vince Rause offer a startlingly simple, yet scientifically plausible opinion: humans seek God because our brains are biologically programmed to do so.

Researchers Newberg and D'Aquili used high-tech imaging devices to peer into the brains of meditating Buddhists and Franciscan nuns. As the data and brain photographs flowed in, the researchers began to find solid evidence that the mystical experiences of the subjects "were not the result of some fabrication, or simple wishful thinking, but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events," explains Newberg. "In other words, mystical experience is biologically, observably, and scientifically real.... Gradually, we shaped a hypothesis that suggests that spiritual experience, at its very root, is intimately interwoven with human biology." Lay readers should be warned that although the topic is fascinating, the writing is geared toward scientific documentation that defends the authors' hypothesis. For a more palatable discussion, seek out Deepak Chopra's How to Know God, in which he also explores this fascinating evidence of spiritual hard-wiring. --Gail Hudson

From Publishers Weekly
The collaborative efforts of science writer Rause, radiologist Newberg and psychiatrist d'Aquili (Newberg's late colleague at the University of Pennsylvania) result in a murky and overspiritualized remix of what should be a compelling scientific investigation into the neurology of mystical experience. The book's best material is its summary of Newberg and d'Aquili's research using advanced imaging technologies to study brain activity during "peak" meditative states, which not only suggests a characteristic radiological profile but also uncovers some specific correlations between brain function and subjective religious experience. For example, in subjects who reported a feeling of infinite perspective and self-transcendence during meditation, the researchers identified decreased activity in the brain's "object association areas" where perceptions of the boundary between self and other are normally processed. The authors conclude that these experiences are the result of normal, healthy neurophysiology, not to be dismissed as pathological or random events a point that believers and practitioners will doubtless appreciate. But the broader questions these results suggest questions about the origins and significance of human religious behavior lead the researchers quite out of their depth into a speculative rehash of Joseph Campbell, comparative religion and sociobiology. This culminates in a confused and confusing discussion of what it means to accept that religious experience is "neurologically real" or that spirituality "does us good."

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This fascinating and thought-provoking book by two neurologists and a veteran journalist reflects the two physicians' long-term interests in the role of religious experience in the mind and its location in the brain. Their studies were most often done with the aid of single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), a process in which the subject need not be in a machine while it is working. SPECT allows all involved to work in an informal atmosphere, which has undoubtedly made the results obtained more closely reflect both religious and neurological reality. Early on, the authors assert that "biology, in some way, compels the spiritual urge." They know the literature of their field and of religious experience, as well as the history of the mind and brain. They write lucidly, analogize effectively and often strikingly, and delightfully combine science and human interest. Their arguments are cogent, and their observations and questions should keep readers seriously involved. William Beatty
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Large hypotheses supported by small science
This book was an easily summarized quick read.

1. Research on Tibetan meditators and Nuns using HMPAO-SPECT nuclear imaging shows that blood flow to the "Orientation Association Area" (OAA) of the brain decreases during peak meditation states. This brain area, just in front of and on top of the "Primary Vision Area" computes our orientation with the space surrounding us. The hypothesis is that, during meditation, the normal data pathway to this area is partially blocked, leading to "Deafferentation of the Orientation Area". (My thought - DOA?). This hypothesis leads to the speculation that feelings of "infinite space, infinite connectivity, communion directly with God, etc. common in intense religious experience and the states achieved by meditation arise directly from starving the OAA of data.

2. The rare experience of "Absolute Unitary Being" (AUB) - essentially complete suppression of data to the OAA, is really, really powerful - but cannot be described in words -- it has to be experienced. This state leads, in a healthy way, to an understanding that all religions share a common, higher reality, and other nice things.

3. On the other hand, partial suppression of data to the OAA can lead to an understanding that one's particular understanding of God is the only valid one, leading to tribalism, war, and other bad things.

4. The feelings extant during intense enjoyment of music, or the rituals of Catholic Communion, or repeating Rosary bead Hail Marys, offer hints at the AUB without requiring the intense effort of deep meditation.

5. While the effects of mind altering drugs or brain injury or mental illness sometimes resemble that of deep meditation, meditation itself and the minds that practice meditation are essentially healthy. Furthermore, people who experience these spiritual connections, weak or strong, report happier lives than those who do not.

4. The authors say in their 2002 epilogue, "We hope our work will provide a new way to explore the connection between science and the religious urge - the driving spiritual force behind all religions - in ways that not only shed new light on the origins of human spirituality, but also give us greater scientific insights into the mysterious workings of the human brain."

I enjoyed the book but feel the experimental evidence does not fully support the hypothesis.

Good Research, but poor analysis, and circular conclusions
These authors share with us the latest neurological research findings on "the not so dramatic changes" that occur in the brain when it undergoes controlled acts of meditation: This is done by tracking the blood flow with a radioactive tracer as a CAT-Scan takes cross-sectional snapshots of a subject engaged in the actual process of meditation.

According to these authors, what the pictures show is that compared to a "statistical baseline," the frontal lobe in the subject is more active at the same time that the parietal lobe is blood-deprived. The effect on the mind of this combined increased flow in the frontal lobe and deprived flow in the parietal lobe, according to these authors, is a lost in ones sense of "self" and a perception of becoming more of "one" with the world. In short, one loses his ego orientation and his general sense of self.

The authors point out that this sense of "lost of ego" occurs also for people who go through spiritually induced trances and rituals, and other mythical religious-like experiences, including self-transcending drug induced experiences, or operations where the brain is damaged. But they are careful not to draw too fine a point about a possible direct correlation between a blood-deprived parietal lobe and over-activity in the frontal lobe, and self-transcending feelings of "oneness." According to Dr. Andrew Newberg, (on the McCloughlin Show) we get the same experience by watching a sunset, listening to Mozart, or even in temple lobe seizures caused by epilepsy or other diseases. His main point here was that the quality of the respective experiences, are all very different and are by no means easily "mapped" one-to-one into corresponding brain functions or to brain architecture, directly.

On the issue of whether belief in God fits in the same class of delusions as the "oneness" phenomenon, these authors finesse the issue in an academically trivial way: Basically saying that since all human experiences whether "direct sense data," or "reprocessed thoughts as creative ideas" (that is conceptions rather than perceptions), they are all processed in the same way: as reconstructions within the conscious mind. Thus "God experiences" are in themselves indistinguishable from any other data, including sense data. Thus due to this inherent ambiguity, we cannot tell whether belief in God is real or not? QED.

While this academically neat trick of trivializing this most important of issues may satisfy the authors need to "straddle" this sensitive fence, it does nothing for a book entitled "Why God Won't Go Away?" [If we can't trust a Neurologist (or is it Neuro-theologist?) to tell us the truth about the relationship between brain structure and conscious brain processing - that is: to tell us that God is a "mental construct" and little more -- then who can we trust?]

This trivialized position is of course difficult to square with the author's section on mysticism, where what we know about the proto-religious habits of early man, turns out to be exactly what the Freudian psychologists have always told us: that man's religious yearnings are mostly a reaction to fear, environmental threats, general lack of control over the chaos in the world, and most of all, a reaction to his fear of death: That is, that religion is very definitely a stress induced collective delusion that has been "colonized," through socialization.

The grand purpose of the book was precisely to try to answer these very questions, and the closely related, or corollary ones, such as: Are there biological roots to religious experiences? If so, what does this say about the nature of the spiritual urge? Can this experience be produced externally? That is, is the God experience exteriorly stimulated? Even if we can induce these experiences does it then follow that all of these experience are the same? For instance are theology, ideology, diseases, split-brain research, and mind-manipulation which all produce it, are also all the same (and here we mean the same in kind, not quality)?

These are the questions the research cannot yet seem to answer. Yet, the authors still make a fairly weak case that these conclusions are not inconsistent with things like belief in God, benefiting from prayer, etc.

Where the authors are more like scientists and less like Rabbis is in their analysis of the brain scans. What they say here is that when we look at the brain via a Cat-Scan, we generally see "large-scale global effects," but that what we really need to be able to see are "the small-scale more detailed effects" and their changes under "case analysis" if we are to better understand what is really going on inside the mind.

On this feeling of being a part of the larger world; the authors comes full circle: that this "oneness of being" is an ineffable God-like kind of experience that may or may not have a biological meaning. In sum, the book does a good job of describing the mechanics of brain biology, and summarizing recent research, but a poor job of answering its own questions: making the connection between brain architecture, brain mechanics and "other-worldly" or God-like experiences. On this very issue, which is so central to answering all of the questions posed above and at the beginning of the book, the author repeatedly "punts."

His "functional descriptors" are little more than names he himself has "coined" for his own self-described "brain constructs," that are spatially located loosely as identifiable brain functions. They seem to have little more than correlational relationships to actual biological structures, per se.

This mode of analysis is quite different from even what Julian Jaynes does in his book "The Origins of Consciousness in the Break-down of the Bicameral Mind" (which I note in passing is not even cited in this book: Shame on these authors!). What Jaynes shows in a very convincing non-medical way, is that consciousness itself may well have been developed as a mere by-product of brain architecture. Similarly, Peter Burger deals with these issues in a much more professional way in his "The Sacred Canopy," and in his "A Rumor of Angels." Berger, of course does not appear in the list of citations either. And although William James' "Varieties of Religious Experiences" is cited, the book of his that is most relevant to this research, "The Will to Believe," also goes unreferenced. I hesitate to even mention Shumaker's "The Corruption of Reality," which is a tour de force in this very area, but also does not appear in the list of references.

Frankly, although I am not religious, I was expecting a lot more and thus was very disappointed in this book. It seemed bent on hewing the politically correct religious line, the deference it pays to religious orthodoxy is almost fawning, which is not exactly what we expect of our scientifically-trained medical professionals.

Two stars

An interesting perspective on the neuroethology of religion
This book explores the relationship between the brain's functioning and religion and myth. The authors note that (page 8): "Gradually, we shaped a hypothesis that suggests that spiritual experience, at its very root, is intimately interwoven with human biology. That biology, in some way, compels the spiritual urge." In short (page 9), "We will examine the biological drive that compels us to make myths, and the neurological machinery that gives these myths shape and power."

In the study of evolution, one key question is: What is the survival value of a particular behavior? What is its advantage in natural selection? How does it enhance survival odds of individuals? This book, as others, suspects that the ability to hold religious values and myths, in fact, enhances survival value of individuals and even groups. The authors note (page 138): "Their religion would serve to strengthen bonds between individuals and to encourage more peaceful and productive interaction in the community at large. Stronger social groups, of course, would mean better lives for clan members, which might ultimately result in higher rates of survival as well."

The authors, including some well-respected researchers in brain structure and function, use standard neurophysiological technology to assess the brain's functioning with respect to religious behaviors. They report studies that suggest that certain brain areas are involved in religious-related behaviors.

The book also notes that the authors do not want to set up biology versus religion dichotomy. They observe that the fact that the brain is built to accept religious values and beliefs does not mean that religious beliefs are wrong. Simply, they assert that there is machinery in place for people to be predisposed toward accepting a belief in God, or some other deity/entity.

This is an intriguing book. Readers may respond very negatively or positively, based on their beliefs. But the argument in the book makes on think about important issues in humans' lives. If for no other reason, that makes this worthwhile reading.