The Neuroscience of Religious Experience

Almost three-quarters of the way through his book, McNamara writes: “At this point (assuming the reader has plowed through the material in the previous chapters [emphasis mine]), we are no longer surprised to see links between phenomena involving aberrations in self-consciousness with the right anterior lobe” (187). McNamara is an associate professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine who argues that religion and religious experiences involve key nodes of the amygdala, large portions of the prefrontal lobes, and the anterior temporal cortex of the brain (ix). Even being thus forewarned in the preface and relying heavily on QUICKSTUDY© brain and nervous system charts, a reader who is not a neuroscientist or only superficially acquainted with human anatomy does indeed feel as if she or he were plowing with a wooden plow drawn by a horse through rocky terrain. Even my charts prepared for medical students did not have all the places McNamara mentioned in the brain. The effort, however, is rewarding, for his use of neuroscience insights in investigating religious experiences is both illuminating and challenging. This reviewer accepts the neuroscience as reliable, leaving its critical evaluation to neuroscientists. I will instead reflect on his work from the perspective of an anthropologically informed theologian and biblical scholar.

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