Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
By:
Andrew Newberg Eugene D'Aquili Vince Rause
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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, theybridge 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.
Description:
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
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Release Date: 2002-03-26
Customer Review: 1 out of 5
BAD science! - The book deserves to be trashed because it is an example of "applied" science, i.e. the authors are Believers and are using science to support their beliefs. We live in a democracy so they have the right to write the book, but I certainly hope their fellow scientists shun them for the misuse of scientific resources (supplies and money). To think my tax dollars may have helped them to twist the purpose of scientific inquiry to prove God exists.
Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Great question......gobledegop answers - I read this after reading Stroke of Insight.
What a waste of time.
While starting out with some good scientific observations, this book quickly devolves into "Madoffness" (unfounded claims........too good to be true).
Stroke of Insight shows that "mystical experiences" are always present in the right hemisphere of the brain, but, are obscured by the activity of the left hemisphere.
Mystical (religious) experiences are of the mind and available for anyone to experience, anytime.
It's part of our makeup and has nothing to do with "something" else out there.
But, I see that people who want to believe, are going to find a way to believe, including the remaking of scientific research.
These are probably the guy's that were used to validate that there were WMD in Iraq.
Customer Review: 3 out of 5
To Be or not to Be... - A sort of intriguing title to a book but that fall short of satisfying believer, or unbeliever alike. To me the most interesting part of the book is at the paragraph at the bottom of page 146, where it says you can't dismiss Spiritual experience as "mere" neurological activities, you would also have to distrust all of your own brain perceptions of the material world. On the other hand, if we do trust our perceptions of the physical world, we have no rational reason to declare the Spiritual experience is a fiction that is "only" on the mind.
And here lays the crucible of the matter, it is the physical world a construct of our minds, just like unbelievers made spirit to be? After all Theologians, Philosophers, Sages, and Mystics through the ages have claimed this to be so, "Life is but a dream..." and at the end of our life who could dare to say not to be so...
The authors obviously in the belief side draw the inevitable conclusion of God as the Unitary Being, definitely not a Scientific book neither a Mystic one, that I doubt will please a staunch unbeliever. And mildly will please a true student of Mysticism which I rather recommend to read Ibn Arabi's Meccan Revelations, or Mr. Chittick many books on the subject.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Great scientific research - I loved the book. I am a very open-minded Christian who deeply respcts all major religions. This book helps you understand better your own believes and those of others and see that they all aim to the same goal: a closeness to God.
Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Reductionism - This is a popularized version of d'Aquili and Newberg's The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1999).
Dr. d'Aquili, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, passed away in 1998 before this book was completed.
Rause is a journalist, and Newberg is an M.D. working in the Department of Radiology in the Division of Nuclear Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also teaches Religious Studies.
The thesis is that meditation is a voyage inward in which the conscious mind is blotted out in an effort to connect with a deep part of ourselves. The result is neurotheology (or the neurobiology of mystical experience). The argument is that rhythmic stimulation yields mystical union with something they define as "God" in the interior of self-consciousness.
The authors build on Evelyn Underhill's classic Mysticism (first edition, 1911, later much revised) by providing what they describe as "natural causes for 'supernatural' events" (p. 99). Mystical experiences are not thereby treated as mere illusions; they are, instead, understood as neurological events generated by various exercises crafted by mystics to produce those experiences and thereby resolve tensions in the life of the mystic.
The point of meditative exercises, according to d'Aquili and Newberg, is to satisfy the need to reduce an otherwise intolerable anxiety generated by the experience of opposites in life. The result of such self-induced neurological brain patterns is a kind of "experience" of "union," as the brain makes the conscious mind, of an inner "transcendence" over the exterior world.
This "neurotheology" is used to account for the origins of all religion, ritual, and myth.
Such an explanation is, of course, reductionist.
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