WHO IS SPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS?
A growing segment of the world’s population now considers itself atheist.1 An atheist is generally considered a person who does not believe in the existence of God and who does not follow a particular religion. However, even within the category of atheism, there is some degree of variability. For example, there are those who are rather staunch or “strong” atheists and do not believe in anything supernatural.2 Some of these individuals go beyond that and are highly critical of anyone who does believe in God or something supernatural. For these individuals, anyone who believes in God is considered delusional or worse, psychotic. These atheists often adhere to a more specific concept of “scientism.” Scientism refers to the belief that science will provide an answer to all the questions we might have about the universe.3 These answers not only apply to the material world in the context of physics, biology, and chemistry, but might ultimately be applicable to questions about love, morality, and religion. For these individuals, every aspect of the universe can be understood or studied through the scientific lens. As might be expected, for these individuals, there is no room for anything spiritual or supernatural.
Other atheists similarly do not believe in God but are not as highly critical of those who are religious or spiritual. These individuals are sometimes regarded as “weak atheists.” In their worldview, people have different approaches to the notion of God, with some believing in God and others not. However, they do not typically label those individuals who believe in God as abnormal. Thus, these atheists are tolerant of religious or supernatural beliefs, even though they themselves do not hold such beliefs.
For some atheists, there is still a profound sense of the spiritual, but not the supernatural. For these individuals, the universe has a deep beauty and mystery that goes beyond anything humans can easily comprehend or experience. Noted individuals in this category include Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan. Much like a religious or spiritual person, such individuals often perceive a sense of substantial interconnectedness of all things in the universe. In thinkers such as Pythagoras, Spinoza, and Einstein, we see a kind of spiritual reverence for mathematics and the beauty and simplicity of the equations that help to describe the workings of the universe, from the large-scale structure of superclusters of galaxies to the quantum structure of the quark.
About the universe and what it might mean to us, Carl Sagan once said, “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”4 This certainly has some spiritual overtones, but not as much as another of his quotes: “I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.”5 Here again is the notion of a spiritual-like concept invoked as part of a scientific pursuit. Einstein specifically struggled with the connection between science and something that felt spiritual. His notion that “science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind,” suggests there needs to be some kind of interaction between the two, even though Einstein typically rejected any formal concept of religion.
There are other large groups of individuals who might be considered atheists but still have a belief in things that go beyond the material world. Arguably, most, if not all, Buddhists would be considered this kind of atheist.6 They do not have a belief in a theistic notion of God as in the traditions of Judaism or Christianity. However, they have a strong sense of a universal consciousness that extends beyond the material world or perhaps supersedes it. In fact, within some forms of Buddhist ideology, there is the notion that the material world derives from a universal mind or consciousness rather than the other way around.7 Achieving this universal consciousness, which humans can access through their mind or brain, is the ultimate goal of Buddhist meditation practices and considered to represent enlightenment. Interestingly, on attaining enlightenment, a person also realizes that the material world, within which science resides, is an inferior representation of reality. The physical world is sometimes referred to as a dream or illusion, which would consequently relegate science to being a dream or illusion as well.
In considering the term enlightenment, it is interesting to note that it can mean different things depending on one’s perspective on religious and spiritual issues.8 For the Buddhist, enlightenment is the ultimate escape of material reality and uniting with universal consciousness. Even in the Judeo-Christian scriptures of the Bible, the term enlightenment is described as referring to an individual who has come in contact with God and now understands the true nature of God and God’s relationship with humans. Ephesians 1:18 states, “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling.” The idea here is that enlightenment is associated with knowing God in a religious or spiritual way.
The Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe, however, took human thought in a very different direction. During this time, people moved away from religious and spiritual ideas. Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant redefined enlightenment as freedom from religion by moving people away from a state of religious ignorance.9 Enlightenment in this context referred to a more scientific enlightenment in which people recognized the inferiority of religious and spiritual ideas and the need for rational thought processes and scientific disciplines. For those adhering to concepts borne out of the Enlightenment, the highest mental states involved rational thinking and a complete escape from any type of supernatural or religious beliefs.
A more recent development has been the growing group of individuals who consider themselves to be spiritual but not religious.10 Many of these individuals would also fall into the category of atheism. These individuals do not believe in God, or at least do not believe in a traditional deity as found in monotheistic religions. These individuals explore spirituality through a variety of novel and ancient concepts.11 Many people in this “New Age” environment seek out Buddhist and Hindu concepts, such as meditation, mindfulness, and consciousness. Others turn to pagan concepts related to nature and the earth. Still others seek out various cults or alternative approaches to fulfill spiritual needs by mechanisms other than traditional religions or a specific belief in God. Thus, many of these individuals reject traditional notions of God and sacred scriptures as they explore spirituality in new ways.
Considering the spiritual but not religious category in more detail again brings us back to the issue of definitions. Those individuals who fall into this category either flat-out reject, or at least have serious questions about, traditional religious systems. The doctrinal concepts and reliance on specific stories about God, Messiahs, or prophets, usually ring hollow for these individuals. Agnostics as well as atheists see substantial logical problems and contradictions in the myths of traditional religions. For this reason, agnostics, along with atheists, are unable to accept these traditions as providing any kind of relevant material on how to live one’s life or how to be spiritual.
While agnosticism is different from atheism, there is a clear overlap.12 Most agnostics would also consider themselves atheists with regard to specific beliefs in God or traditional religions. Agnostics typically question the beliefs of these traditions and seek rational, logical, or emotional approaches to understanding the notion of God. Many agnostics also become part of the spiritual but not religious group as they strive to find some support to satisfy their spiritual concerns, but outside the more traditional framework of religion.13 This is an important point: Agnostics tend to be interested in addressing their spiritual needs, whereas atheists have no belief in a spiritual word or a spiritual side to themselves.
Atheists typically have very little interest in any spiritual tradition or approach that might include ideas that extend beyond the material realm. Agnostics, on the other hand, usually have far more “questions of ultimate concern,” as the theologian Paul Tillich would say.14 Agnostics typically believe that there is something greater than a purely material perspective on the world but are unable to understand or articulate it. These individuals are more likely than atheists to seek out yoga and meditation programs or other spiritually focused activities. Whether an agnostic finds a path for his or her spiritual quest depends on a variety of factors, including an ultimate willingness to accept some paradigm that provides a sense of meaning and purpose in life, even if it goes beyond science in the material world. Of course, many agnostics ultimately find atheism as a landing point. But others continue to search for a greater sense of meaning and purpose in their life.
THE BRAINS OF BELIEVERS, ATHEISTS, AND AGNOSTICS
Given the distinctions and variations observed between agnostics and atheists, the natural question for neurotheology is, what are the differences in the brains of believers, nonbelievers, and agnostics?” Arguably, there are distinctions in the brains of those who believe in specific religious traditions and those who do not. And, as with many of the concepts discussed thus far, there is likely a continuum of brain-related functions associated with this diversity and these variations.
The short answer is that we don’t fully understand the difference between believers and nonbelievers. There is also a larger fundamental problem from a scientific perspective, which is that most studies that have begun to look at this question typically use standard scientific methods as a way of evaluating differences between groups. While this can be very helpful, part of the problem is that any differences observed are related to the average of all people within that group. So, for example, a study that were to find that nonbelievers have more active frontal lobes on average than believers would truly show only a global difference. But within those large samples, there would likely be atheists with very low frontal lobe activity and religious people with very high frontal lobe activity. Establishing inter-individual differences and categorizing people on an individual basis is much more difficult.
That said, there are a number of studies that have at least begun to explore these issues. Some have taken a decidedly neuroscientific approach, whereas others have taken a more psychological one. When the neuroscientist Sam Harris studied the brain and beliefs, he found no fundamental distinction in brain function between beliefs in God and beliefs in everyday facts.15 In other words, the brain appears to handle God in much the same way it handles other objects in the world. To a religious person’s brain, God is considered as real as a bicycle.
From a psychological perspective, one group of studies has explored the possibility that religious people view the world differently, or think differently, from those who are nonreligious. Many of these studies suffer an intrinsic bias in that they view religious people as inherently less logical, less critical, and more susceptible to external suggestion. But even if religious people do think differently, another question is whether one way of thinking is better or worse in some way. Let’s look at some of the studies designed to explore the nature of the religious and nonreligious brain in different ways.
Several studies have attempted to determine if religious people are less intelligent or less logical than nonreligious people. A meta-analysis of sixty-three studies on intelligence and religiosity led by Miron Zuckerman and his colleagues at the University of Rochester found “a reliable negative relation between intelligence and religiosity.” These conclusions were based on a review of several types of studies, including studies directly measuring intelligence (e.g., via intelligence quotient [IQ]), as well as studies looking at particularly intelligent people such as scientists. The authors argued that there were several reasons for the inverse relationship they found. They suggested that intelligent people might be less likely to conform to beliefs that are now substantiated by clear data, and might prefer highly analytical approaches that might reject religious beliefs, and might use their intelligence to better regulate emotions and behaviors. While these are reasonable hypotheses, we also have to keep in mind that these results are based on large samples. On an individual level, there are plenty of very intelligent people who are highly religious and plenty of less intelligent people who are atheists.
While studies such as Zuckerman’s are important to consider, neurotheology would encourage us to fully understand the meaning of intelligence in the context of these studies. It seems that there are specific modes of thought that are more or less likely to foster religious beliefs in people. In this way, certain measures of intelligence, such as high IQ, may be associated with lower religiousness. But there are other types of intelligence and problem-solving abilities that might lead people to more religious interpretations of the world. In fact, Zuckerman considered arguments that there are essentially two ways of thinking about the world: one more analytical and associated with established measures of intelligence and one more intuitive.16 The latter mode of thinking may be more predisposed to religious beliefs.
Pascal Boyer has argued in an essay published in Nature in 2008 that religious thinking is an inescapable property emerging from the human cognitive system, but that “disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions.”17 Boyer feels that this explains why there are more religious than nonreligious individuals. Religiousness is essentially a more natural type of brain function. Other scholars have also argued that religiousness is based on more “naturally occurring” brain processes.18 On one hand, it may make sense that religious beliefs come more easily to us. On the other hand, all of our brain processes are “natural.” The capacity for both religious and nonreligious thought to exist within our brain would seem to support the overall perspective of neurotheology, which strives to integrate both modes of though in the most effective manner.
A variety of approaches have explored whether specific cognitive processes support or reject religious and spiritual beliefs. The overarching goal of such approaches is to establish the cognitive processes that might explain why we do or do not hold religious beliefs. One common paradigm involves presenting various logical problems to people to determine whether the approach to solving those problems and the accuracy with which they are solved are the same between religious and nonreligious individuals. The syllogism used is a common logical problem with a familiar pattern. The individual is asked, “If statement 1 and statement 2 are true, does statement 3 follow logically?” For example, “If John is a man, and all men are mortal, then John is mortal.” Several studies have explored how people analyze these types of logical problems and have typically found that religious people did not do as well as nonreligious people.19
A particularly well-designed study tried to eliminate some of the biases that both believers and nonbelievers bring to the solving of different problems. In order to account for this, the researchers presented to believers and nonbelievers a group of syllogisms that were either pro-religious or anti-religious in their content.20 An example of a pro-religious syllogism is as follows: If God created everything in the universe, and if human beings are part of the universe, then God created human beings. This is logically consistent if you are asked to assume the first two statements are correct, but it is also pro-religious. The authors found that when presented in this way, individuals who were believers tended to do very well with syllogisms that were pro-religious but did not do well with syllogisms that were anti-religious. Conversely, nonbelievers did very well on syllogisms that were anti-religious but did not always do well on syllogisms that were pro-religious. The important implication here is not so much that religious people are more or less logical than nonreligious people, but rather that both types of individual make logical mistakes in the direction of their own biases. This is clearly an important point with regard to the larger topic of what makes people religious or not. Neurotheology strives to find a less biased perspective and would acknowledge that believers and nonbelievers alike have certain flaws in their neurological systems that depend heavily on the overall beliefs they hold.
At the University of British Columbia, the psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan used another approach, trying to stimulate certain cognitive processes to determine whether these processes are concordant or discordant with religious beliefs. They performed a two-part study with the first part showing, as have many of the earlier-mentioned studies, that greater critical thinking abilities were generally associated with religious disbelief.21 In the second part of the study, test subjects were given different ways of boosting their critical thinking processes. It turned out that when critical thinking was enhanced by various tasks, religious disbelief also increased. In other words, turning on the cognitive processes of the brain appears to turn off the religious processes.
A further study supporting the idea that there might be two different cognitive systems in the brain contributing to belief was conducted by the psychologist Jonathan Evans.22 One system is the evolutionarily older instinctual or intuitive system. The second system is the more recently evolved higher abstract reasoning system. Both are important in helping us evaluate the world, but they might contribute differently to religious belief or disbelief depending on how we use them together. One system may not be inherently better or worse than the other; they simply process information about the world in different ways. And since religious beliefs incorporate topics that often defy logic, such as meaning and purpose in life or what happens after we die, it might make sense that more intuitive processes are at work in developing myths and ideas about these challenging issues.
There are also other types of cognitive processes that might support religious beliefs. For example, a study that surveyed over 1,200 people found what the authors referred to as a path model for the development of religious beliefs.23 The authors suggested that “mentalizing” about different people and ideas comes first. This leads to a sense of meaning and purpose within the world that ultimately supports religious or paranormal beliefs. The cognitive process of mentalizing is the tendency to infer or think about the mental states of others. Mentalizing is also referred to as theory of mind and may relate to the ability to perceive a mind in objects or supernatural beings such as God. The brain areas that appear to be involved in mentalizing are the temporo-parietal junction, parts of the frontal lobe, and a part of the parietal lobe called the fusiform face area. One piece of evidence supporting the theory that mentalizing and religion are connected is that individuals with autism, and hence have a reduced ability to mentalize, have typically been found to be less religious or less likely to believe in God than people without autism.24
Perhaps the most interesting research on this topic was performed by Dimitrios Kapogiannis of the National Institutes of Health.25 Kapogiannis and his colleagues conducted an fMRI study looking at functional connectivity; that is, how different parts of the brain work together. First, they evaluated twenty-six people with different religious beliefs according to several dimensions of belief. The first dimension related to God’s perceived level of involvement in the world, ranging from very distant to very involved. The second dimension had to do with the perception of God’s emotion toward us, ranging from anger to love. The third dimension was religious knowledge and was divided into doctrinal versus experiential. The statements used to characterize these different dimensions were then presented to a separate set of forty subjects while in the fMRI scanner to see which brain areas were affected when reflecting on each dimension. The results were fascinating, demonstrating evidence for a complex set of networks being involved in religious beliefs. For example, religious subjects activated a pathway involving the frontal lobe when considering the involvement of God in the world. This makes sense since this area of the frontal lobe helps with theory-of-mind processing. When people considered the emotion of God, areas of the brain involved in an emotional understanding of others were activated, including the middle part of the frontal and temporal lobes. Doctrinal beliefs were associated with the neural pathways involved in language and abstract thought processes; that is, Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas. Experiential beliefs were found to be associated with brain pathways involved in memory and visualization, particularly in the temporal lobes. Here we see initial evidence for multiple cognitive systems playing a role in religious beliefs. However, additional data make some of these findings murkier.
A more recent study by Anthony Jack and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve University surveyed more than two hundred people to determine whether religious and spiritual beliefs are linked to various social, analytical, and cognitive functions in the brain.26 This study found a different result from those just discussed, with no relationship found between social mentalizing and religious or spiritual beliefs. This finding has been supported by other studies, which similarly found no relationship between mentalizing and religious beliefs.27
In Jack’s study, religious and spiritual beliefs were much more correlated with measures of moral concern or with “ontological confusion.” Ontological confusion refers to ways in which people attribute concepts of one type of object to a different type of object. For example, a person might ascribe attributes of mental phenomena to physical phenomena or attributes of animate organisms to inanimate objects. Thus, thinking your car can feel pain if it is in an accident is a form of ontological confusion. In a study of almost three thousand people, ontological confusion correlated best with the existence of religious beliefs. However, it should be noted that many people might not consider this a form of confusion, but rather a more accurate assessment of the world. In Buddhist and Hindu thought, there is a universal consciousness that suffuses all things in the universe. Consciousness is the primary stuff of the universe; therefore, rocks and trees are considered to have consciousness even if it is not expressed like human consciousness. This notion of “panpsychism” also has a long tradition in the West dating from the pre-Socratic thinkers to Spinoza and to the present day via scholars such as the anthropologist Gregory Bateson.28
An idea related to mentalizing is something called anthropomorphism, which states that the human brain tends to see faces or human-like characteristics in various objects. If we project human-like characteristics on objects like the sky or sun, then we may perceive of gods associated with those objects.29 Given the prevalence of gods in different traditions associated with the sun, wind, and animals, anthropomorphism seems a reasonable hypothesis. However, in a study performed by my research team, we asked people to draw what they visualized when thinking about God. Simply put, we asked them to draw a picture of God.30 In this study, we found that only about 20 percent of the almost four hundred drawings included faces. Thus, it may be that most people visualize God in a more abstract or esoteric way. Further, a study by the psychologists Aiyana Willard and Ara Norenzayan found that anthropomorphism was not related to belief in God and that teleological thinking was only weakly related to religious and nonreligious paranormal beliefs.31 So it is unclear how much anthropomorphism is really responsible for the development of religious beliefs.
A study by Konika Banerjee and Paul Bloom of Yale University explored teleological beliefs in terms of whether religious believers differed from nonbelievers in their perception of the meaning of life events.32 The study explored attitudes of different groups of people with respect to religious beliefs and also beliefs about fate. Not surprisingly, the results showed that the large majority of religious believers, particularly those with strong beliefs in God, also believed in fate. However, a majority of nonbelievers also subscribed to the notion of fate. Thus, while the notion of fate or purpose in life was often mediated by a belief in God, a belief in God was not required for people to believe in fate or purpose in life.
The binary process of the brain that we discussed earlier also plays an important role in distinguishing religious from nonreligious ideas. Our brain has the ability to perceive opposing concepts, one of which relates to mind–body dualism. Theoretically, people with a strong belief that the mind and body can be separated in some way are more likely to consider it possible that ghosts and spirits exist.33 However, as with anthropomorphism, there are not sufficient research data to know how much this cognitive process is responsible for religious beliefs.
Several studies have employed techniques to directly change the brain’s function to see if this also changed religious beliefs. Using a new technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, researchers are able to alter brain activity in specific areas by “beaming” magnetic fields into them. In a study by the psychologists Keise Izuma and Colin Holbrook, people whose frontal lobes were shut down by transcranial magnetic stimulation reported significantly less belief in God, angels, and heaven. This is an interesting piece of data that must be carefully considered. The authors concluded that since the part of the frontal lobe targeted in this study helps people resolve problems, the reduction in activity caused by the transcranial magnetic stimulation prevented study subjects from turning to religion to solve existential problems about death. The interesting question here is how the frontal lobes go about resolving difficult problems. Do we take a highly analytical approach, or do we take a more intuitive approach? If the frontal lobes help with analytical thinking, then we might expect that shutting them down would turn people toward religion. If the frontal lobes simply work to find a solution, whether religious or nonreligious, then shutting them down should turn people away from religion. This was the argument of the authors: that people were no longer troubled by the existential problem presented to them and hence did not need to turn to religion to solve it.
In a somewhat related study, the psychologist Michael Inzlicht investigated how religious and nonreligious people responded to making errors on a problem-solving task.34 In general, the religious study subjects were much less anxious and felt less stress when they made an error than the nonreligious subjects. This was also reflected in the brain’s electrical activity, where it was found that the religious subjects experienced less response in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the frontal lobe that reacts to mistakes. Interestingly, the religious subjects also made fewer mistakes, perhaps because they were less anxious.
The neuroscience researcher Lorena Gianotti and her colleagues conducted another fascinating study invoking changes in brain function.35 This study explored the difference between believers and nonbelievers with respect to how they visualized various images that contained blurred or unclear content, images similar to those used in a Rorschach test. However, unlike Rorschach images, the study images contained actual pictures or words that had been manipulated to make it difficult to see what was and was not there. The religious and nonreligious individuals both made mistakes when interpreting the pictures; however, they made their mistakes in different ways. Religious individuals were able to find many of the things that actually were in the pictures. However, sometimes religious individuals saw things that were not there. On the other hand, nonreligious people almost never saw things that were not in the pictures and sometimes had trouble finding things that were actually there.
The study went one interesting step further by giving the nonreligious individuals a medication that increases dopamine in the brain. Afterward, the investigators retested them with a new set of images and found they scored nearly the same as the religious individuals. This fascinating study implies not only that religious and nonreligious people see the world differently, but that there may be a neurophysiological correlate associated with these differences. In this particular case, the amount of dopamine released in the brain seemed to be associated with differences in the way people viewed their reality.
Dean Hamer’s work on the “God gene” also supports the important relationship between dopamine and religious and spiritual beliefs.36 If you remember, Hamer found a significant correlation between feelings of self-transcendence and a gene that codes for a brain receptor that regulates dopamine levels. Thus, there may be genetic variables that contribute to whether a person is a believer or a nonbeliever.
To date, no studies have explored the variety of ways in which people attribute their sense of spirituality and religiousness. In other words, no studies have documented differences among individuals who consider themselves spiritual but not religious, those who consider themselves neither spiritual nor religious, and those who consider themselves to be both religious and spiritual. This would be a very important future direction for neurotheology research. Studies could be performed to determine the degree to which people feel themselves to be religious and spiritual, and if a large enough population were studied, could determine a variety of physiological and neurophysiological correlates.
We might hypothesize where such differences lie based on current knowledge. Certainly, those who are spiritual but not religious likely share certain similarities with those who are both spiritual and religious. Both types of individual identify as being spiritual. This sense of spirituality may correlate with feelings of self-transcendence as it did in Dean Hamer’s research. It might also be the case that certain areas of the brain, such as the parietal lobe, are able to function in ways that more easily enable a person to have an experience he or she considers spiritual. The main differentiator between these two types of individual appears to be the religiousness aspect. The question arises, why do some people who are spiritual ultimately reject specific religious beliefs while others embrace them?
Perhaps there is a combination of factors involved, such as frontal lobe activity and dopamine activity. Although a simplistic model, if we consider high and low frontal activity along with high and low dopamine levels, we might end up with the same two-by-two matrix we considered for religiousness and spirituality. Perhaps if you have higher levels of frontal lobe activity and high dopamine levels, you are more likely to be both religious and spiritual. Perhaps if you have high dopamine levels but low frontal lobe activity, you are more likely to be spiritual but not religious. And perhaps if you have low activity in both, you are more likely to be an atheist. While speculative, such a model can be a launching point for future studies.
Another important question concerns how our beliefs and cognitive processes help us interpret various experiences and accept or reject them as spiritual. Some people see God in a sunset while others see different wavelengths of light being refracted. In a previous book, I described an individual who claimed to have had a near-death experience that met many of the criteria of other types of spiritual near-death experiences.37 This individual experienced the tunnel, the beautiful light, and other aspects of the core near-death experience. However, since she was an atheist to begin with, her interpretation was that it was simply the experience of her brain dying rather than a true spiritual experience. So perhaps, based on our frontal lobe and dopamine systems, the beliefs we hold going into certain experiences color the way we interpret them. An atheist friend once asked me, “Why doesn’t God just come down and shake my hand so that I would believe God exists?” I said to him, “If you ever experienced God coming to shake your hand, rather than believe God existed, you would most likely check yourself into the local psychiatric facility!”
Are there some experiences so powerful that they push all of our cognitive systems to their limits? Many people who have had near-death experiences become highly religious, especially if the experience is easily integrated into their existing religious system. Alternatively, a number of individuals who have had near-death experiences frequently report becoming more spiritual but less religious, stating that no specific religion was capable of explaining or helping them understand the experience. Of course, the individual whose near-death experience I studied still felt compelled by her atheistic stance even in the face of her experience. From a neurotheological perspective, the question becomes whether all near-death experiences, and other types of spiritual experiences for that matter, are subjectively and physiologically equivalent. It might be that regardless of what type of experience a very staunch atheist has, it could never dissuade him or her from his or her prevailing belief system that there is no God. Or perhaps there are some religious and spiritual experiences so powerful that a person has no choice but to accept them as real. Such an issue lies at the heart of the movie Contact, in which the lead character, played by Jodie Foster, has such an intense experience of the beauty of the universe that she has no choice but to accept it as real even though she is the only one who had the experience and no one else believes her.
Overall, the information we have about religious and nonreligious individuals is incomplete. There are theories based on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience that purportedly identify areas of the brain that underlie religious beliefs. As the data stand now, and as I have argued in prior works, it seems that there is not one single part of the brain that is the “religious spot” or the “God spot.” One part of the brain does not suddenly turn on when we are feeling particularly religious or spiritual. Given the richness and complexity of religious and spiritual phenomena, it is not a surprise that the data suggest many different areas are involved, along with many cognitive and emotional processes. In fact, a neurotheological approach might conclude that the entire brain is the “God spot.” All the different parts of the brain work together to enable us to have a complex repertoire of beliefs. And since the brain and body are intimately interconnected, it might not be a stretch to argue that it is the entire human being that is religious or spiritual.
We still don’t have a definitive answer as to why some people are religious and others are not. It is likely that complex interactions between genetics, development, environment, and personal experience all come together to lead one person to believe in God and another to reject God. Some people are already working on a complex synthesis of the data to help explain religious phenomena.38 And there is always the lingering issue of whether God is created by the brain or vice versa. After all, a lot of these difficult neuroscience problems about being religious would go away if we found that God does exist and simply created the human brain to be religious. For now, answering these questions is not easy, but hopefully, a carefully designed neurotheological approach can move us closer.