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Abstract

Humans have postulated the existence of a transcendent soul capable of interacting with higher being (e.g. God). This soul has no physical limitations and may persist beyond time and space. Likewise, this non-physical component of personhood allows the presence of God to infiltrate the mind to produce genuine religious experiences with such a higher being. In contrast, the physicalist position of neurobiology seeks to attribute religious feelings and experiences to neurochemicals and the precise firing of neurons; the brain is the beginning and end of all religiosity. On the one hand, the idea is that human beings are nothing but collections of neurons firing in response to external signals. On the other hand, there may be a portion of personhood that is unreachable by biology and that constitutes the core of a human being. If neurobiology is eventually capable of explaining away every aspect of religious experience, then one might claim that God is not truly present in individual religiosity. But if neurobiology can “explain away” religious experience, then it should also be able to explain away any experience including logic and reasoning, the very foundations of science itself. I will explore these ideas in this paper.

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