Spiritual practices, or awakenings, have an impact on brain, mind and personality. These changes are being scientifically predicted and proven. For example, studies show Buddhist priests and Franciscan nuns at the peak of religious feelings show a functional change in the lobes of their brain. Similar processes have been found in people with epilepsy, which Hippocrates called the sacred disease. New research is showing that not only does a person's brain activity change in particular areas while that person is experiencing religious epiphany, but such events can be created for some people, even self-professed atheists, by stimulating various parts of the brain. In this far-reaching and novel set, experts from across the nation and around the world present evolutionary, neuroscientific, and psychological approaches to explaining and exploring religion, including the newest findings and evidence that have spurred the fledgling field of neurotheology. It is not the goal of neurotheology to prove or disprove the existence of God, but to understand the biology of spiritual experiences. Such experiences seem to exist outside time and space - caused by the brain for some reason losing its perception of a boundary between physical body and outside world - and could help explain other intangible events, such as altered states of consciousness, possessions, alien visitations, near-death experiences and out-of-body events. Understanding them - as well as how and why these abilities evolved in the brain - could also help us understand how religion contributes to survival of the human race. Eminent contributors to this set help us answer questions including: How does religion better our brain function? What is the difference between a religious person and a terrorist who kills in the name of religion? Is there one site or function in the brain necessary for religious experience?

In this provocative book, evolutionist and evangelical Christian Denis O. Lamoureux proposes an approach to origins that moves beyond the "evolution-versus-creation" debate. Arguing for an intimate relationship between the Book of God's Words and the Book of God's Works, he presents evolutionary creation--a position that asserts that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit created the universe and life through an ordained and sustained evolutionary process. This view of origins affirms intelligent design and the belief that beauty, complexity, and functionality in nature reflect the mind of God. Lamoureux also challenges the popular Christian assumption that the Holy Spirit revealed scientific and historical facts in the opening chapters of the Bible. He contends that Scripture features an ancient understanding of origins that functions as a vessel to deliver inerrant and infallible messages of faith. Lamoureux shares his personal story and his struggle in coming to terms with evolution and Christianity. Like many, he lost his boyhood faith at university in classes on evolutionary biology. After graduation, he experienced a born-again conversion and then embraced belief in a literal six-day creation. Graduate school training at the doctoral level in both theology and biology led him to the conclusion that God created the world through evolution. Lamoureux closes with the two most important issues in the origins controversy--the pastoral and pedagogical implications. How should churches approach this volatile topic? And what should Christians teach their children about origins?

Perhaps inadvertently, historians have often eliminated the religious chapters--those episodes in history during which human insights into transcendence and divinity have shaped human consciousness--from our planet's story. This book tells the story of cosmic history as big historians tell it, beginning with the big bang, and explores the question of God hidden beneath this story. The book pauses on the Axial Age of human history: a moment during the first millennium BCE in which questions of transcendence first simultaneously arose in distinct locations around the world. By exploring this threshold in cosmic history, the author demonstrates the way the arrival of the God question marked a radical new human consciousness, one that ultimately laid the groundwork for the modern age.--

The Definitive Introduction To The Relationship Between Religion And Science ∗ In The Beginning: Why Did the Big Bang Occur? ∗ Quantum Physics: A Challenge to Our Assumptions About Reality? ∗ Darwin And Genesis: Is Evolution God′s Way of Creating? ∗ Human Nature: Are We Determined by Our Genes? ∗ God And Nature: Can God Act in a Law-Bound World? Over the centuries and into the new millennium, scientists, theologians, and the general public have shared many questions about the implications of scientific discoveries for religious faith. Nuclear physicist and theologian Ian Barbour, winner of the 1999 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion for his pioneering role in advancing the study of religion and science, presents a clear, contemporary introduction to the essential issues, ideas, and solutions in the relationship between religion and science. In simple, straightforward language, Barbour explores the fascinating topics that illuminate the critical encounter of the spiritual and quantitative dimensions of life.

Medicine, Religion, and Health: Where Science and Spirituality Meet will be the first title published in the new Templeton Science and Religion Series, in which scientists from a wide range of fields distill their experience and knowledge into brief tours of their respective specialties. In this, the series' maiden volume, Dr. Harold G. Koenig, provides an overview of the relationship between health care and religion that manages to be comprehensive yet concise, factual yet inspirational, and technical yet easily accessible to nonspecialists and general readers. Focusing on the scientific basis for integrating spirituality into medicine, Koenig carefully summarizes major trends, controversies, and the latest research from various disciplines and provides plausible and compelling theoretical explanations for what has thus far emerged in this relatively young field of study. Medicine, Religion, and Health begins by defining the principal terms and then moves on to a brief history of religion's role in medicine before delving into the current state of research. Koenig devotes several chapters to exploring the outcomes of specific studies in fields such as mental health, cardiovascular disease, and mortality. The book concludes with a review of the clinical applications derived from the research. Koenig also supplies several detailed appendices to aid readers of all levels looking for further information. Medicine, Religion, and Health will shed new light on critical contemporary issues. They will whet readers' appetites for more information on this fascinating, complex, and controversial area of research, clinical activity, and widespread discussion. It will find a welcome home on the bookshelves of students, researchers, clinicians, and other health professionals in a variety of disciplines.

This book, in language accessible to the general reader, investigates twelve of the most notorious, most interesting, and most instructive episodes involving the interaction between science and Christianity, aiming to tell each story in its historical specificity and local particularity. Among the events treated in When Science and Christianity Meet are the Galileo affair, the seventeenth-century clockwork universe, Noah's ark and flood in the development of natural history, struggles over Darwinian evolution, debates about the origin of the human species, and the Scopes trial. Readers will be introduced to St. Augustine, Roger Bacon, Pope Urban VIII, Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Sigmund Freud, and many other participants in the historical drama of science and Christianity. “Taken together, these papers provide a comprehensive survey of current thinking on key issues in the relationships between science and religion, pitched—as the editors intended—at just the right level to appeal to students.”—Peter J. Bowler, Isis

Contemplative experience is central to Hindu yoga traditions, Buddhist meditation practices, and Catholic mystical theology, and, despite doctrinal differences, it expresses itself in suggestively similar meditative landmarks in each of these three meditative systems. In Yoga, Meditation and Mysticism, Kenneth Rose shifts the dominant focus of contemporary religious studies away from tradition-specific studies of individual religious traditions, communities, and practices to examine the 'contemplative universals' that arise globally in meditative experience. Through a comparative exploration of the itineraries detailed in the contemplative manuals of Theravada Buddhism, Patañjalian Yoga, and Catholic mystical theology, Rose identifies in each tradition a moment of sharply focused awareness that marks the threshold between immersion in mundane consciousness and contemplative insight. As concentration deepens, the meditator steps through this threshold onto a globally shared contemplative itinerary, which leads through a series of virtually identical stages to mental stillness and insight. Rose argues that these contemplative universals, familiar to experienced contemplatives in multiple traditions, point to a common spiritual, mental, and biological heritage. Pioneering the exploration of contemplative practice and experience with a comparative perspective that ranges over multiple religious traditions, religious studies, philosophy, neuroscience, and the cognitive science of religion, this book is a landmark contribution to the fields of contemplative practice and religious studies.

stellar cast of leading theologians and scientists debating science and religion in the public arena. The Boyle lectures are a prestigious lecture series held annually in the City of London. Engaging themes at the cutting-edge of contemporary science and religion debates, from evolution and emergence to the psychology of religious beliefs.

A comprehensive exploration of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. This work is a comprehensive study of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. Mystics claim to experience reality in a way not available in normal life, a claim which makes this phenomenon interesting from a philosophical perspective. Richard H. Jones’s inquiry focuses on the skeleton of beliefs and values of mysticism: knowledge claims made about the nature of reality and of human beings; value claims about what is significant and what is ethical; and mystical goals and ways of life. Jones engages language, epistemology, metaphysics, science, and the philosophy of mind. Methodological issues in the study of mysticism are also addressed. Examples of mystical experience are drawn chiefly from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but also from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Daoism. “This is a significant extension of the seminal work by Walter Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy. That work has stimulated much literature, all of which Jones manages to review here. He critically extends Stace’s universal core and embeds it in a sophisticated discussion of the extent, range, and metaphysical implications of mysticism.” — Ralph W. Hood, Jr., coauthor of The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach

This book examines the relationship between Buddhist philosophy and scientific psychology by focusing on the doctrine of No-self. The hypothesis is that No-self can function as an instrument of counter-induction, that is, an alternative conceptual scheme that exposes by contrast the intuitive or "folk" theoretical presuppositions sedimented in our perception of ourselves and others. When incorporated into regimens of meditative and ritual practice, the No-self doctrine works to challenge and disrupt our naïve folk psychology. The author argues that there is a fruitful parallel between the No-self doctrine and anti-Cartesian trends in the cognitive sciences. The No-self doctrine was the product of philosophical speculation undertaken in the context of hegemonic struggles with both Buddhist and non-Buddhist rivals, and the classic No-self doctrine, accordingly, is a somewhat schematic and largely accidental anticipation of the current scientific understanding of the mind and consciousness. Nevertheless, inasmuch as it challenges and unsettles the seemingly self-evident certitudes of folk psychology, it prepares the ground for the revolution in our self-conception promised by the emerging cognitive scientific concept of mind. A novel contribution to the study of Buddhist Philosophy, the book will also be of interest to scholars of Buddhist Studies and Asian Religions.