Beauregard, Mario and O’Leary, Denyse (2007), The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, New York: HarperCollins PublishersThe neuroscientist is Mario Beauregard at the University of Montreal. Denyse O’Leary is a freelance journalist in Toronto. In this interesting book, Beauregard documented his experiments with a group of Carmelite nuns exploring the thesis that spiritual experiences are more than imagination or delusions by the brain.
Beauregard calls himself a non-materialist neuroscientist, distinguishing himself from the materialist neuroscientist. The materialist neuroscientist does not believe there is anything outside the material plane and all phenomenon can be explained by the workings of the brain. Beauregard explores psi effects (paranormal experiences such as extrasensory perception and psychokinesis), near death experiences NDE (medical resuscitation has improved so there is a large number of people with NDEs) and placebo effects (you are very sick but you start to get better in the doctor’s waiting room-your brain is making you better).
This book is a welcome reading in face of a sudden raise in number of materialist scientific writings which are ‘anti God’ and propose a “God gene’ or ‘God switch’. Examples are Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Daniel Dennet), The God Delusion (Richard Hawkins), God: The Failed Hypothesis-How Science shows that God does not Exist (Victor Stenger), and God is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens).
“…our book shows that when spiritual experience transform lives, the most reasonable explanation and the one that accounts for all the evidence, is that people who have such experience have actually contacted a reality outside themselves, a reality that has brought them closer to the real nature of the universe”(xvi)
This book is a welcome reading in face of a sudden raise in number of materialist scientific writings which are ‘anti God’ and propose a “God gene’ or ‘God switch’. Examples are Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Daniel Dennet), The God Delusion (Richard Hawkins), God: The Failed Hypothesis-How Science shows that God does not Exist (Victor Stenger), and God is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens).
“…our book shows that when spiritual experience transform lives, the most reasonable explanation and the one that accounts for all the evidence, is that people who have such experience have actually contacted a reality outside themselves, a reality that has brought them closer to the real nature of the universe”(xvi)
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