The Phantom God: What Neuroscience Reveals About the Compulsion to Believe

These dense musings by computational biologist Wathey (The Illusion of God’s Presence) ponder how mechanisms in the brain might give rise to mystical experiences. Humans, Wathey suggests, evolved to have an innate expectation of a caring mother, and a side effect of this mental predisposition is that adults in distress sometimes feel a similar sense of a powerful, loving presence that they call God. The author describes his “neuroethological” approach as focusing on how brain chemistry produces “highly specialized natural behaviors” that boost an animal’s chances of reproducing. Exploring the connection between neural networks and sensations of intangible presences, Wathey details the neuroscience behind such potentially analogous conditions as taking hallucinogenic drugs and speculates that they affect a part of the brain implicated in the “mother-infant bond” that might elicit perceptions of the divine. However, the author’s reliance on conjecture means most of his hypotheses remain theoretical (a full chapter is devoted to “predictions”) and will primarily be of interest to scholars, who will respect the provocative thesis and the author’s command of the neuroscientific literature. Lay readers will likely find the academic tone and scientific jargon a slog. Technical to a fault, this one’s for specialists only. (Oct.)