George Graham, philosophy professor at Georgia State University, says it can be difficult to distinguish between signs of illness and religious insight, particularly when the purported insight raises doubts about the emotional health of the religious person.

John Haught, an emeritus professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., believes that spiritual experiences are connected to the brain processes and dependent on them but not reducible to them. He says it is possible to distinguish between the chemical basis of experiences and the experiences themselves. Life and mind cannot be reduced […]

Rebecca Sachs Norris, religion professor at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., argues that religious states are transmitted and learned through the body, that particular qualities of perception and memory are necessary for this process and that neurobiology and cognitive science provide material to support this claim. Scientific and experiential perspectives, she says, can coexist. […]

The Rev. Nihal C. deLanerolle is a professor of neurosurgery and neurobiology at Yale University School of Medicine and chaplain-in-residence of the Episcopal Church at Yale in New Haven, Conn. A specialist in the analysis of human seizure foci, he believes that the dialogue between science and religion informs and clarifies assumptions of both endeavors.

Steven Pinker, psychology professor at Harvard University, formerly with the department of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2002). He says seeing morality as a product of the brain is less dangerous than the […]

For an interview with leading researchers, read a Nov. 9, 2001, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly story, “Religion and the Brain.”

Nancey Murphy, professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., is the author of Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Cornell University Press, 1990). She thinks that how God acts in the natural world is one of the most pressing theological questions. And she believes that God’s action in human life must be […]

Robert John Russell is the founder and director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences and a professor of theology and science at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. He’s a leading researcher committed to a positive interaction between the fields of theology and science.