Religion and Psychiatry in the Age of Neuroscience

Summary: In recent decades, an evolving conversation among religion, psychiatry, and neuroscience has been taking place, transforming how we conceptualize religion and how that conceptualization affects its relation to psychiatry. In this article, we review several dimensions of the dialogue, beginning with its history and the phenomenology of religious experience. We then turn to neuroscientific studies to see how they explain religious experience, and we follow that with two related areas: the benefits of religious beliefs and practices, and the evolutionary foundation of those benefits. A final section addresses neuroscientific and evolutionary accounts of the transcendent, that is, what these fields make of the claim that religious experience connects to a transcendent reality.

Authors: James Phillips, MD,* Fayez El-Gabalawi, MD, Brian A. Fallon, MD,Salman Majeed, MD, Joseph P. Merlino, MD, MPA, Jenifer A. Nields, MD,* David Saunders, MD, PhD, and Michael A. Norko, MD, MAR, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, January 2020