What is Neurotheology?

Neurotheology is a relatively new scientific field in which scientists attempt to discover the missing elements of physical science by scientifically studying human beliefs. In the modern age, science has come to dominate the way we think as well as the theories regarding the way we think to the exclusion of any comprehensive understanding of the human mind, spirituality, beliefs and ideas. Neurotheology attempts to bridge this gap. Neurotheology engages meaningfully diverse understandings of reality, including the physical, mental, and spiritual. The discipline explores ways humans experience, generate, interpret and mediate beliefs. Its primary objectives are to establish comprehensive, interdisciplinary approaches to understand beliefs and to explain, interpret and predict the influences of beliefs to thought, feeling, behavior and experience. Neurotheology acknowledges the complexity and diversity of human beliefs by providing a broad conceptual framework to encompass beliefs, whether mystical or religious, economic or environmental, political or social, or some other. Each dimension of beliefs affords critical, creative study of the science(s), beliefs and/or belief systems involved. Both the science and beliefs intersect through a fourfold methodology that provides the basis to unpack the complexity of their relationship and intimate the relationship’s influence to human thought, feeling, behavior and experience.