E168: The Phantom God, What Neuroscience Has to Say About Religion w/ Dr. John Wathey

Recovering From Religion

This week on RfRx, Dr. John Wathey will return to discuss his latest work, The Phantom God. Does neuroscience have anything to say about the existence of God or the basis of human spiritual beliefs? Many books have been written about this, but most have strayed from the
scientific method. In this talk Dr. Wathey will take a more rigorous approach, emphasizing two big ideas.One is religious compulsion, which includes the appeal of ritual, the tenacity of religious belief, and the religious obsession with sex. The other is religious phantoms: the idea that the feeling of God’s presence is a phantom sensation, directly analogous to the phantom limb of an amputee. Here we’ll explore how the brain handles embodiment and the fascinating illusions that happen when the circuitry of embodiment goes awry.

John C. Wathey is a retired computational biologist, whose interests include evolutionary algorithms, the biology of nervous systems, and electoral reform. He got his PhD in Neurosciences at UC San Diego and has spent most of his career working on computer simulations of protein folding. His first book, The Illusion of God’s Presence, explores the evolution of the emotions and intuitions behind religious belief, emphasizing behavioral and psychological research. His latest book is The Phantom God: What Neuroscience Reveals about the Compulsion to Believe. It relates the motivating forces behind religiousness to the neural circuitry of embodiment, mother-infant attachment, adult sexual pair-bonding, addiction,selective attention, hallucinations, and many other neurological surprises.