The Search for God in Science: Spirituality and Science Meet in New Book

Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality

I was a child the first time I saw someone "speaking in tongues" during a Pentecostal worship service. The murmuring woman approached our pastor, who raised his hands over her head and, after a few minutes of impassioned prayer, placed the heel of one hand on her forehead and shouted, "Hallelujah!" The woman collapsed on the floor and lay prone for several minutes. Later, she claimed to have experienced a dramatic easing of her arthritis.

This faith healing (and the many others I later witnessed) always left me wondering two things: Did it really work, and what was the experience like, physically, for the person who received it? In Fingerprints of God,National Public Radio religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty attempts to answer these and other vexing questions about the science of spiritual experience. Along the way she tells the story of her own intriguing spiritual evolution.

Fingerprints are a good metaphor for Hagerty's project. Like fingerprints, Hagerty argues, spiritual experiences leave physical marks, particularly on the brain. She spends much of the book exploring this phenomenon and the emerging field of "neurotheology -- the study of the brain as it relates to spiritual experience." Using tools such as fMRI, neurotheologists try to explain everything from gut feelings and premonitions to near-death experiences. Is it possible, neurotheologists ask, to connect to a spiritual realm beyond the material world? Can consciousness exist apart from our physical bodies?

Hagerty's own spirituality adds depth to her journalistic investigation. Hagerty was raised a Christian Scientist, a faith that places great emphasis on mind-body connections and forswears much modern medicine. "Christian Science holds as a central premise that healing is a function of spiritual understanding," Hagerty explains, "that matter and its conditions, including sin and disease, are 'false beliefs;' and that prayer changes a person's thought, which results in healing." As an adult, Hagerty grew distant from the religion, although without the bitter recriminations common among those who leave their faith. (She recalls with humor the moment when, severely ill with the flu, she allowed skepticism and an overwhelming desire for Tylenol to trump her childhood beliefs.)

Read the rest of the review here, or get a copy of Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality now!

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