Religion and Psychiatry in the Age of Neuroscience.
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease July 1, 2020 James Phillips, Fayez El-Gabalawi, Brian A Fallon et al.
The conversation among religion, psychiatry, and neuroscience has changed how religion is understood and how that understanding affects its relationship with psychiatry. This review covers the history and phenomenology of religious experience, neuroscientific explanations of religious experience, the benefits of religious beliefs and practices, and the evolutionary basis of those benefits. It also examines how neuroscience and evolutionary theory account for the claim that religious experience connects to a transcendent reality. The authors conclude with a summary and unresolved questions.