Overview

Taking a perspective rooted in evolutionary biology with a focus on brain science, two distinguished authors radically alter the fractious debate on the existence of God and the nature of religion. Two distinguished authors, renowned anthropologist Lionel Tiger and pioneering neuroscientist Michael McGuire, elucidate the perennial questions about religion: What is its purpose? How did it arise? What is its source? Why does every known culture have some form of it? Their answer is deceptively simple, yet at the same time highly complex: The brain creates religion and its varied concepts of God, and then in turn feeds on its creation to satisfy innate neurological and associated social needs. Brain science reveals that humans and other primates alike are afflicted by unavoidable sources of stress that the authors describe as ""brainpain."" To cope with this affliction people seek to ""brainsoothe."" We humans use religion and its social structures to induce brainsoothing as a relief for innate anxiety. How we do this is the subject of this groundbreaking book. In a concise, lively, accessible, and witty style, the authors combine zoom-lens vignettes of religious practices with discussions of the latest research on religion's neurological effects on the brain. Among other topics, they consider religion's role in providing positive socialization, its seeming obsession with regulating sex, the common biological scaffolding between nonhuman primates and humans and how this affects religion, and evidence that the palliative effects of religion on brain chemistry are not matched by nonreligious remedies. In a new preface to the paperback edition, Lionel Tiger discusses the paradoxical effects of religion-on the one hand, producing masterpieces of art and architecture and, on the other, fueling violence throughout history and into the present. This fascinating book provides key insights into the complexities of our brain and the role of religion, perhaps its most remarkable creation.

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9781633883376

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Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF GOD'S BRAIN The joint effort [of two distinguished authors and scholars] is impressive. It manages to bring the experience and energy of both men together in one pithy, provocative package. --Washington Times [The authors] rightly observe a myriad of religious-based topics and bring up fascinating discoveries of the human brain. --Sacramento Book Review, San Francisco Book Review The authors write here for a lay audience, offering interesting anecdotes, personal experiences, and witty turns of phrase. --Library Journal The authors' entertainingly loopy writing belies a comprehensive approach to a major fact of the human experience, and their analysis will provoke the religious and the scientific equally: a sure sign that the authors are doing something right. --SEED magazine God's Brain is meant for a lay audience. The authors frequently express their concepts in simple, everyday terms... McGuire and Tiger invoke a wide range of social and 'hard' sciences, whether brain chemistry or the study of nonhuman primates. Although the range can make the material somewhat kaleidoscopic at times, they do not let the book become too abstract or academic... God's Brain is a welcome respite from the frenzied cacophony that too often attends discussion of religion. --BlogCritics.org The writing style is concise, interesting, and even quite entertaining at times. What could have been a technical tome in evolutionary theory and neurobiology has been transformed into an informative book that even nonscientists can comprehend. --Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith There is much that is coherent... in the story as told by the authors, woven together from a broad spectrum of the social and life sciences, and the ultimate survival of the authors' brain soothing idea will depend on its testability. --Human Ethology Bulletin

PRAISE FOR THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF GOD'S BRAIN The joint effort [of two distinguished authors and scholars] is impressive. It manages to bring the experience and energy of both men together in one pithy, provocative package. --Washington Times [The authors] rightly observe a myriad of religious-based topics and bring up fascinating discoveries of the human brain. --Sacramento Book Review, San Francisco Book Review The authors write here for a lay audience, offering interesting anecdotes, personal experiences, and witty turns of phrase. --Library Journal The authors' entertainingly loopy writing belies a comprehensive approach to a major fact of the human experience, and their analysis will provoke the religious and the scientific equally: a sure sign that the authors are doing something right. --SEED magazine God's Brain is meant for a lay audience. The authors frequently express their concepts in simple, everyday terms... McGuire and Tiger invoke a wide range of social and 'hard' sciences, whether brain chemistry or the study of nonhuman primates. Although the range can make the material somewhat kaleidoscopic at times, they do not let the book become too abstract or academic... God's Brain is a welcome respite from the frenzied cacophony that too often attends discussion of religion. --BlogCritics.org The writing style is concise, interesting, and even quite entertaining at times. What could have been a technical tome in evolutionary theory and neurobiology has been transformed into an informative book that even nonscientists can comprehend. --Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith There is much that is coherent... in the story as told by the authors, woven together from a broad spectrum of the social and life sciences, and the ultimate survival of the authors' brain soothing idea will depend on its testability. --Human Ethology Bulletin

Author Information

Lionel Tiger (New York, NY) is the bestselling author of ten books, including Men in Groups, The Imperial Animal (with Robin Fox), The Pursuit of Pleasure, Optimism: The Biology of Hope, and The Decline of Males. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Harvard Business Review, and Brain and Behavioral Science. He is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Rutgers University. Michael McGuire, MD (1929-2016), was the author or editor of ten books, including Believing: The Neuroscience of Fantasies, Fears, and Convictions and Darwinian Psychiatry (with A. Troisi). He was the president of the Biomedical Research Foundation, director of the Bradshaw Foundation and the Gruter Institute of Law and Behavior, and a trustee of the International Society of Human Ethology. Formerly, he had been a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles and editor of Ethology and Sociobiology.

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