Religions and the Brain

Can religion be the object of a scientific approach? Does religion have any legitimacy outside of the human brain? What is the differences between persons fond of understanding and beings obsessed with faith? Can religion be a science?

These are the problems tackled by the author to distinguish the concern for seeking a scientific explanation from the peace of belief, starting from Nietzsche’s distinction between “those who want to understand and those who wish to believe.” Indeed, the human brain, according to those who are concerned with understanding represents in the author’s opinion the end result of a very long development of living beings, as attested by all branches of biology, in particular developmental and evolutionary biology, and archaeology. Indeed, the scientific dissection table, in Doctor Boukhris’s opinion, permits to clearly see the gradual anatomical changes in the brain, through a review of the chain of brains from the most primitive animals to human beings.

Scientific approaches have been able to sketch in maps of the brain which, in the author’s opinion, stress the nature of the electric links and neurotransmitters that govern its various components. Indeed, scientific research permitted to determine the evolutionary functional adaptation of the brain structure, and numerous research teams are making consistent efforts for a precise mapping out of the brain. For this reason, the author makes a distinction between idealistic theories which acknowledge that consciousness is a phenomenon “totally different from the material body” and scientific approaches which realise that thought is the result of the activity of the nervous cells of the brain and the nature of their physio-chemical interactions, so as to show us the chasm between metaphysical interpretation and scientific understanding.