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The God in our brains.

Article Excerpt
A review of Did Man Create God? Is Your Spiritual Brain at Peace with Your Thinking Brain? by David E. Comings. Hope Press, 2008 Duarte, CA: 694 pp., $29.95. ISBN-10 1878267736 ISBN-I3 978-1878267733

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WITHIN THIS VOLUME IS A GREAT book that anyone wishing to understand the human religious impulse really needs to read. This is an opulently produced work, printed on slick paper, with color illustrations lavished throughout. My only complaint is that the author needed a bit of editorial restraint. He is obviously well read on many topics, which means the reader has to work through several hundred pages that include a reiteration of details of the history of life on earth, human evolution, the structure of DNA and even the Big Bang and quantum theory. This caution and condition notwithstanding, however, I urge readers to immerse themselves in this book.

The main body dealing with the neurological and genetic origins of the innate spirituality of human nature explains why unreason often prevails in so many ideologically based arguments. As a physician, neuroscientist, and behavioral and molecular geneticist, he is well qualified to explain the effects of the physical structure of our brains on our thought processes.

Reason, emotion and spirituality arise, Comings argues, in different parts of the brain. The reasoning, planning, calculating and organizing functions of the brain are carried out by and located in the prefrontal cortex. Our emotions are centered in the thalamus, hypothalamus and the limbic system. Our temporal lobes are the seat of our sense of spirituality, and temporal lobe epilepsy is often associated with visions, revelatory experiences and a sense of being directly spoken to by God. Given the symptoms of the onset of revelations reported by various visionaries or by those who observed them, it would seem that many, if not all of their visions originated as temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Among these are the apostle Paul, St. Teresa of Avila, Joan of Arc, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ellen White (co-founder of the Seventh...

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