I just completed Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s The Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality (Riverhead Books, 2009). Hagerty is NPR’s Religion Correspondent and offers a chatty introduction to current scientific research into religious experience—everything from peyote to near-death experiences. I learned some things about new directions in neurological research, but in the end, I found the book rather slight.

There are several problems with it. For one, she says that she is writing about the existence of God, but that’s not accurate. She is writing about religious (or spiritual) experience, and whether there is a physical basis for that. Both are interesting questions, but you can’t answer the first one by means of the second. When she does attempt to link the two, she raises some interesting speculations about the universal nature of religious experience, but then seems immediately to jump to the question whether all religions are true. If the brains of Tibetan Buddhist monks and Roman Catholic nuns do the same thing when meditating, that must lead to the question of the truth claims of religions. But it needn’t. It only shows that human brains are similar and certain types of religious experiences share certain physical characteristics.

The thing that bothered me the most was that while she interviewed all of the leading researchers in the field, the scientific data and analysis were sophisticated, but the religious scholarship was almost non-existent. For example, she referred more than once to St. Teresa of Avila’s “spiritual orgasms.” That’s a prurient and sophomoric description of Teresa’s experiences. More problematically, she begins with a discussion of “brokenness” as an important precondition for many people’s experiences and says more about stages, but her analysis would have been much more effective had she drawn on the research of scholars of mysticism.

The question of the relationship between religious experience and the body/brain is a fascinating one. I find it not at all surprising that people experience similar things and that the brain does similar things in certain circumstances. What I do find interesting is that people process these experiences in different ways, and indeed religions process and interpret them differently, too. Of course, those things are interesting to scientists. They should fascinate scholars of Religious Studies.

One comment of hers stands out:

Every person I interviewed who had traveled to the brink of death returned with a new definition of God. I had first noticed this when I talked with people who had enjoyed spontaneous mystical experiences, and I saw the pattern repeat with those who experienced other transcendent moments as well. I realized that after encountering the ‘Other,’ people no longer clung to religious distinctions.

She continues

Now I am not saying I agree with the view that all of the world’s great religious traditions hold, at their root, the same view of the nature of reality I am simply reporting what spiritual adepts told me.

Here’s one of those places that a little depth in the study of mysticism would be illuminating.