Alva Noe has a thoughtful essay on “Art and the Limits of Neuroscience” on the Opinionator.

He criticizes the field of neuroaesthetics:

Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist at University College London, likes to say that art is governed by the laws of the brain. It is brains, he says, that see art and it is brains that make art. Champions of the new brain-based approach to art sometimes think of themselves as fighting a battle with scholars in the humanities who may lack the courage (in the words of the art historian John Onians) to acknowledge the ways in which biology constrains cultural activity. Strikingly, it hasn’t been much of a battle. Students of culture, like so many of us, seem all too glad to join in the general enthusiasm for neural approaches to just about everything.

There’s a deeper criticism here. Noe attacks the view, held from Descartes on, that there is in us something “that thinks and feels and that we are that thing.” For Descartes, it was the soul; for neuroscientists, it is the brain. Noe counters:

What we do know is that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life. We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment. We also need the presence and availability of other people if we are to have anything like the sorts of lives that we know and value. So we really ought to say that it is the normally embodied, environmentally- and socially-situated human animal that thinks, feels, decides and is conscious. But once we say this, it would be simpler, and more accurate, to allow that it is people, not their brains, who think and feel and decide. It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living human being.

Finally,

Far from its being the case that we can apply neuroscience as an intellectual ready-made to understand art, it may be that art, by disclosing the ways in which human experience in general is something we enact together, in exchange, may provide new resources for shaping a more plausible, more empirically rigorous, account of our human nature.

What Noe says about art, could be said, mutatis mutandi, about religion. While I am deeply interested in what researchers studying the brain can tell us about religious experience, I think that, as Noe says, we are people, embodied, engaged in a web of relationships, in a context larger than our brain. Our attempt to make sense of ourselves and our world is more than mental activity; it involves our entire being.

Rod Dreher, who is a bit over the top for me, says something along the same lines in a brief comment on Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution (h/t Andrew Sullivan):

If you read Bellah’s book, “Religion in Human Evolution,” you understand why ritual is more important than theology. No doubt that ritual completely disconnected from theology is empty. But humans never outgrow the deep need for ritual. It’s built into the biological fabric of our being. You mess with that, you’re messing with things you ought not touch.