PHILADELPHIA — Religion and science can combine to create some thorny questions: Does God exist outside the human mind, or is God a creation of our brains? Why do we have faith in things that we cannot prove, whether it’s the afterlife or UFOs?
The new Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania is using brain imaging technology to examine such questions as well as to investigate how spiritual and secular beliefs affect our health and behavior.
“Very few are looking at spirituality from a neurological side, from the brain-mind side,” said Dr. Andrew Newberg, director of the center. “We have a fairly unique focus.”
Newberg, a doctor of nuclear medicine and an assistant professor at Penn, also has co-authored three books on the science-spirituality relationship....
