CHAPTER 19 Translational Neuroscience and Religion Volney P. Gay Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Department of Anthropology, and Department of Psychiatry Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN Kent Kreiselmaier PhD Candidate, Graduate Department of Religion Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN Translational neuroscience is an effort to use insights from basic neuroscience discoveries to address immediate, real-world needs. Among those needs are helping people who have neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. The causes of some of these diseases are faulty genes that directly determine the disease’s progression. The causes of other diseases are specific genes responding to specific contexts, such as chronic stress, that together determine the disease’s course. This combined causal pathway is called epigenesis. Some of the aberrations that faulty epigenesis produce can be repaired through medical intervention. In these circumstances, a person’s genetics are not that person’s destiny. The translational neuroscience of religion is an effort by teams of scientists and scholars of religion to understand religious beliefs, experiences, and traditions. Because the notion of religion varies according to which methods are used to study it, efforts to translate neuroscience findings to the study of religious persons also vary. To carry out translational neuroscientific studies of religion, scholars need a useful definition of their subject matter. The first task is to consider where, in human beings, religious thought and action occur. Psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists, and theologians answer this question differently. Because neuroscientists focus on neural function within individual persons, it is useful to focus on personal religion, that is, religious beliefs and experiences that occur within an individual’s life. Clinical studies of religious experience and theological reflection on an individual’s experience employ the concept of ultimate concern. From birth forward, members of religious traditions are inculcated with emotional and interpersonal hierarchies. These hierarchies include religious authorities whose stature and prestige give them the power to answer, if not resolve, questions of ultimate concern. These are questions about oneself as a creature (Where did I come from?), as mortal (What happens to me at my death?), as a moral being (What ought I to do?), and as a thinking animal (What is my self, my individual identity?) Religious instruction and practices promise to help one address, if not resolve, questions like these that would otherwise be emotionally crippling. 319 COPYRIGHT 2017 Macmillan Reference USA, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning WCN 02-200-210