Where Will the Transcendent Dimension Be?

Examinations Based on the Neuroscience of Religious Experience

Abstract

Neuroscience is almost able to estimate and control our states of consciousness. It is close to controlling even our spiritual pain or fear of death, which has been addressed by religion. This is almost an attempt to repeat the experience of transcendence by using scientific technology. In this paper, we examine where the transcendent dimension will be, as neuroscience develops.

Then, we examine the views of modern science, which finds fundamentally different qualities in consciousness from those of classical science, whose purpose was to control nature regularly and repeatedly. One of the theories of modern science is neurotheology, which examines the possibility of reality affecting not only consciousness but also brain state. Another is quantum brain theory, which finds experience and will in the quantum state of superposition to which the classical laws of physics cannot apply. Both of these views find reality not only in subjectivity, but also in action and spontaneity, instead of finding reality only in objective material.

Next, concerning the absence of the transcendent, we examine a religious belief that finds transcendence in our life experiences. As for this thought, the place of transcendence is nothing other than this world presented to us without abstraction, and transcendence to another world is no longer needed. There, spontaneity and purpose acquire their realities again.