Neuroscience is in a period of explosive growth. To address the implications of the new findings for religion and science, Zyvon in 1996 published fifteen articles in this field. Although the authors'explorations of neuroscience and religion are various, three issues in particular are addressed repeatedly: (1) the nature of human identity, or hallmarks of humanness; (2) the nature and origin of religious consciousness; and (3) our means of discovering or constructing order and integration in the brain/mind, in the environment, and (...) holistically. With these categories as templates, this article correlates the findings of the Zygon neuroscience contributors of 1996. (shrink)

. I sketch a synthetic integration of several levels of explanation in addressing how myths, narratives, and stories engage human beings, produce their sense of identity and self‐understanding, and shape their intellectual, emotional, and embodied lives. Ultimately it is our engagement with the metanarratives of religious imagination by which we address a set of existentially necessary but ontologically unanswerable metaphysical questions that form the basis of religious belief. I show how a multileveled understanding of evolutionary biology, history, neuroscience, psychology, narrative, (...) and mythology may form a coherent picture of the human spirit. Neuropsychological functions involved in constructing and responding to the narratives by which we form our identities and build meaningful lives include memory, attention, emotional marking, and temporal sequencing. It is the neural substrate, the emotional shaping, and the narrative structuring of higher cognitive function that provide the sine qua non for the construction of meaning, relationship, morality, and purpose that extend beyond our personal boundaries, both spatial and temporal. This includes a neural affect system shaped by our developmental dependency, the dynamic narratives of self formed in the development of identity and reconstructed over the life span, drawing on culturally available mythic and storied forms. Narrative constitutes our movement in moral space and may have the potential both for healing and for disruption for us as individuals and as a species, providing a contingent solution to the alienation and fragmentation of personhood, relationship, and community. (shrink)