ABSTRACT
With the rapidly expanding field of research exploring religious and spiritual phenomena, there have been many perspectives on the validity, importance, relevance, and need for such research. There is also the ultimate issue of how such research should be interpreted with regard to epistemological questions. The best way to evaluate the field of neurotheology is to determine the methodological issues that currently affect the field and explore how best to address such issues so that future investigations can be as robust as possible and make this body of research more mainstream. Thus, this chapter will focus on more specific principles regarding the methods by which neurotheological research and scholarship should proceed. Interestingly, within the Bible itself, we find the first notion of how a research study might actually be designed. In the Book of Daniel (verses 12-15) we read:
Thus, even in the earliest religious texts, there was a notion that there could be some way of evaluating the effects of religiousness on the human person. This example may well be one of the first descriptions of a controlled trial since there are two groups to be compared, those receiving the king’s choice food and those who simply are the more religious. It was realized even then, that an adequate evaluation of religiosity required some type of comparison group. Otherwise, one might not be able to determine fully the effects of religiosity on an individual. Biomedical research has obviously advanced significantly since biblical times even though the study of religious phenomena is often difficult.
