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Cognitive neuroscience has raised important questions regarding the religious understanding of persons as bodies inhabited by nonmaterial souls (dualism). Although physicalism (monism) offers an alternative, this view has typically been associated with reductionism that is inconsistent with a religious view of persons. Nonreductive physicalism provides a description of human nature that is more resonant with a theological perspective. Nonreductive physicalism entails abandonment of reductionism in science and of body-soul dualism in theological anthropology. This article suggests that nonreductive physicalism preserves the critical properties and attributes of human nature, and potentials for human experience, which have been described in religious scriptures and assigned to the soul. It is argued that a critical feature of a religious view of persons is a capacity for the deepest forms of personal relatedness. Thus, soul is an attribute of physical human beings that is an emergent property of the capacity and experiences of personal relatedness.

Neuroscience, Psychology, and Religion is the second title published in the new Templeton Science and Religion Series. In this volume, Malcolm Jeeves and Warren S. Brown provide an overview of the relationship between neuroscience, psychology, and religion that is academically sophisticated, yet accessible to the general reader.The authors introduce key terms; thoroughly chart the histories of both neuroscience and psychology, with a particular focus on how these disciplines have interfaced religion through the ages; and explore contemporary approaches to both fields, reviewing how current sci

The past decade has witnessed a renaissance in scientific approaches to the study of morality. Once understood to be the domain of moral psychology, the newer approach to morality is largely interdisciplinary, driven in no small part by developments in behavioural economics and evolutionary biology, as well as advances in neuroscientific imaging capabilities, among other fields. To date, scientists studying moral cognition and behaviour have paid little attention to virtue theory, while virtue theorists have yet to acknowledge the new research results emerging from the new science of morality