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Erik Goodwyn's book is a splendid, detailed, thorough, and essential piece of reading. It is full of well-researched data and packed with interesting new angles on some very old and established ideas.
The Neurobiology of The Gods is a mixture of passionate enthusiasm mixed with appropriately objective and agnostic scientific reasoning. It covers all the popular—and less well spoken about—aspects of religion, science, and culture. Using reams of well-sourced references and literary examples of humankind's logically senseless striving for spiritual comprehension, Goodwyn has one beady eye on the why and the other on the how of brain mechanisms throughout—leaving the cosmic third eye of perception to roam the sheer beauty of spirituality's meaninglessness and the sense of deep meaning it gives to many everyday persons' lives.
Goodwyn argues that the brain's large array of innate predispositions for certain mental experiences—including that of our capacity for those that are mystical or spiritual—explain the huge similarities between the world's religions. Clearly a man who is passionately Jung at heart, Goodwyn describes the similarities of symbols used by humans through the ages. The development of the collective unconscious as a product of evolutionary psychology (EP) brings to the core human psyche our sense of self-ness and belonging. It is a byproduct of millions of years of adaptive evolution; just as the corporal body has evolved in the face of physical environmental stimuli thrust upon it, so too has the brain and mind at large.
Combining traditional psychoanalytic ideas with data from contemporary EP, the author demonstrates just how close the Jungian and Freudian scholars were to today's reality. There are many shared universals—not just the propensity to worship nonvisible gods. Humans have developed broadly similar societal organizations wherever and whenever they have lived, and their dream imagery is universal and relies on common themes. Drawing on many rec