USA Today has published a thoughtful reply to the claim of atheistic materialists that belief in God is merely a mechanical delusion that occurs within the brain.

In her USA Today commentary, Barbara Bradley Hagerty discusses the revolutionary scientific field of neurotheology, which investigates the startling evidence in support of the premise that “God is not a figment of our brain chemistry; perhaps the brain chemistry reflects an encounter with the divine,” as Hagerty puts it.

Hagerty, who is religion correspondent for NPR and author of Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, frames the scientific debate this way:

How you come down on this issue depends on whether you think of the brain as a CD player or a radio. Most people who believe that everything is explainable through material processes think that the brain is like a CD player. The content — the song, or in our analogy, God — is all playing in a closed system. If you take a hammer to the machine, the song does not play; if you surgically remove parts of the temporal lobe, “God” disappears. In this view, there is no “God” outside the brain trying to communicate; all spiritual experience is inside the brain.

But suppose the brain is not a CD player. Suppose it is a radio. In this analogy, everyone possesses the neural equipment to receive the radio program in varying degrees. Some have the volume turned low (Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens appear to have hit the mute button). Other people hear their favorite programs every now and again, as do most of us who have brief transcendent moments. In this model, the “sender” is separate from the receiver. The content of the transmission does not originate in the brain, any more than Rush Limbaugh or the hosts of All Things Considered are sitting in your radio. If you destroy the radio, you cannot hear your favorite program. But the program is still transmitting. In this model, God’s communications never stop —even when the brain is altered, or stops functioning.

Read the rest of Hagerty’s article to learn about the case of Pam Reynolds, whose near-death surgical experience in 1991 provides powerful support for the “radio” model of the human brain.