Are You Brainy Enough to Be Religious?

Looking for the "God Spot" in the brain:

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Beauregard seeks to pinpoint the brain areas that are active while the nuns recall the most powerful religious epiphany of their lives, a time they experienced a profound connection with the divine. The question: Is there a God spot in the brain?

Persinger thus argues that religious experience and belief in God are merely the results of electrical anomalies in the human brain.

Would Persinger say the same thing about all experiences of pleasure and pain? By this reasoning, can't love, hate, perception, and contemplation of one's navel all be boiled down to electrical impulses in the brain? Also, since most people hold some level of belief in God and have religious experiences, wouldn't the lack of them be the anomaly?

[Persinger] opines that the religious bents of even the most exalted figures—for instance, Saint Paul, Moses, Muhammad and Buddha—stem from such neural quirks. The popular notion that such experiences are good, argues Persinger in his book Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs (Praeger Publishers, 1987), is an outgrowth of psychological conditioning in which religious rituals are paired with enjoyable experiences. Praying before a meal, for example, links prayer with the pleasures of eating. God, he claims, is nothing more mystical than that.

I'd like to see the scientific evidence he has to back up that claim.

[N]o matter what neural correlates scientists may find, the results cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation of God’s interactions with them. After all, finding a cerebral source for spiritual experiences could serve equally well to identify the medium through which God reaches out to humanity. Thus, the nuns’ forays into the tubular brain scanner did not undermine their faith. On the contrary, the science gave them an even greater reason to believe.

The problem with this line of research is that it ultimately proves nothing about religion one way or another. Just because there is cerebral activity that manifests itself during religious experience doesn't say anything about the authenticity of those experiences. Trying to say they disprove them is like saying my brain activity when I hear my mother's voice proves she doesn't not exist either.

It would be far more surprising to discover no brain activity for the experiences we feel. Persinger commits many logical fallacies in the conclusions he reaches. The nuns on the other hand are far more rational in their thinking.