Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience have made it possible to empirically investigate religious and spiritual experiences, leading to the emergence of the concept of the neural signature of religious experience. This concept refers not to the localization of religious experience in a specific brain region, but to relatively stable and recurrent network-based patterns of neural activity involving systems related to self-awareness, attention, emotion, and meaning, which co-occur with first-person reports of religious experience. Interpreting such neural signatures, however, raises a fundamental challenge of reductionism, insofar as neural correlates of religious experience may be misconstrued as exhaustive explanations of the experience itself.



The aim of this article is to provide a theoretical analysis of the concept of the neural signature of religious experience and to explore the possibility of a non-reductive framework for its interpretation. Employing a theoretical–analytical approach, the article first reviews contemporary neuroscientific literature on religious experience and clarifies the notion of neural signature. It then examines and comparatively analyzes two influential approaches in this field—one emphasizing the reorganization of self-related neural networks, and the other stressing the distinction between explanatory levels and the methodological limits of neuroscience. On the basis of the strengths and limitations of these approaches, the article proposes a conceptual model grounded in three principles: non-reductive co-emergence, multi-level distinction without disconnection, and the intentional, meaning-directed structure of religious experience.



The findings suggest that the neural signature of religious experience can be understood as the biological dimension of a multi-level phenomenon that requires neural activity for its realization but cannot be fully explained without reference to phenomenological and meaning-oriented levels. Accordingly, identifying neural signatures neither negates nor validates the theological significance of religious experience, but instead provides a framework for a constructive dialogue between neuroscience and theology.