I personally find the link between neurology, psychology and religion to be extremely fascinating. The following is a shortened (for your convenience) "short response" paper I wrote for my "religion and psychology" course last semester, wherein I explore some of the research done on the connection between the frontal lobes and the formulation of religious belief.
The frontal lobes play an important role in an individuals ability to possess religious beliefs. They are associated with the emotional response which allows counterintuitive ideas to be easily accessible to the memory, the Theory of Mind mechanism which allows an individual to conceive of a conscious God, and the agency detection mechanism which allows an individual to perceive animate objects as controlled by a divine will.
According to Paloutzian, by dealing with phenomena which cannot be fully accounted for by mundane explanations, religion creates mysteries which are responsible for causing tension in believers rather than resolving it. For example, an apostle witnessing Jesus Christ walking upon water would be in a difficult spot, intellectually. On the one hand, he would feel the need to reject, based upon his understanding of reality, the idea that a person can walk on water. On the other hand, he would have to accept, based upon the evidence before his eyes, the very notion that his knowledge and experience tell him is not possible: Jesus Christ has somehow managed to ignore the natural laws and walk on water as if it were stone. Unable to explain this phenomena using his present schema and filled with awe at what his senses reveal to him, the apostle would be forced to attribute the phenomena of Christs walking on water to the sphere of mystery.
Research by Boyer and Ramble suggests that counterintuitive ideas such as the one discussed above are easier to remember than ideas with no intuitive violations, which may simply be the due to their ability to incite strong emotional responses. Continuing with the above example, the feelings of awe associated with the mystery of witnessing Jesus Christ walk upon water would make the event more readily accessible to the apostles memory than recollections of other events. Thus , this memory would be more likely to be incorporated into the vast body of experiences which, together, help form his worldview.
According to McNamara, the emotionalist aspect of religious phenomena would be hard to explain if we localized religion to any other aspect of the brain besides the frontal lobes. Also associated with religious belief and dependant upon the frontal lobes are the mechanisms of Theory of Mind and agency detection. According to McNamara, current research performed by Baron-Cohen suggests that the frontal lobes are associated with the Theory of Mind mechanism which enables individuals to perceive that others possess minds. This is important to the religious individual because it is responsible for his or her ability to conceive of a conscious god. The intentionality detector, on the other hand, allows people to (sometimes fallaciously) attribute intentions to animate objects. Thus, if a meteor were to crash through the kitchen window of a religious individual right now, because of his or her functioning agency detection mechanism, he or she would be able to attribute the sudden arrival of this astronomical object to divine will.
Thus, functioning frontal lobes are vital to an individuals ability to incorporate counterintuitive religious experiences into their worldviews, conceive of a conscious God, and perceive objects as instruments of divine will.
