Zoloft works better than God,” a Catholic priest once told me during a conversation about depression. This is not the kind of man to give up on faith; our talks always finish with his reminders to pray. But in matters of body, and in matters of mind more and more, he and many others sense the right thing to do—religiously—is to consult a scientist.

In recent years, such common sense has given rise to a new paradigm in the study of human religiosity, one founded in a laboratory understanding of biology and the human mind. Together, these researchers are attempting to “biologize” religion, recalling E.O. Wilson’s notorious call for inquiry into human values “to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologized.” And, like Wilson’s, their efforts have been fraught with controversy.

Driven by a growing confidence in cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and genetics, the wider public has begun to embrace truly scientific (as well as pseudo-scientific) explanations of religious beliefs and practices. This idea takes root in an era that led the first President Bush to declare the 1990s “the decade of the brain,” one in which mental illnesses are treated increasingly through psychiatric drugs rather than analysis or spiritual practice alone.

Popular magazines, from Newsweek and Time to the New York Times Magazine, have paraded the research around with catchy labels like “the God spot,” “the God gene,” and “Darwin’s God.” People with a variety of religious perspectives, from Western Buddhists to evangelical Christians to the anti-religious, have explored and discussed biological accounts of belief, each bringing to it their sometimes contradictory assumptions and interpretations. Biologizing is a research project, but it is also a manifestation of a public desire to understand religiosity in the terms of science.