The Phantom God

“John Wathey has made landmark contributions to the anatomy of religious belief. The Phantom God gives us the fundamental hows of religion’s tenacious hold on human minds, the neuroscience buried deep in our neonatal and early infant attachment system. Read this landmark book, and treasure it.”— J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., M.D., Psychiatrist, University of Virginia, author of Why We Believe In God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith.

John C. Wathey, Ph.D., is a computational biologist whose research interests include evolutionary algorithms, protein folding, and the biology of nervous systems. Previously, he was a senior applications scientist at Biosym Technologies (now named Biovia), a company that develops molecular modeling software for the pharmaceutical industry. He then founded his own business, Wathey Research, and since that time most of his scientific research was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health. Wathey has published his peer-reviewed research results in distinguished scientific journals, including Biophysical Journal, Journal of Neuroscience; Brain, Behavior and Evolution, and Neuroscience Letters, among others.

He is the author of The Illusion of God’s Presence: The Biological Origins of Spiritual Longing and has published popular articles in the Huffington Post, Skeptic Magazine, and The Jonestown Report.