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What is this thing called religion?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826502.300&print=true
8.4.5
A. C. Grayling

AS LONG as religion was untouchably sacred, it was by definition beyond
the prying fingers of objective inquiry. Now society has matured enough
to empirically scrutinise religion, and late last year a group of nine
European universities led by the University of Oxford began to examine
religious belief and behaviour, helped by a ¬2 million European
Commission grant.

The project, called Explaining Religion (EXREL), brings together
psychology, biology, anthropology and history to investigate both the
common and the variable features of "religiosity" (this is the term
EXREL uses) and to test theories about it - including the current
leader in the field, which is that religiosity exists because of the
way that human cognitive architecture functions.

According to EXREL's website, the project partners "aim to develop a
computational model of religious dynamics that can be used to explain
present and past religious traditions, and to simulate likely future
directions". This is a fascinating and worthwhile project, and is sure
to be controversial, whatever its outcome.

Illumination may come from seeing how differently the brains of
religious and non-religious people function in appropriate experimental
circumstances as revealed by fMRI and PET scanning. It is surely
relevant that there are such interesting correlations as those between
dopamine levels in the brain and degree of religiosity - the more
severe a person's Parkinson's disease, the less religious he or she
tends to be - but a crucial aspect of the investigations will be the
historical and anthropological data, because they affect from the
outset what the investigation's target actually is.

This is because "religion" and "religiosity" are very ill-defined
terms. Today's major religions are relatively young, and they share
features - such as belief in a single supernatural agent that is
actively interested in the affairs of human individuals - which are
novelties compared to most of history's religions. What a Roman or
Greek of the classical period believed was quite different. For the
Romans, religion was a matter of public social cohesion rather than
personal spirituality, and the attitude of individuals to their
household gods and guardian deities was equivalent to a form of
knocking-on-wood superstition, useful chiefly for protection and luck.

Moreover it is not clear that "primitive" religions were religions at
all, as we have come to understand the concept; they were more like
rudimentary forms of science and technology. It seems likely that their
espousers did not regard gods and spirits as supernatural, but as
straightforward parts of nature, operating in fairly systematic ways as
instigators of wind, thunder and other natural phenomena, and amenable
to manipulation through sacrifice and observance of taboo. There is a
marked difference between someone who holds contemporary Christian
evangelical views and an ancient Egyptian who literally felt his god on
his back - Ra, the sun - every day of the week.

To think that there is something in the brain or its function which
specifically gives rise to "religiosity" is not consistent with the
idea of major differences between what we now think of as religion and
what people long ago believed and did. It is plausible that a
generalised propensity to credulity in childhood is a successful
evolutionary adaptation, and that this might have been culturally
annexed by religion as social complexity increased. If so, the concept
of religiosity is going to need all the historical and anthropological
clarification it can get before a computational model of its dynamics
becomes possible.

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Weblink

Explaining religion (EXREL)
http://www.icea.ox.ac.uk/research/cam/projects/explaining_religion/exrel.pdf

Does God have a place in a rational world?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626294.200&print=true
7.11.11
Michael Reilly, La Jolla, California

WE'RE on the Pacific coast, miles from southern California's
still-raging wildfires, but talk of conflagration fills the air. Some
of the best minds in science are gathered here at the seaside resort of
La Jolla, together with some of the world's most insistent
non-believers, to take a fresh look at the existence or otherwise of
God. And one thing is clear: the edifice of "new atheism" is burning.

The first firebrand is lobbed into the audience by Edward Slingerland,
an expert on ancient Chinese thought and human cognition at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "Religion is not
going away," he announced. Even those of us who fancy ourselves
rationalists and scientists, he said, rely on moral values - a set of
distinctly unscientific beliefs.

Where, for instance, does our conviction that human rights are
universal come from? "Humans' rights to me are as mysterious as the
holy trinity," he told the audience at the Salk Institute for
Biological Studies. "You can't do a CT scan to show where humans'
rights are, you can't cut someone open and show us their human rights,"
he pointed out. "It's not an empirical thing, it's just something we
strongly believe. It's a purely metaphysical entity."

This is a far cry from the first "Beyond Belief" symposium a year ago,
at which many militant non-believers, including evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins and author Sam Harris, came together to hammer home the
virtues of atheism (New Scientist, 18 November 2006, p 8). That
gathering made much of the idea that humans can be moral without
believing in God, and that science should do away with religion
altogether.

The mood at this follow-up conference was different. Last year's event
was something of an "atheist love fest" said some, who urged a more
wide-ranging discourse this time round. While all present agreed that
rational, evidence-based thinking should always be the basis of how we
live our lives, it was also conceded that people are irrational by
nature, and that faith, religion, culture and emotion must also be
recognised as part of the human condition. Even the title of this
year's meeting, "Beyond Belief II: Enlightenment 2.0", suggested the
need for revision, reform and a little more tolerance.

Such was the message from evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson of
Binghamton University, New York. He suggested that humans' religious
beliefs may have evolved over time, thanks to the advantages they
conferred as a sort of social glue holding together groups that
developed them.

Wilson was not saying religion is good or bad, simply that it has
evolved to be hard-wired into our brains, and therefore cannot be
ignored. "Adaptation is the gold standard against which reality must be
judged," he said. "The unpredictability and unknown nature of our
environment may mean that factual knowledge isn't as useful as the
behaviours we have evolved to deal with this world."

Stuart Kauffman of the University of Calgary in Canada, an expert in
complex systems and the origin of life, took that argument and ran with
it. No matter how far science advances, there will be aspects of nature
that remain unknowable, he said. As an example, he cited Darwinian
pre-adaptations - in which organisms evolve traits that end up having
beneficial side effects - which are so random as to be completely
unforeseeable.

Fact-based knowledge can never provide all the answers, he concluded.
"If we don't know what's going happen, we have to live our lives
anyway... We live our lives largely not knowing. That means reason is
an insufficient guide."

Though Kauffman declared himself an atheist, he argued from this that
it may be apt to invoke the concept of God as a proxy for such gaps in
our knowledge. "I'd say that it's wise to use the word 'God'", he
continued. "I know it's very freighted, but it also carries with it awe
and reverence. I want to use the God word on purpose, to reinvent
creativity in the natural universe. The natural universe, nothing
supernatural."

Chemist Peter Atkins of the University of Oxford, one of the more
hard-line atheists in the room, did not let this go unchallenged. He
chided fellow participants for not being sufficiently proud about what
science can accomplish. Given time and persistence, science will
conquer all of nature's mysteries, he said. He even proposed that
atheist scientists signal their intent to do just that by adopting a
flag with a Mandelbrot set as its emblem.

So can scientific and religious world views ever be reconciled? Harris,
author of The End of Faith, declared that they could not, and provided
an uncompromising exposition on the evils of religion.

Away from the meeting, philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University
in Medford, Massachusetts, told New Scientist that as irrational as
human minds may be, calm, firm introduction of reason into the world's
classrooms could over time purge them of religion.

For all its fiery rhetoric, this year's Beyond Belief conference razed
neither the new atheist movement nor, of course, religion itself. But
it certainly lit the touch paper.

An Alternative reading of literature

Religion is not the only aspect of the human condition that could do
with a little more rationality, said some delegates at Beyond Belief
II. Jonathan Gotschall, who teaches English literature at Washington &
Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, proposed marrying literary studies
with a scientific style of inquiry.

Gottschall has already made waves among his colleagues by conducting an
experiment on how people respond to literature. From interviews with
readers about their responses to books, he has shown that in general
people have similar reactions to a given text. This runs counter to the
conventional idea that the meaning readers take from literature is
dependent more on their cultural background than what the author
intended. It also appears not to make sense, as literature is grounded
in subjective rather than objective experience.

Gotschall, however, argues that the same can be said for literary
criticism: the field is awash with irrational thought, he says, largely
because most literature scholars believe that the humanities and
science are distinct. As a result, literary theorists rely on opinion
and conjecture, rather than trying to find solid, empirical evidence
for their claims, he says. By adding an element of scientific thought
to literary criticism, Gottschall says, we could unearth hidden truths
about human nature and behaviour.

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7.9.1

Review: An angelic riposte to the God Delusion, by John Cornwell
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526221.800
7.9.22

Letter: Science of morals
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626334.700
7.12.8

Web letter: Reason or religion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626330.200
7.12.8

Web letter: Reason or religion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626341.200
7.12.15

Letter: Reason or religion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626350.300
7.12.22

Editorial : Humankind cannot live by rational thought alone
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626293.200&print=true
7.11.10

SCIENCE and religion: just seeing the two words in the same sentence is
enough to make some people apoplectic. The commingling of the two has
been one of the most contentious educational and intellectual issues of
the decade. Can they live together? Can a rational person be religious?
Or should scientists be campaigning to rid society of what Richard
Dawkins calls these "juvenile superstitions"?

To address such questions, some of the world's leading scientists met
in La Jolla, California, last week for the second Beyond Belief
symposium. The idea was to see how rational thinking fits with the
distinctly non-rational religious beliefs that billions of people hold.
Last year's meeting resounded with rallying calls from atheists
determined to replace faith wherever they found it with a scientific
world view. This year things were more conciliatory, with speakers
recognising that we need many tools to make sense of the world besides
the strictly rational (see "God's place in a rational world?").

The change of tone is welcome. While the overbearing influence of
religious groups in politics, especially in the US, is worrying and
needs tackling, the idea that science can simply replace religion in
the public consciousness is not only fanciful, it's also bad for
science. Trying to tell people how they should think is likely to
alienate them.

There is still a tendency among some scientists, however, to view
religion as an irrational distraction and to presume that eradicating
it would end a host of abuses. Witness the claim, repeated by one
participant in La Jolla, that religious schools are more likely to
produce extremists, and the refrain repeated ad infinitum since 9/11
that religion is a sufficient incentive for suicide bombing. Such talk
should be discouraged. It is based on no evidence whatsoever. True,
terrorists tend to be more educated in religion than most in their
community, but they are more educated in everything. Religious
education is rarely a key radicalising factor. Likewise, it has been
shown over and over that the political aspirations of terrorist groups
play a far more critical role in suicide bombing than religion.

Moreover, religious belief is just one of many irrational human
tendencies. Our sense of fairness and morality is hardly based on
rational thinking. There is a growing conviction that such behaviours
are largely innate, and that they evolved because they have survival
value in an unpredictable world.Likewise religion. To borrow from a
popular biblical saying, humankind cannot live by rational thought
alone. To want to cleanse society of religion before understanding its
evolutionary roots and purpose seems strangely unscientific.

The problem is not with religion per se - it's with the prejudice,
discrimination and backward thinking that can derive from it. The
subjugation of women and opposition to condom use are good examples.
Far better to tackle these issues as they arise than try to eliminate a
belief system in its entirety.

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http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225780.142
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Evolution: Survival of the fittest [I sent this earlier.]
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7.11.3

Letter: Reason or religion
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7.12.1

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7.12.1

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7.12.22

Letter: Reason or religion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726371.900
8.1.5

Web letter: Reason or religion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726391.400
8.1.19

Reason or religion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626320.200&print=true
7.12.1

From Mark Vernon, Gosport, Hampshire, UK
You nobly resist the temptation to give science the victory over
religion, but I dispute your overly generous concessions (10 November,
p 3). In making the practical point that trying to change how people
think is likely to alienate them, you abdicate the scientific
responsibility to distinguish truth from falsehood. It is not a
question of purging religion, rather one of promoting critical thought.

You say the problem is not with religion per se. Politically, this may
be true, but intellectually, yes, religion is a problem. Religion lays
down in advance what is to be believed, and thus represents a betrayal
of the intellect. Science, on the other hand, starts from a position of
ignorance and gradually builds a secure network of interlocking ideas.

From this emerges a world view incompatible with religion. The
neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, for example, defeats competing
religious accounts.

We do indeed stand in need of tools other than reason for a complete
understanding of the world, but we don't have them. Our species has
survived and prospered by evolving the practical intelligence needed to
manipulate the environment.

Our systems of belief need to be useful, but need not be true. We live
in pursuit of interests, not truth; we are at liberty to believe any
old rubbish, and most people do. A scientific way of thinking can free
us from this ignorance.

Science greatly extends the power of reason by linking it to
observation and technology.

Fairness and morality are skills that help us to live well, not paths
to knowledge. Religion cannot be considered in the same light, because
it involves false belief.

Faith certainly isn't an extra tool for understanding. Public truths
cannot be divined from private experience, any more than I can judge my
own height by placing my hand on my head.

From Alan Oberman
Shame on you for a cowardly editorial that fails to defend reason and
rationality. You say: "We need many tools to make sense of the world
besides the strictly rational." Human societies construct all sorts of
ideologies to explain the world, but rational thought is not one among
equals - rather, it is the only method we have of sorting sense from
nonsense, of getting closer to a true understanding of how the world
works.

You add: "Trying to tell people how they should think is likely to
alienate them." We must state clearly and boldly what we believe to be
the case, with every tolerance for people but zero tolerance for wrong
thinking.

Finally you say, "The problem is not with religion per se," meaning,
presumably, that it isn't the "ism" that's wrong, just the people who
misapply it. Not so. Religion is a social construct - one person on
their own cannot make a religion. To survive, a religion has to have
authority, and for it to have authority it has to promote faith in the
authority. Religion has to defend faith against reason and that is its
problem per se.

We look to New Scientist to advance reason and rational thought, not
duck away in search of some kind of "conciliation".
Builth Wells, Powys, UK

From Mary Midgley
Is it rational to believe that the people around us are conscious, or
that they have aims and feelings much like our own? This can certainly
not be proved. Nor can we prove that the physical world will go on
working in the way that it has done so far.

We have to make tacit, background assumptions before any reasoning or
proof can get off the ground. They come to us from our social nature,
which also gives us a complex structure of emotion and imagination, out
of which grow our ethics, our sciences, our arts and our religions.

We work out the details of these various kinds of insight with
experience and we use reasoning to resolve the conflicts among them.
This is rationality: a soundly organised way of relating these various
elements, not a single cast-iron source of knowledge that competes with
them and ought to replace them. The idea that we should believe only
what can be proved is thus rather wildly irrational.
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Reason or religion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626321.100&print=true
7.12.1

From Ron Gibson, Irvine, California, US
You say that trying to tell people how they should think is likely to
alienate them (10 November, p 3). I'll respond with a quote from a
popular bumper sticker: "Minds are like parachutes, they only work when
they are open". After a lengthy and absurd paragraph on how religion
does not engender hatred and terrorism, you conclude by saying
"Religious education is rarely a key radicalising factor." For that
banality, I'll answer with another bumper sticker quote - taken from
Voltaire: "If they can make you believe in absurdities, they can make
you commit atrocities."

It is really not complicated: science is applied reason while religion
is institutionalised superstition. For three centuries the two have
been locked in mortal combat, the forces of superstition in constant
retreat to those of the enlightenment and reason. It takes courage to
walk away from the religion you learned at your mother's knee.
Obviously, the editors of New Scientist are lacking in that department.

From Peter Scott
I must take issue with your editorial. Contrary to the last paragraph,
there is a problem with religion. It is in the word "belief". A belief
is something that is held without the need for proof. Religions require
people to accept ideas that contradict common sense, experience and
evidence. They enforce this at best by fear and guilt and at worst by
torture and death.

Why is belief so dangerous? If someone allows him or herself to be
persuaded to accept one absurd idea, it is then much easier to move
them on to others, such as a statement that Muslims, blacks or Jews are
inferior or damned. Another small step demands and decriminalises their
destruction. The suspension of critical thought is very dangerous. Mark
Twain said, "Faith is believing something you know ain't true."

The world would be far better place without religion. With the present
revival of fundamental Christianity and Islam, this is not the time for
rational people to appear to accept their existence as desirable. Fight
the good fight!
North Walsham, Norfolk, UK

Reason or religion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626350.300&print=true
7.12.22
Valerie Stone, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
I am surprised anyone would be so naive as to believe that science will
eventually conquer all nature's mysteries, as you report Peter Atkins
does (10 November, p 6). Historians and philosophers of science have
already shown through analyses of scientific revolutions and of chaotic
systems that this cannot happen.

Consideration of evolutionary biology gives us a similar lesson:
science is done with human brains, using human cognition, and so is
necessarily constrained by what our brains can and cannot represent
about the universe. But all that aside, any scientist knows that the
moment all mysteries are conquered is the moment their grant money
dries up.

From John Falla
It may be true, as your editorial states, that replacing religion with
science is fanciful (10 November, p 3). But what's not fanciful is
separating the state and religion. Prying the dying hands of the
Anglican church from the British state is a move that is long overdue.
What is also not fanciful is separating education and religion. I am
appalled by the continued state funding of faith schools in the UK.
London, UK

From Peter Scott
Why is belief so dangerous? Well, if people allow themselves to be
persuaded to accept one absurd idea, it becomes much easier to make
them accept others, such as statements that Muslims, blacks or Jews are
inferior or damned, for example. From there, it is a small step to
condoning and justifying the destruction of those groups.

As Mark Twain said, "Faith is believing something you know ain't true."
North Walsham, Norfolk, UK

From John Osborn
What good is religion? I'll tell you. It is by far the greatest
labour-saving device ever invented.

Why?

Because once you believe, you never have to think again. The amount of
painful effort this must have saved throughout history is enormous!
Martinez, California, US


Reason or religion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726371.900&print=true
8.1.5

George Taylor, Royston, Hertfordshire
You conclude that "the idea that science can simply replace religion in
the public consciousness is not only fanciful, it's also bad for
science" (10 November 2007, p 3). Mary Midgley strongly concurs, and
from an epistemological point of view her argument cannot be faulted (1
December 2007, p 24).

Other correspondents who berate you for apparent lack of moral fibre in
defending reason and rationality (same issue) are on the right side of
this argument, but the issue is not whether science can replace
religion, but whether scientists can protect themselves from those who
wish to replace science with religion.

The indicators around the world are worrying. In the US, science and
scientists are being harassed, intimidated or bought by a coalition of
extreme religion and corporate hooliganism - a coalition thought by
many to have President George W. Bush in its pocket. In the Islamic
world, according to an August 2007 report in Physics Today, the 57
nations of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference have 8.5
scientists and technologists per 1000 population, compared to a world
average of 41, and 139 per 1000 in OECD countries.

Meanwhile, a well-funded Islamic campaign of anti-Darwinian propaganda,
under the title The Atlas of Creation, is being mounted. Similarly, the
Catholic Church, through its worldwide network of nuncios and
concordats and its connections in the European Union, United Nations
and other international bodies, continues its campaign to impose
undemocratic controls on science and medicine.

This is a crucial issue for scientists, but it is political in that it
can only be resolved through political action to curb activities of
religious organisations inimical not just to science but to democracy
and free speech.

Religion is not a homogeneous entity: precise targeting might be a good
start. The problem lies with the proselytising religions, especially
Christianity and Islam.

Reason or religion
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19726391.400&print=true
8.1.19

Alfred Zarb, Leura, New South Wales, Australia
I have news for your readers Peter Scott and John Osborn (22 December,
p 34). They are dead wrong.

Scott assures us that belief is dangerous because once we accept an
absurd idea, it then becomes that much easier to accept another and
another. There is simply no scientific basis whatsoever for such an
assertion. Moreover, he does not reveal the meaning of "absurd" and,
most critically, also fails to disclose who will decide which idea is
absurd or not.

Osborn, ecstatic in his mental laziness, is all for the notion that
once he believes, he does not have to think again. I cannot speak for
my fellow couch potatoes, but as an armchair scientist - now of long
standing - I am not exactly impressed with his dynamically motivational
compliment.

It is astonishing, in the 21st century, to see otherwise sensible
people still ignoring the heuristic and logical contradictions involved
in talking of reason "or" religion, as if they actually cancelled each
other out. So long as the fundamentalist either/or paradigm remains
dominant in these apparently conflict-obsessed minds, so long will it
remain impossible to talk meaningfully of the beneficial interaction
of, and useful dialogue between, reason and faith, science and
religion. To choose one at the total expense of the other is to place
unnecessary and detrimentally artificial barriers on all.

The real world works differently, of course. As anthropology, history
and epistemology demonstrate, reason and religion are mutually
enriching in all known societies. Early man developed myths and fables
in order to explain all the phenomena he observed around him, a
combined religious and scientific initiation indeed. It is this process
of cumulative reasoning which leads directly, however tortuously at
times, to our modern integrated ideas and disciplines which we know as
science, philosophy and theology.

The claim that reason and rationality belong exclusively to science
flies in the face of all that is rigorous in human thought. It is mere
fiction. And it is an irrational belief.

What good is God?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526190.400&print=true
7.9.1
Helen Phillips

RELIGION occupies a strange position in the world today. Religious
belief is as powerful as ever, yet religion is under attack, challenged
by science and Enlightenment thought as never before. Critics like
Richard Dawkins would have us believe that it is a delusion, and a
dangerous one at that. He is one of many thinkers who are challenging
the traditional view of religion as a source of morality. Instead, they
argue that it provides a means for justifying immoral acts.

Their views have recently been bolstered by evidence that morality
appears to be hard-wired into our brains. It seems we are born with a
sense of right and wrong, and that no amount of religious
indoctrination will change our most basic moral instincts.

Many biologists are not convinced by such radical views, however.
Recent years have seen a flurry of activity by researchers who want to
assess the effects of religion on human behaviour. It is a fiendishly
difficult area for science, but they are starting to address the issue
by looking at how religion might have evolved, what purpose it has
served, and whether it really can make you a moral person - or an
immoral one.

As a result of this work a new view is emerging that challenges
simplistic ideas about the link between religion and morality. Instead
of religion being a source of morality or immorality, some researchers
now believe that morality and religion are both deep-rooted aspects of
human nature. We do not need religion to live moral lives, but without
it morality might never have evolved. This kind of thinking could
explain the complex and apparently contradictory relationship between
religious beliefs and moral behaviour that is being demonstrated. It
could also make some sense of religion's remarkable staying power, as
well as highlighting the futility of attempts to persuade believers to
abandon their faith by rational argument.

There is no shortage of research supporting the case for religion as a
force for good. In the late 1970s and 1980s sociologists Rodney Stark
and William Sims Bainbridge, then at the University of Washington in
Seattle, forcefully argued the line that religious beliefs correlated
with moral behaviour. Their studies showed that church attendance and
religiosity increase the collective understanding of moral norms and
make people less likely to turn to crime. More recently, various
surveys have suggested that moderate religious people are happier, more
caring, just and compassionate, and give more money to charity. Other
studies show that religion can help people quit smoking, drugs and
alcohol. Religion can also affect people's sexual morality. Recent
research by RAND Health, a US non-profit policy research group, has
found that people with HIV who professed religious beliefs had fewer
sexual partners than those who were not religious (Journal of Sex
Research, vol 44, p 49).

However, religious belief is not the only moral guide, even for
believers. The RAND study also found that HIV-positive Catholics were
more likely to use condoms than other groups despite their church's
prohibition on birth control. "Catholics increasingly are inclined to
consider their individual consciences as sources of moral authority,"
says David Kanouse, one of the study's authors. The work certainly
doesn't contradict the view that moral values come from within (see
"Born to be moral"), suggesting instead that religion can provide an
additional source of rationalisation to help us interpret our innate
sense of right and wrong.

How does this square with claims that religion makes for bad people and
bad societies? Dawkins and others point to many examples of the use of
religious beliefs to rationalise acts of hatred or war. They also cite
morally reprehensible acts endorsed in religious scripture - stoning
adulterers, heretics and homosexuals, beating or killing disobedient
children, acceptance of slavery, even prostituting one's own daughter.
They argue that religion is just a by-product of other cognitive
processes and has nothing to do with our underlying morality. Besides,
many atheists manage to be good without God - and religious believers
are not necessarily better at following their own moral codes than
non-believers. Philosopher Dan Dennett from Tufts University in Boston
points out that the prison population - at least in the US - has the
same religious structure as the rest of society, and that divorce rates
among Christians are if anything higher than among non-religious
Americans.

In 2005, Greg Paul, an independent researcher from Baltimore, Maryland,
published a study that attempted to quantify negative effects of
religion (Journal of Religion and Society, vol 7, p 1). He compared
levels of religiosity with various indicators of social dysfunction in
18 developed nations. He concluded that countries with higher rates of
belief and worship had higher rates of homicide, death among children
and young adults, sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy and
abortion. Paul now believes that morality does not stem from religion,
and that religion arises from insecurity within society. "Mass belief
in gods is primarily a fear and anxiety-based response to
insufficiently secure financial circumstances, and does not have a deep
neurobiological, genetic or other basis," he says.

His study has not been without critics, however. Some researchers have
argued that his choice of nations and indicators of moral health were
selective. In an attempt to provide a more rigorous test, sociologist
Gary Jensen from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee,
conducted a more detailed analysis of just one of Paul's indicators,
homicide, to see how it correlated with various religious beliefs. He
found that homicide rates were indeed linked with passionate beliefs,
though the strongest correlation occurred in societies with prominent
dualist beliefs in good and evil, God and the devil. The highest rates
were seen in the US - where as many as 96 per cent of the population
claim to believe in God and 76 per cent in the devil - along with the
Philippines, the Dominican Republic and South Africa. The correlation
was much weaker in societies with a belief in God, but no strong
beliefs in the devil, such as Sweden, where only 18 per cent claim to
believe in both. "Gods do matter," Jensen says, "but in a far more
complex manner than proposed." (Journal of Religion and Society, vol 8,
p 1).

A similarly complex picture has emerged about the role of religion as a
force for good. Daniel Batson, a social psychologist from the
University of Kansas in Lawrence, looked at two categories: "intrinsic"
religiosity - belief in God and a motivation to attend church as an end
in itself - and "extrinsic" religiosity - where religion and
churchgoing are seen primarily as social activities, often undertaken
for personal gain. He found some correlation between intrinsic
religious beliefs and compassion or reduced prejudice. By contrast,
extrinsic religiosity is linked to increased prejudice - people in this
group tend to be less helpful to others, and when they do assist it is
only for people they see as the "right" sort.

Batson also identifies a third category he calls "quest" religiosity -
a more questioning form of spirituality. His experiments reveal that
while people in this category show intolerance of behaviour that
violates their own values, they are nevertheless the most tolerant and
helpful towards people who exhibit such behaviour.

Such studies lend some support to the idea that religion influences
moral behaviour. Yet they also raise the question of whether it does
this primarily within a believer's own social group, or whether it
engenders a more universal compassion and altruism. Peter Richerson, a
specialist in cultural evolution, and human ecologist Brian Paciotti,
both from the University of California, Davis, used economic games to
examine this distinction.

The dictator game tests people's altruism and sense of fair play. One
person gets $10 and is told to offer some of it to another, anonymous
player - the amount offered is due to the first player. The recipient
can either accept the offered amount, in which case both parties keep
their share, or punish perceived unfairness by rejecting the offer so
that nobody gets a payout. In the trust game, a person is given $10 and
can hand any amount to another unknown person, but this time the sum
they give is doubled, and the recipient then chooses how much to
return. Here the best strategy is to hand over all the money - provided
that the recipient reciprocates your trust. Finally, in the public
goods game, people contribute to a public fund that is then doubled by
the organisers and shared out equally. The game is played anonymously
and tests all kinds of morality, including the amount of altruism and
cheating. The group does best if everyone donates the maximum, but
generally lots of people cheat.

Richerson and Paciotti conducted all three games both in a secular
university and with churchgoers who had just attended a service. They
found that secular and religious people did behave differently. "There
are weak and subtle effects where people who [say they are] highly
religious give more," Paciotti says. This might suggest that religion
fosters universal cooperation. However, like Batson, the team found
that only people with intrinsic or questing religiosity were more
generous and trusting, and less likely to punish unfairly.
Extrinsically religious people were actually less altruistic than the
non-religious. These results will please no one, says Richerson, as
they show that religion is neither vital for morality nor always has a
negative effect. Paciotti believes the findings support the idea that
humans are hard-wired to be moral and cooperative, with religion
serving to define the nature and scope of that moral behaviour and
influence with whom we cooperate.

Another reason that the effects of religiosity on morality have been
hard to tease apart is highlighted by a new study that also uses the
dictator game. Psychologists Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan from the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that by
presenting people first with a word game unscrambling either religious
or non-religious phrases, even atheists could be primed to be more
generous to an anonymous partner by exposure to the religious words
(Psychological Science, in press). People did not notice when the game
had a particularly religious theme, say the researchers, suggesting
that the priming effect is unconscious. Likewise, psychologist Brad
Bushman from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, found that both
Christian and non-religious people were more aggressive towards an
anonymous person after reading a religious text describing how a
husband took revenge for the torture and murder of his wife - but only
if they had been told that the story came from the Bible or if it
contained an additional verse in which God seemed to sanction the
husband's violence (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 204).

You are being watched

So why do religious concepts provoke moral behaviour even in
non-believers? It's because both religion and morality are evolutionary
adaptations, says Jesse Bering, who heads the Institute of Cognition
and Culture at Queen's University, Belfast, UK. Morality does not stem
from religion, as is often argued, he suggests: they evolved
separately, albeit in response to the same forces in our social
environment. Once our ancestors acquired language and theory of mind -
the ability to understand what others are thinking - news of any
individual's reputation could spread far beyond their immediate group.
Anyone with tendencies to behave pro-socially would then have been at
an advantage, Bering says: "What we're concerned about in terms of our
moral behaviour is what other people think about us." So morality
became adaptive.

At the same time the capacity for religious belief would also have
emerged. Our reputation-conscious ancestors would have experienced a
pervasive feeling of being watched and judged, he says, which they
would readily have attributed to supernatural sources since the
cognitive system underlying theory of mind also seeks to attribute
intentionality and meaning, even where there is none. So the same
adaptations that led to morality could also have driven the evolution
of religion.

Meanwhile, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson of the State
University of New York argues that religious practices are also
important for group cohesion and are therefore subject to group
selection. As humans have become ever more social over the past 100,000
years, and especially from 10,000 years ago, when agriculture led to
huge division of labour in societies, religion and morality would have
co-evolved as ways to promote social cohesion. "Religion did play a
crucial role in giving us our moral nature, at least evolutionarily
speaking," says psychologist Jonathan Haidt from the University of
Virginia.

Nowadays, adds Bering, whether we believe in a God or not, the brain
architecture that causes us to behave as though we might get caught
behaving badly is still present. As a result, atheists are no more
likely to be immoral than believers. Indeed, his own experiments show
that, regardless of whether people believe in supernatural beings, both
adults and children cheat less when performing a task in private if
Bering has first primed them with the idea that there may be a "god" or
a "ghost" watching.

Cultural and technological advances have also changed the way we live,
making western liberal societies poor models for understanding the link
between religion and morality, according to Haidt. He argues that we
are now far more individualistic than our ancestors. "Technology has
changed our lives so we can live in new ways. We can now be moral
without religion. We have developed other means of social control," he
says, such as laws, police forces and CCTV cameras.

Yet religion does still have the power to galvanise individuals in any
society. Brain-imaging experiments by Andrew Newberg at the University
of Pennsylvania indicate that people in religious or meditative states
show a transient decrease in brain activity in regions representing our
map of the body and our sense of self. Religious feelings do seem to be
quite literally self-less, which may be one of religion's biggest
draws. Many human activities - from music festivals to military service
- tap into our powerful urge for group bonding. Haidt believes that we
also have an evolved desire to elevate ourselves beyond our own selfish
interests to a more helpful, group-oriented and selfless plane.

Haidt says this sense of elevation is mediated through a physiological
response in the release of a hormone called oxytocin, which makes us
feel happy and good about ourselves. Elevation can come in many forms:
we might get it from pursuing a noble goal, doing good, reading great
prose, witnessing something skilful, experiencing awe or empathising
with someone else who is feeling good. Still, religious people have an
extra source of elevation that many atheists lack - and scientists like
Dawkins may do well to realise that even the most logical and
articulate argument against religion will never eradicate this
evolutionary sense of meaning.

Even if many no longer need religion for social cohesion or moral
guidance, and think that atheism is the only rational route, we should
nevertheless recognise that religion has had a pivotal role in our
evolutionary history. It can still reinforce moral values and work with
our innate moral sense. It can also be used to justify immoral
behaviour towards those who do not embrace our beliefs. Like it or not,
religion remains an important part of what we are.

Born to be moral

The idea that we have an innate sense of right and wrong has been
brought to prominence again by the Harvard University cognitive
psychologist Marc Hauser, with the publication of his book Moral Minds.
He likens morality to language and its innate core to our innate sense
of grammar. In other words, at the heart of human moral codes lie
common rules and features that come hard-wired at birth.

Hauser suggests that each culture and generation learns to interpret
the moral grammar slightly differently, but the rules, fixed in the
biology of the brain, remain the same.

One reason he believes this is that the origins of morality, altruism
and fair play can be seen in our group-living primate cousins, in
behaviours such as loyalty to kin, intolerance of theft and punishment
of cheats.

Another reason is that moral decisions are made intuitively, rather
than consciously or rationally. People come up with similar answers
when faced with a particular moral dilemma, yet Hauser and his
colleagues have shown that their reasoning to justify their answers is
variable and inconsistent, suggesting it is done after the choice has
already been made.

They also find no difference in fundamental moral choices made by
thousands of people of different faiths and none in answer to
questionnaires posing moral dilemmas. This suggests that inbuilt
morality is independent of learned religious codes.

Undeniably, there are differences over time and cultures in attitudes
towards issues such as slavery, racism, capital punishment and
abortion. Even so, Hauser argues, the innate sense remains the same; it
is the interpretation that changes.

So how is morality hard-wired into our brains? The consensus among
brain scientists is that emotions such as fear, guilt and pride are
vitally important.

Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia used a hypnosis
experiment to show how important emotions are. Under hypnosis, he
induced people to feel disgust when they heard a couple of arbitrary
words. When these words later came up in connection with moral
dilemmas, the subjects judged certain scenarios to be wrong when people
who had not been hypnotised did not. When asked to justify their
choices, they could not do so to the researchers' satisfaction. Without
knowing how or why, their emotions had altered their sense of right and
wrong.

Brain-scanning studies have shown a link between damage to the brain
regions that house the social emotions and a tendency to make aberrant
moral choices. Still, there is more to morality than emotion. Most
researchers now think that emotions influence the way our moral
decisions are turned into actions or choices, rather than how the
decisions are made in the first place. Other brain regions involved in
empathy and attributing beliefs about intentions are important too.

Related Articles

Interview: How we tell right from wrong
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325937.100
7.3.7

Exploring the moral maze
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825271.700
5.11.26

Belief special: How evolution found God
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925361.100
6.1.28

Belief special: What's it all about?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925361.000
6.1.28

Letter: What are gods good for?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526220.300
7.9.22

Web letter: What are gods good for?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526221.200
7.9.22

Letter: What are gods good for?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526230.500
7.9.29

Web letter: What are gods good for?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526236.400
7.9.29

Letter: Large Hadron Font
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626310.800
7.11.24

Weblinks

Batson's work on intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8294%28200103%2940%3A1%3C39%3A%22WIMNI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

Batson's work on quest religiosity
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8294%28197603%2915%3A1%3C29%3ARAPAOD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U

Marc Hauser's online questionnaires
http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu

Beyond belief: In place of God
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225780.142&print=true
6.11.20
Michael Brooks
Helen Phillips

It had all the fervour of a revivalist meeting. True, there were no
hallelujahs, gospel songs or swooning, but there was plenty of
preaching, mostly to the converted, and much spontaneous applause for
exhortations to follow the path of righteousness. And right there at
the forefront of everyone's thoughts was God.

Yet this was no religious gathering - quite the opposite. Some of the
leading practitioners of modern science, many of them vocal atheists,
were gathered last week in La Jolla, California, for a symposium
entitled "Beyond belief: Science, religion, reason and survival" hosted
by the Science Network, a science-promoting coalition of scientists and
media professionals convening at the Salk Institute for Biological
Studies. They were there to address three questions. Should science do
away with religion? What would science put in religion's place? And can
we be good without God?

First up to address the initial question was cosmologist Steven
Weinberg of the University of Texas, Austin. His answer was an
unequivocal yes. "The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of
religion," Weinberg told the congregation. "Anything we scientists can
do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be
our greatest contribution to civilisation."

Those uncompromising words won Weinberg a rapturous response. Yet not
long afterwards he was being excoriated for not being tough enough on
religion, and admitting he would miss it once it was gone. Religion
was, Weinberg had said, like "a crazy old aunt" who tells lies and
stirs up mischief. "She was beautiful once," he suggested. "She's been
with us a long time. When she's gone we may miss her." Science, he
admitted, could not offer the "big truths" that religion claims to
provide; all it can manage is a set of little truths about the
universe.

Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford would have none of it.
Weinberg, he said, was being inexplicably conciliatory, "scraping the
barrel" to have something nice to say about religion. "I am utterly fed
up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon
religion," Dawkins told the assembly.

He was soon joined by Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in
Boulder, Colorado, who had been charged with providing an answer for
the second question: if not God, then what? Science, she said, could do
at least as well as religion. "If anyone has a replacement for God,
then scientists do." Porco said. "At the heart of scientific inquiry is
a spiritual quest, to come to know the natural world by understanding
it... Being a scientist and staring immensity and eternity in the face
every day is about as meaningful and awe-inspiring as it gets."

Astronomers in particular, she suggested, regularly confront the big
questions of wonder. "The answers to these questions have produced the
greatest story ever told and there isn't a religion that can offer
anything better." Religious people, she claimed, use God to feel
connected to something grander than they are, and find meaning and
purpose through that connection. So why not show them their place in
the universe and give them a sense of connectedness to the cosmos? The
answers to why we are here, if they exist at all, will be found in
astronomy and evolution, she said.

A secular icon

Science provides an aesthetic view of the cosmos that could replace
that provided by religion - a view that could even be celebrated by its
own iconography, Porco added. Images of the natural world and cosmos,
such as the Cassini photograph of Earth taken from beyond Saturn,
Apollo 8's historic Earthrise or the Hubble Deep Field image, could
offer a similar solace to religious artwork or icons.

The big challenge, according to Porco, will be dealing with awareness
of our own mortality. The God-concept brings a sense of immortality,
something science can't offer. Instead, she suggested highlighting the
fact that our atoms came from stardust and would return to the cosmos -
as mass or energy - after we die. "We should teach people to find
comfort in that thought. We can find comfort in knowing that everyone
who has ever lived on the Earth will some day adorn the heavens."

Like many of the others at the meeting, Porco was preaching to the
choir, and there was no more animated or passionate preacher than Neil
deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Tyson
spoke with an evangelist's zeal, and he had the heretics in his sights.
Referring to a recent poll of US National Academy of Sciences members
which showed 85 per cent do not believe in a personal God, he suggested
that the remaining 15 per cent were a problem that needs to be
addressed. "How come the number isn't zero?" he asked. "That should be
the subject of everybody's investigation. That's something that we
can't just sweep under the rug."

This single statistic, he said, gave the lie to claims that patiently
creating a scientifically literate public would get rid of religion.
"How can [the public] do better than the scientists themselves? That's
unrealistic."

DeGrasse Tyson clearly found it hard to swallow the idea that a
scientist could be satisfied by revelation rather than investigation.
"I don't want the religious person in the lab telling me that God is
responsible for what it is they cannot discover," he said. "It's like
saying no one else will ever discover how something works."

For others, the idea that it is somehow unacceptable for scientists to
maintain a religious belief was going too far. "They're doing science,
they're not a problem," said Lawrence Krauss, a physicist based at Case
Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Scientists are not a
special class of humanity, he pointed out, so it is hardly surprising
that a small number of academy members are also believers. "It would be
amazing if that figure were zero," he said. "Scientists are people, and
we all make up inventions so we can rationalise about who we are."

Krauss says he found the meeting at La Jolla a peculiar experience. He
is a veteran of campaigns against religious incursion into science, and
testified against the scientific credentials of "intelligent design" in
the Dover school board trial in Pennsylvania last year. "I'm not
usually the person who defends faith," he told New Scientist.

Krauss wasn't the only participant who seemed to think some of the more
militant speakers were a tad over the top. Joan Roughgarden, a
professor of geophysics and biology at Stanford University, California,
described some of the statements being made as an "exaggerated and
highly rose-coloured picture of the capabilities of science" while
presenting a caricature of people of faith. Attempts by militant
atheists to represent science as a substitute for religion would be a
huge mistake, she said, and might even set back science's cause. "They
are entitled as atheists to generate more activism within the atheist
community," she told New Scientist. "But scientists are portraying
themselves as the enlightened white knights while people of faith are
portrayed as idiots who can't tell the difference between a [communion]
wafer and a piece of meat." People of faith are being antagonised, and
this is "a lose-lose proposition", she said.

She also suggested that science, like religion, had dogma and prophets
of its own, citing as an example the "locker-room bravado" of many
biologists in promoting the received wisdom regarding sexual selection.
What's more, she said, science's ethics were open to being manipulated
- notably by biotechnology companies - leading her to seriously doubt
that a workable morality could be developed by the rationalist
scientific community.

Biology rules

This was not a view shared by Patricia Churchland of the University of
California, San Diego, who was charged with answering the question "can
we be good without God?". Values, Churchland said, are set by what we
care about, and as social animals we care about mates, kin and
insider-outsider relationships. Every human social value and moral, she
said, can be traced back to group dynamics and biochemistry; there is
no need for a scriptural mandate. Thus the answer to the third question
of the meeting became an overwhelming yes.

With three positive verdicts in the bag, the mood was clear: science
can take on religion and win. "We've got to come out," urged chemist
Harry Kroto of Florida State University, Tallahassee. Dawkins also used
the same phrase, and compared the secular scientists' position to that
of gay men in the late 1960s. If everyone was willing to stand up and
be counted, they could change things, he said. "Yes I'm preaching to
the choir," Dawkins admitted. "But it's a big choir and it's an
enthusiastic choir."

Kroto certainly declared himself ready to fight the good fight. "We're
in a McCarthy era against people who don't accept Christianity," he
said. "We've got to do something about it." His answer is to launch a
coordinated global effort at education, media outreach and campaigning
on behalf of science. Such an effort worked against apartheid, he said,
and the internet now provided a platform that could take science
education programmes into every home without being subject to the
ideological and commercial whims of network broadcasters. He has
schools run by religious groups firmly in his sights too. "We must try
to work against faith schooling," he said.

For all the evangelical fervour, some attendees suggested that a little
more humility might be in order. "This is Alice in Wonderland, it's
just a neo-Christian cult," Scott Atran of the CNRS in Paris told New
Scientist. "The arguments being put forward here are extraordinarily
blind and simplistic. The Soviets taught kids in schools about science
- religiously - and it didn't work out too well. I just don't think
scientists, when they step out of science, have any better insight than
the ordinary schmuck on the street. It makes me embarrassed to be an
atheist."

Krauss was similarly critical. "The presumption here was that any
effort to respect the existence of faith is a bad thing," he told New
Scientist. "Philosophically I'm in complete agreement, but it's not a
scientific statement, and I've seen how offensive it is when scientists
say 'I can tell you what you have to think'. They make people more
afraid of science. It's inappropriate, and it's certainly not
effective."

Dawkins, though, is ready to mobilise. The meeting, he says, achieved
"probably a little" - but every little helps. "There's a certain sort
of negativity you get from people who say 'I don't like religion but
you can't do anything about it'. That's a real counsel of defeatism. We
should roll our sleeves up and get on with it."

Should science do away with religion?

"It is just as futile to get someone to give up using their ears, or
love other children as much as their own... Religion fills very basic
human needs."

Mel Konner, ecologist, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

"Religion is leading us to the edge of something terrible... Half of
the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world.
This kind of thinking provides people with no basis to make the hard
decisions we have to make."

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

"Religion allows billions of people to live a life that makes sense -
they can put up with the difficulties of life, hunger and disease. I
don't want to take that away from them."

Francisco Ayala, biologist and philosopher, University of California,
Irvine

"No doubt there are many people who do need religion, and far be it
from me to pull the rug from under their feet."

Richard Dawkins, biologist, University of Oxford

"Science can't provide a sense of magic about the world, or a community
of fellow-believers. There's a religious mentality that yearns for
that."

Steven Weinberg, physicist, University of Texas, Austin

"Science's success does not mean it encompasses the entirety of human
intellectual experience."

Lawrence Krauss, physicist and astronomer, Case Western Reserve
University, Ohio

If not God then what?

"It is the job of science to present a fully positive account of how we
can be happy in this world and reconciled to our circumstances."

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

"Let me offer the universe to people. We are in the universe and the
universe is in us. I don't know any deeper spiritual feeling that those
thoughts."

Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, Hayden Planetarium, New York

"Let's teach our children about the story of the universe and its
incredible richness and beauty. It is so much more glorious and awesome
and even comforting than anything offered by any scripture or
God-concept that I know of."

Carolyn Porco, planetary scientist, Space Science Institute, Boulder,
Colorado

"I'm not one of those who would rhapsodically say all we need to do is
understand the world, look at pictures of the Eagle nebula and it'll
fill us with such joy we won't miss religion. We will miss religion."

Steven Weinberg, cosmologist, University of Texas, Austin

Can we be good without God?

"The axiom that values come from reason or religion is wrong... There
are better ways of ensuring moral motivation than scaring the crap out
of people."

Patricia Churchland, philosopher, University of California, San Diego

"What about the hundreds of millions of dollars raised just for Katrina
by religions? Religions did way more than the government did, and there
were no scientific groups rushing to help the victims of Katrina -
that's not what science does."

Michael Shermer, editor-in-chief, Skeptic magazine

"It doesn't take away from love that we understand the biochemical
basis of love."

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles.