I'm Art Markman. I'm a professor in the psychology department here at the University of Texas
and I run the program in the Human Dimensions Organizations here.
I’m also the former editor of the journal Cognitive Science,
and I think I’m a native born cognitive scientist.
I think that we’re really interested in how we can take an understanding
of thinking from a multi-disciplinary perspective and really use that to understand religion,
and the dialogue between religion and science as differing belief structures,
and I think that there’s a lot of different ways to do that.
One of the advantages of taking the cognitive science approach over say,
a straight psychology approach or a straight philosophy approach,
is that we’re bringing together lots of different strands of thought in order to do that,
and I think that that’s a valuable piece of it.
So what does that allow us to do?
It allows us to think about, in part,
how are religion and science different from each other as disciplines,
that science explicitly uses evidence, which has been discussed a tremendous amount in philosophy
and often runs counter to natural psychological tendencies.
So in fact, scientists need to be trained to engage in that scientific method.
So we can begin to look at how scientific thinking differs from religious thinking,
at how scientific thinking coexists with religious thinking.
So, you know, there was a classic Star Trek episode back in the day
where one of these computers kind of blew itself up because it had an inconsistent thought,
which doesn’t seem to bother human beings even slightly;
we’re perfectly happy to have many coexisting thoughts that are incompatible
if we really laid them down next to each other,
and understanding how those coexist and when we apply each one is something that is valuable from a psychological standpoint,
there’s some interesting linguistic aspect of how we end up trying to talk about things,
when we’re trying to express something that we know isn’t 100 percent consistent
You know, that switch from the active voice to the passive voice
when we want to remove our own responsibility for things.
So I think cognitive science has a lot to say about that,
and I also think that cognitive science has an awful lot to say about some of the ways
that religion and science are actually the same.
So from my standpoint, while people who engage in scientific practice often think
of what they’re doing as very different from what people are doing when they’re engaged in religious practice
in fact the day-to-day operation of what people are doing has a tremendous number of similarities.
Good scientists often toil for years under the belief that they are solving a problem that is ultimately solvable
even when they don’t have any evidence to back up that assertion and that assumption
There is a tremendous amount of faith that goes into motivating yourself to remain at work on something that hasn’t yet born fruit,
and in many ways, except for that decision criterion that we ultimately use
or whether we’re going to hold on to a particular hypothesis;
you know, that decision criterion that says we ultimately are going to find support in data or fail to find support in data
for a particular hypothesis, and we agree to be bound by that,
in terms of our future beliefs.
Everything that led up to that actually looks pretty much identical to
what is happening in religious context,
and so there’s actually a much deeper human similarity there than we often acknowledge,
and I think that cognitive science can look at all of those different aspects
and make progress on it.