Great, thank you so much for joining us today. So there are all sorts of ways science and
religion cross paths. Sometimes harmoniously, sometimes not so harmoniously. And the case
I want to focus on today is the case where science and religion seem to intersect with
each other because we’re offering scientific explanations for our religious belief. So
in the last few years there’s been a lot of interest, in particular, in the brain bases
and the evolutionary bases in people’s religious beliefs. To give you just one example in a
recent headline, Finding God in a seizure: the link between temporal lobe epilepsy and
mysticism. There’s been a lot of research among these lines. People relating different
brain processes and neural processes to religious belief and religious experience. In this particular
article the author goes on to write that for people who experience temporal lobe epilepsy,
their transcendent experiences are actually seizures. Another headline reads, she thinks
she believes in god but in fact it’s just chemical reactions taking place in the neurons
in her temporal lobes. Another journalist describes another scientist’s perspective
like this, religious experience and belief in god are merely results of electrical anomalies
in the human brain. More generally, when we try to explain aspects of religious experiences,
they appeal to the brain or genetic bases or basic psychological processes. It often
seems like these are offered as some kind of threat or competition to that religious
belief as a way t debunk that religious belief. Now it turns out these debunking arguments
have a long history, so Freud famously wrote “religious ideas are illusions, fulfillments
of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind.” He basically goes on
to suggest that belief in God is the result in wishful thinking. He doesn’t suggest
that this means god doesn’t exist but rather this challenges our justification for believing
in God. One way to think about this is that if you don’t believe wishful thinking is
a reliable mechanism for arriving at true belief then discovering believing in God comes
from wishful thinking might give you a reason to challenge your basis for that belief. A
reason to think you might be less justified in holding that belief. More contemporary
arguments often appeal to evolution. So the idea that if our religious ideas can be shown
by natural selection, whether they’re the result of biological adaptation or the side
effect of biological adaptation, you might think this gives us a reason to challenge
our justification in those religious beliefs. Now these questions I’ve been raising are
important philosophical questions that are controversial and have been debated by philosophers.
The question whether these scientific explanations really do challenge or debunk the religious
beliefs anyway. The question I want to focus on today is the psychological counterpart
to this question. Do people in fact treat scientific explanation for belief as a challenge
or threat to their own religious beliefs? As the headlines I’ve shown you might suggest
is the case. So to explore this question I had two collaborators, Dillon Plunkett who
will be a PhD student in psychology at Harvard and my colleague at UC Berkeley Lara Buchak
in the philosophy department. In order to explore these issues, we conduced a set of
studies that presented people with scenarios like the following. So I want to introduce
you to Michael our hypothetical. Michael is reading a website and he comes across the
following claim. The claim is that there is a God. Now Michael hasn’t actually given
a lot of thought to this. But he probably would say he does accept this claim. But later
he reads the following in a reliable book. He reads people are more likely to believe
in god, this particular claim, if they experience many seizures in the ventral striatum in the
brain. Now this is a scientific claim we completely made up but you can see this is base don popular
media coverage of temporal lobe epilepsy or mini seizures being a part of religious experience.
We then asked people what effect they thought learning this information would have an effect
on Michael’s thinking there is a God. Is it going to make him more confident that God
exists or less confident that God exists? As you might expect if this is treated as
a debunking explanation. Now what we found was kind of interesting. If the scientific
explanation takes the form it does here, where we invoke something like mini seizures, then
people said this should make Michael less confident that God exists. But if we instead
replace that scientific explanation with that’s perhaps more neutral or positive we merely
invoke type M neural activity, which again we made up, But this doesn’t imply the kind
of abnormality that seizures imply. In this case we actually found that offering a scientific
explanation for a religious belief people said Michael should become more confident
in that belief. Now we can show you this effect quantitatively as follows. So these are people’s
responses to how Michael’s confidence in his belief should change in response to these
explanations. When the explanation invokes seizures, an abnormal basis for belief people
become less confident. And when we invoke something like Type M neural activity people
think this should actually make him more confident. So offering scientific explanation in and
of itself doesn’t seem to be threatening to the religious belief. Now we didn’t just
look at religious beliefs here. We also considered scientific explanations for scientific beliefs.
Like the claim humans evolved via natural selection. And scientific explanations for
moral beliefs. Like killing animals for human consumption is morally wrong. And we didn’t
only focus on these neuro-scientific explanations, we also considered genetic explanations, developmental
explanations, and cognitive explanations for various kinds of beliefs. And in all of these
cases what we varied was whether or not the scientific explanation invoked a normal process
or an abnormal process. So I’ve given you one example already of mini seizures vs type
M neural activity. We also described beliefs coming from the result of a genetic mutation
vs the absence of that mutation. As the result of an attachment disorder vs the absence of
an attachment disorder. Or as a result of cognitive biases vs the result of cognitive
processes. And what we found across the board is that only some of these abnormal explanations
were treated as debunking or challenging people’s beliefs in these domains. So here are what
the data look like. And what you can see across the board for all of these different explanations
offering a scientific explanation that appeals to normal processes led people to become more
confident. And some of these beliefs were challenged or debunked when we offered abnormal
explanations. So why does this matter? Well one reason why I think this is interesting,
is it tells us something about how people regard the relationship between scientific
explanation and religious belief and more generally how they regard the epistemic bases
for belief in different domains. But it also turns out this actually has some interesting
real world implications. So it turns out whether you’re given a normal or an abnormal explanation
trickles down into the way people respond tp sometimes consequential real world justifications.
So in one of our studies we presented people with either a normal or abnormal neuro-scientific
explanation for either belief in God or atheism. And we also asked them a variety of questions
like the following. For a particular finding they read about we asked them how important
they thought that was, whether that would be appropriate to teach in science classes,
whether it’s appropriate to receive federal funding for that type of research. For lack
of a better term I’m going to collapse all these questions into a measure called scientific
trust or how much they trusted these general scientific findings. What we found was that
people were least trusting of abnormal explanations for their own beliefs. Okay so here’s what
the data look like. Remember that people were seeing explanations for belief in God or atheism
and were asked about their own religious beliefs. participants were themselves theists or believers
and some atheists. What you can see is this kind of U-shaped pattern. When you’re receiving
an explanation for your own belief, so an explanation of theism if you’re a theist
or an explanation for atheism if you’re an atheist, you’re going to invoke much
less trust in an explanation that shows an abnormal process than a normal process. But
when you’re explaining the opposing belief, so theism if you’re an atheist or atheism
if you’re a believer, you see people are less trusting of explanations that invoke
a normal process than an abnormal process. Now on top of that we also found that across
the board believers were just less trusting than atheists of all of these scientific findings.
So if we split up the data that I’ve just shown you by people that were atheists and
theists. For the atheists you see this U-shaped pattern I showed you before. For theists you
see the same sort of U-shaped pattern but also notice all of these values are just much
much lower. Across the board the theists in the study much more skeptical or showed much
less scientific trust in these findings. Now one implication of that is that different
sorts of people see a headline like the one I just showed you here, and even though they’re
all reading the same words and go on to read the same article, they’re actually going
to be understanding the scientific implications and consequences very differently. People
are going to understand the scientific findings very differently depending on whether they
themselves, theists or atheists, also whether or not they take the neural explanation offered
to suggest the operation of a normal or abnormal process. These final results also hint at
the idea that people who do and don’t believe in God might differ more broadly in what we’re
calling the explanatory scope of science. That is whether or not their views about scientific
explanations can and should be offered for all aspects of human experience, not just
religious beliefs but morality, conscious experience, and so on. I’ve been exploring
these issues with a PhD student in my lab, Sara Gottlieb, and one of the things we’ve
tried is to find a way to measure people’s beliefs in the explanatory scope of science.
So for example, give people items they can agree or disagree with. And people who endorse
a broad scope of science agree with statements like the following: I think all aspects of
the human mind should be studied scientifically. People who endorse a narrow scope of science
agree with statements like: I think there are some subjects, like love and morality,
that should never be studied by scientists. Or there’s something troubling about a purely
scientific description of mental life.
And what we found is that religiosity
by which, I mean : people's belief in God, and the extent that they say religion is important in their own lives
is associated with having a narrower view about the explanatory scope of science.
So quantitatively what I am showing you here is a correlation between people's religiosity
and the extent to which they endorse a narrower scope of science.
And you can see there is actually a pretty strong correlation
between these two factors.
We also find that a narrower scope of science is associated
with political conservatism, with greater disgust sensitivity, and with a tendency
to engage in less reflective thought.
So if you give people these sort of tricky word problems
that can be answered either with a immediate intuitive gut reaction
or with a more reflective or deliberative kind of response.
We find that people who have the more kind of gut intuitive reaction are more likely to show a narrower scope of science.
Now, Importantly
If you
take into account all of these additional associations
between people's views about the scope of science
and these factors. We find that the religiosity has an effect above and beyond these additional considerations.
Alright, there seems to be a particularly close or special relationship
between people's religious views and their views about the explanatory scope of science.
So again, Why does this matter in the real world
besides generally informing us about the close relationship between religious beliefs
and views about science.
One reason is that it turns out that our views about the scope of science
actually relate to a host of bio-ethical judgements that again have real world
policies and implications .
So we find, that people who endorse a narrower scope of science
are also more likely to reject
abortion, physician assisted suicide, cloning, and stem cell research.
And again, these relationships hold even if you factor in people's political beliefs and so on.
Okay. To sum up I've been exploring the relationship between science and religion
by focusing on one particular place where you see science and religion coming together
and that's in scientific explanations for religious belief.
I've shown you some evidence that not all scientific explanations for religious belief
are in fact treated as debunking.
However; people do treat explanations that invoke abnormality as debunking.
They're less trusting of such explanations especially when they bare on their own beliefs.
This turns out to have implications for their views about their scientific findings.
Whether they should be taught in science classes. Whether they are appropriate
for federal funding, and so on.
We've also seen that religious individuals differ from people who are less religious
in terms of their interpretation of these scientific findings. The extent to which they trust them across the broad.
and that also people who are more religious tend to endorse a narrower scope for science.
They're more likely to think that there are aspects of human experience that we can't and shouldn't approach scientifically.
So, the picture I want to leave you with looks something like this.
On the one hand, we have certain set of explanatory drives and preferences.Right.
There are certain kinds explanations that we find more or less satisfying.
We're very driven to find explanations for aspects of the world around us.
And on the other hand, we have a set of religious beliefs and commitments.
Whether this is belief to a God of a particular type,
or belief in atheism.
My research and research by a lot of people suggest that these two are closely related to each other.
But that raises a lot of questions about the bases for this relationship.
Is it that people's explanatory drives and preferences have a direct causal impact
on their religious beliefs and commitments.
Is it instead that people's religious beliefs and commitments have a direct causal impact
on their explanatory drives and preferences,
or instead do these have some kind of a common cause that accounts for why we see the association between these
in the data that I have shown you and other people's data as well.
Now, my own guess is that there is some reality to all of these causal connections.
But I think the story is actually going to turn out to be somewhat more subtle than might be suggested.
So at least to me it's not really obvious why there would be a direct connection
between simply the metaphysical belief that a God exists or not
and these general explanatory drives and preferences .
And a lot of the work that I have done also suggests that some of the plausible common causes for these.
Like general political views, or general ideological views, probably don't account for all this relationship
because we find an association between these even when you factor out those influences.
So I think the most promising place to focus is going to be on this particular arrow here.
It's not only because our explanatory drives and preferences might help us understand
why we have religious beliefs at all or why religious beliefs take the particular form that they do.
But also because we've seen that people vary in their explanatory drives and preferences.
I think that variation that we see across individuals is going to help us understand
some of the variation that we see in peoples religious beliefs and commitments
and also why we often get such intractable kinds of tensions
at the interface of these debates. Where you have people that might differ in their explanatory drives and preferences
trying to come to some sort of agreement on these issues.
So with that Thank you very much for your attention.