It would be something of an understatement to say that there has been quite a lot of discussion recently, on Nature Network and elsewhere, about the interaction of science and religion.
Now, the Ian Ramsay Centre for Science and Religion at the University of Oxford is pitching in with a significant new research project funded by a £1.9 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The project is entitled Empirical Expansion in Cognitive Science of Religion and Theology. (A brief summary of the project can be found here.)
According to their website, “The project seeks to support scientific projects that promise to yield new evidence regarding how the structures of human minds inform and constrain religious expression including ideas about gods and spirits, the afterlife, spirit possession, prayer, ritual, religious expertise, and connections between religious thought and morality and pro-social behavior.”
That is, research performed and funded by the project will seek to address the following questions:
- Why do people believe in gods?
- Why do people believe in God?
Further, “we desire to stimulate scholarship that explores the philosophical and theological implications of findings from the evolutionary and cognitive sciences as applied to religion.”
That is,
- Does the naturalness of religious beliefs mean that they’ve been explained away and you shouldn’t believe in God?
Cognitive science approaches to religion are certainly valuable. As the Ramsey Centre researchers themselves explain, “The cognitive science of religion does not pretend to be able to explain why any given individual believes in their God or gods. Rather, the cognitive science of religion attempts to identify numerous factors that contribute to the general tendency for people to believe in gods generally and God specifically.”
There’s a very large (and growing) literature on this topic – no doubt a great deal more ink will be spilled before this project is completed. Here’s hoping that at least some of it will be worth reading.
A quick side note: The relatively new head of the Ramsey Centre is Peter Harrison, an Aussie formerly at Bond University on the Gold Coast. If you’re interested in hearing a calm and measured voice in the science and religion dialogue, one that takes the history and philosophy of science seriously, you could do worse than read some of his many recent essays.
[In case you were wondering, I take no credit for “British boffins”. My title is almost a direct quote from a Sydney Morning Herald story on this topic.]
Who is ‘God specifically’?
יהוה
Matt, the project’s website is not particularly helpful when it comes to answering this question. The project’s detailed discussion page, where the three questions I quoted in my post are expanded upon, makes no explicit mention of the nature of the gods/God about which they speak. However, I think that Richard’s hunch – that “God” refers to יהוה, typically translated as Yahweh or Jehovah (the God of Israel) – is probably correct.
Hi Pete – nice info (as always)
A couple of summers ago I attended a course at The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, in Cambridge. Talks were given, in the main, by highly-reputed, quality speakers (veritable ‘stars’); it was highly informative, challenging, and challengeable; and I thoroughly recommend it to anybody interested in such themes, and who, like me, glazes over during seminars detailing the effects of some SNP or other. It is a big wide world outside of the lab.
The Faraday is likewise supported by the Templeton Foundation, which is seriously minted: the recipients of its annual prize can expect to pocket more than Nobel winners. But it’s worth looking at what the prize is awarded for. The Ian Ramsey Centre’s research focus is interesting, and promises to yield some fascinating product. Indeed it reads similar to the kind of thing Daniel Dennett argues for. However, research is often agenda-driven; the word ‘apologetics’ comes to mind.
It seems to me that if science can provide a biological explanation for religion, if we are naturally religious, believers can counter with, “So what?!”. After all, what would be the point of a lonely god, requiring of praise, creating man lacking such capacity? Be a bit of an oversight, wouldn’t it? (Although I guess the Intelligent Design-ers would suggest he could have installed an update modification later.) Evidence for the nature of belief in gods/God would seem to satisfy both ‘sides’.
What qualifies as ‘calm and measured’, by the way? Does that mean excited erraticism should be discounted?
Hi Lee,
We may well have been at the same Faraday Institute course – I took a week off from the lab to attend the second week of their 2006 summer course on science, philosophy, and theology.
Your comment about evidence for belief satisfying both sides is right on the money. As the Ramsay Centre’s website puts it, when discussing this very point,
“Non-believers might find satisfaction in a sound scientific explanation of why people tend to believe in God because they can now account for why people persist in believing in a fictitious being. The believer might find satisfaction in the scientific documentation of how human nature predisposes people to believe in God because it could reinforce the idea that people were divinely designed to know and believe in God. Both believers and non-believers can agree on the scientific findings.”
In light of this assertion, it seems that apologetics built around the results of such research can be used by either side, either in support of or in opposition to religion. Which of these is the more convincing would appear to depend on the side of the argument you start from – it’s hard to see how this type of research would ever be able to conclusively argue for one side or the other. On the other hand, it does make for a win-win for everyone involved…
I suppose by ‘calm and measured’ I meant that Harrison (1) really seems to know his subject matter, (2) writes in a way that does justice to the complexity of the subject matter, and (3) doesn’t resort to ad hominem arguments or strident rhetoric in an attempt to win an argument at any cost. I don’t mean to imply that anything I already agree with is calm and measured, and anything I disagree with is shrill and distempered (a trap that one can easily be fallen into). I always enjoy reading and engaging with those with whom I disagree – I tend to learn an awful lot in the process, and have often changed my mind on matters as a result. However, discussion about religion can often bring out the worst in people, and the loudest voices are seldom the ones with the most interesting things to say.
Given the fact that religion is always top of the news agenda, I think that £1.9m to study why people have religious beliefs at all would be worthwhile … and it’s probably not nearly enough.
Pete – yes, I was there. It was all enjoyable – except for Swinburne.
Amen to your last paragraph (although we need to have some fun now and again).
Unfortunately I missed Swinburne’s talk, although speaking to others after it was over I was told that it wasn’t exactly his finest hour.
It’s such a pity that Dawkins (in The God Delusion) takes Swinburne to be representative of the typical theologian against whom he argues. As far as I can tell, Swinburne represents a very narrow segment of the theological spectrum, while there are many other voices with whom he could conduct a much more fruitful conversation. If conversation is what Dawkins is actually after, of course…