Programmed to pray?

Spot the non-sequiturs in this story from last Thursday's Times (behind paywall):

Human beings are predisposed to believe in God and the afterlife, according to a study by academics at the University of Oxford.

The findings of a three-year, £1.9 million research project suggest that there is an inbuilt bias in the mind towards seeing the world in religious or spiritual terms. This means that public life will always have a strong religious dimension, and that religion will always have an impact on public life, the project leaders say.

 “It means you cannot separate religion and public life,” said Roger Trigg, a philosophy professor and co-director of the project. Professor Trigg, from the Ian Ramsey Centre in the Theology Faculty at Oxford, said: “The mind is open to supernatural agency. There are lots of explanations. It is certainly linked to basic cognitive architecture, in other words, the way we think.”

So, it appears researchers have discovered that humans have an innate predisposition towards religious belief. I’m not qualified to assess the validity of this finding. But I’m curious as to how this leads automatically to the conclusion that ‘religion will always have an impact on public life’. How on earth did 'public life' sneak in there?

The term is, of course, taken straight from the current highly-charged debates about the place of religion in society, and this is very much a political rather than a scientific claim. One of the tropes of anti-secularist discourse has been that secularists and atheists are actively seeking to exclude religion from ‘public life’, or from something called ‘the public square’. It’s become one of those truisms for which little evidence is ever produced. As Helena Kennedy said last week about the Coalition’s constant claim that the Labour government left the economy in a terrible mess, if you repeat something often enough, people will eventually come to believe it (even in the absence of evidence and argument), and it will become part of 'common sense'. In the religion and secularism debate, we're used to a variety of weary familiar tropes of this kind: so, the ‘new’ atheism is always ‘militant’, secularism essentially ‘aggressive’, and liberalism is just as ‘fundamentalist’ as some forms of religion.

Returning to the Oxford research: As Deborah Cameron said in a recent radio debate with Simon Baron-Cohen, about supposedly ‘inbuilt’ gender differences, it’s not that the findings of neuroscience are necessarily ‘wrong’, it’s rather that neuroscientists claim too much for them. They over-ambitiously seek to draw a straight line from some aspect of our biological make-up to attitudes and activities that are deeply embedded in human culture, society and history. Listening to researchers of this ilk (and despite its  theological patina, this research on religion is clearly making claims of a neuroscientific nature), you get the impression that thousands of years of history, social organisation and cultural development, not to mention philosophical reflection, count for nothing, and that our behaviour is directly determined by our genes or our brain cells, as if we lived in a laboratory rather than in complex, multi-layered human societies.

Professor Trigg almost concedes this:

He said that it was too simplistic to talk in terms of being “hard-wired” or “programmed” to believe in God, however. Environmental factors also applied, and humans were not naturally monotheistic. The supernatural instinct could manifest in polytheism or other belief systems as well. 

Well, it's a relief to learn that we're not all programmed to be Christians or Muslims. However, an implied admission of the project's hubris comes later:

The research has raised philosophical questions, such as why it is that if God does exist, he makes it so difficult for humans to believe in him or her. “It is not obvious,” Professor Trigg said. “Others might say it would be an encroachment on human freedom if we were too forced to believe in God.”

It’s not clear how an academic research project, even one lasting three years and costing nearly two million pounds, ever thought it was going to solve philosophical and theological problems that have mystified humankind for millenia.

As I say, I don't feel qualified (not being a neuroscientist) to evaluate the findings of these studies, but even a humble scholar of the humanities and social sciences like me can see that there might be a problem with aspects of their methodology. For example:

One study by Emily Reed Burdett and Dr Barrett at Oxford suggested that children below the age of five found it easier to believe in some superhuman properties than to understand similar human limitations. Children were asked whether their mother would know the contents of a box into which she could not see. Those aged three believed that their mother and God would always know the contents, but by the age of four many started to understand that their mothers were not all-seeing and all-knowing while continuing to believe in an all-seeing, all-knowing supernatural agent such as God.

As every sociologist, or psychologist with an ounce of sociocultural awareness, will tell you, there's simply no way of identifying some 'instinctive' understanding of the world that precedes involvement in a social world of shared ideas and values. Even 'children under five' - especially those with the ability to understand and answer a researcher's questions - have acquired language, which comes imprinted with a mass of cultural assumptions.

This study begs as many questions as it answers. Where, we might ask, did these children derive their concept of 'God' as an 'all-seeing, all-knowing supernatural agent'? Are we supposed to believe that's 'inbuilt' too? 

One of the researchers involved in this particular study continued:

This project does not set out to prove God or gods exist. Just because we find it easier to think in a particular way does not mean that it is true in fact. If we look at why religious beliefs and practices persist in societies across the world, we conclude that individuals bound by religious ties might be more likely to co-operate as societies. Interestingly, we found that religion is less likely to thrive in populations living in cities in developed nations where there is already a strong social support network.

Or, one might add, where religious ideas have been challenged by science or bycompeting philosophies. Again, this supposed finding ignores cultural and social differences between societies and historical periods, in its overweening attempt to identify ahistorical, decontextualised commonalities, and thus to prove the universality - and universal usefulness - of religion.

None of which is to deny the legitimate role of faith in public life. But when religion is forced to fall back on arguments about the social value of faith, rather than attempting to prove its truthfulness, and when theology turns to neuroscience to support its claims, it's a sign of weakness rather than strength, and of desperation rather than confidence.

Progress, primitivism and the politics of 'Avatar'

There was a fascinating exchange on yesterday's Today programme, about a planned scientific expedition to Paraguay. Fascinating, because it exemplified some key trends in current debates about 'culture' and 'progress'.

On one side of the argument was Professor Richard Lane, director of science at the Natural History Museum, which is sponsoring the expedition. Lane was measured, thoughtful, weighing up the benefits and risks of the venture, very much the voice of academic, scientific reason. On the other side was Benno Glauser, director of an indigenous people’s protection group, who argued that the expedition should be called off, because of the threat it poses to communities who have never had any contact with the outside world.

Glauser suggested, somewhat melodramatically, that any contact between the expedition and these indigenous groups would be tantamount to 'genocide'. This was primarily due to the risk of exposure to western diseases, a risk that was disputed by Professor Lane. But there was another, deeper layer to Glauser's concern. He was also worried that any meeting between these hitherto isolated communities and the representatives of western modernity would lead to the breakdown of what he called their 'life model'. He proceeded to elaborate on this in glowing terms, claiming that these indigenous people 'live in complete interdependence with nature', that 'they have a principle of life which is a principle of minimal intervention' in which 'the world protects them as long as they protect the world'.

In other words, Glauser painted a picture of life among isolated indigenous communities in Paraguay as some kind of ecological Eden. By implication, he cast the civilisation represented by the expedition - scientific, modern, western - in entirely negative terms, as a threat or pollutant to this paradisal scene. The echoes of James Cameron's Avatar seemed almost deliberate. (Mischievously, I also wondered how Glauser could speak with such certainty about the way of life of these groups, if they have never had any contact with the outside world.)

Listening to the exchange, it struck me that two hundred years ago, the terms of the debate would have been completely reversed. At the height of colonial expansion and missionary zeal, it was the world of the indigenous tribes that would have been viewed negatively - as backward, godless, darkened by ignorance - and western civilisation as advanced, enlightened, in possession of truth. In the last century, secularised versions of this discourse - both capitalist and communist - held sway, with the prevailing wisdom on all sides being that exposure to modern medicine, scientific knowledge, mechanical methods and so forth, would bring enormous benefits to the lives of 'primitive' peoples.

Even half a century ago - in the Sixties - the dominant paradigm for representing the needs of Third World people was 'development', the notion that lives could be infinitely improved by providing access to modern farming methods, industrial production, safer childbirth, etc.

Since then, as Benno Glauser’s argument (and the popularity of films like Avatar) demonstrates, there has been a massive loss of confidence in ‘progress’ and in 'western' ideas and values (the very labelling of them as 'western', rather than as universal and an aspiration for everyone, is symptomatic). Running alongside this has been the rise of a culturalism that reifies the values and way of life of communities (particularly if those communities are non-western and 'other') as static and almost sacred, together with a relativism that tends to see all cultures as equally valid and therefore beyond rational criticism.

Both trends are evident in the fulminations of cultural commentators such as the Guardian's Madeleine Bunting, with her hand-wringing about the shortcomings of modern civilisation - the individualism, the consumerism, the shallowness - and wondering whether, perhaps, the religious fundamentalists might not have a point - and after all, who are we to judge?

Of course, this kind of thing is not new. Alongside a rhetoric of reason and scientific advance, liberal progressivism has always included a romanticising strain, a tendency to idealise the primitive and the 'other'. Indeed - to get pretentious for a moment - maybe what we are seeing in the rise of the new eco-primitivism (not to mention the new pro-faithism) is the revenge of Romanticism on the Enlightenment. But I digress...

Returning to Benno Glauser's glorification of indigenous 'culture': I notice there was no mention of any less desirable features in the lives of these isolated hunter-gatherers. I wonder what their life expectancy is, or what proportion of their offspring survive infancy? How many of them die from unexplained diseases, and how many of their women are worn down by a constant round of childbirth, or their men by a life devoted to the exhausting daily search for sustenance?

Let’s imagine for a moment that the Natural History Museum's expedition goes ahead and that, despite its best efforts, it makes 'accidental' contact with one of these indigenous groups, which leads in turn to an opening-up of that community to the outside world. Now, imagine that in about fifty years' time the grand-daughter of one of those tribesmen, who has had the opportunity to leave her native village to go to school and then university, has become (say) a pioneering medical researcher, or an acclaimed novelist, or a globetrotting politician. Would the likes of Benno Glauser still argue that her life would have been better if the expedition had not happened, if contact had not been made, and she had been compelled to lead the same kind of life as her mother and her grandmother?

To be sure, if contact is made, there will be losses as well as gains. And those responsible need not to repeat the mistakes of previous incursions, ensuring that rapacious developers and mad-eyed missionaries are kept at bay, and that the rights and freedoms of indigenous peoples are respected. But how strange it would have seemed to progressives of earlier times to argue that indigenous people should be forbidden access to the benefits of modernity - and that every effort should be made to deny them the right to choose for themselves the kind of lives they wish to lead.

Support Simon Singh: keep libel laws out of science

I've just added the 'Keep libel laws out of science' button to the bottom of this page. See here for the original story about the British Chiropractic Association's legal moves to silence science writer Simon Singh's challenge to claims about the efficacy of their treatments. And go to the Sense about Science site for more information on the campaign to defend Singh. I'm not a scientist, but this looks like a clear case of academic and intellectual freedom under attack. It also makes a mockery of the UK's antiquated and illiberal libel laws.

Faith, evolution and secularism: a couple of links

Never let it be said that you only read negative stuff about religion on this blog. Here's a couple of links to thoughtful pieces written from a believing perspective:

On yesterday's Today programme, John Humphrys interviewed an American scientist, apparently a good friend of Richard Dawkins, who argued against the teaching of 'intelligent design', which he saw as little more than creationism with new window-dressing. The surprise of the interview was when the scientist revealed himself to be a practising Roman Catholic. You can read Professor Kenneth Miller's thought-provoking explanation of why an understanding of evolution deepens rather than threatens his Christian faith here.

And here's Red Maria, also writing from a Catholic perspective, on why Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor should refuse the offer of a seat in the House of Lords when he retires as Archbishop of Westminster. As I've always argued, religious faith and secularism (rightly understood) are not incompatible: indeed, a clear separation of church and state is ultimately in the interests of believers.

Giving science and secularism a bad name

One of the constant themes of this blog has been the misguided efforts of some religionists to construct a straw man, bearing labels such as 'militant atheism' and 'aggressive secularism', when much of the militancy and aggression in recent controversies has actually come from the faith camp. 

At the same time, I'm an admirer of neurobiologist Colin Blakemore, not only for his pioneering brain research and contributions to the public understanding of science, but also for his bravery in standing up to animal rights extremists. However, his article on science and religion in yesterday's Observer was a rather crude and superficial piece of polemic.

Arguing that religious faith may simply be a false model of reality, implanted in our brains, that has outgrown its evolutionary usefulness, Blakemore foresees a day when science makes religion redundant. He writes:

I'm dubious about those 'why' questions: why are we here? Why do we have a sense of right and wrong? Either they make no sense or they can be recast as the kind of 'how' questions that science answers so well.

Thus, in a couple of sentences, Blakemore not only abolishes religion, but does away with the need for philosophy, ethics, and probably the social sciences and humanities too. This kind of reductionism and determinism gives science - and secularism - a bad name.

More on this from Norm here.

Attenborough on Darwin

I've just taken Oliver's advice and watched David Attenborough's film about Darwin, which I missed at the weekend, via the BBC iPlayer. It's a great piece of television, culminating in an explanation of the theory of evolution that even scientific ignoramuses like me can understand. 

Like Oliver, I've been frustrated by the way that arguments about 'intelligent design' have dominated coverage of the Darwin anniversary. I heard Attenborough interviewed twice on BBC radio about the programme, and on both occasions the interviewer seemed more concerned with his (lack of) religious beliefs than with the content of the film. Taken together with recent suggestions that schools should teach creationism alongside evolution, it makes you wonder how far we've really progressed in the 150 years since The Origin of Species was published...

Funding homophobia

A.C.Grayling has fun in this piece with attempts to show that religious belief is 'hardwired' into human nature. The research is funded by the Templeton Foundation - 'an organisation keen to find, or to insert, religion into science and to promote belief in their compatibility'. I'm as hostile as Grayling to this kind of misguided and reductive abuse of neuroscience. But I sometimes think that Grayling, like his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, is a little harsh on the Foundation. If a rich man wants to spend his money trying to find scientific evidence for his religious beliefs, then that's up to him - and other, more sceptical scientists are free to refute the resulting findings.

On the other hand, I don't think that John Templeton (son of the Foundation's founder and its current president) has any business using his financial resources to influence democratic elections, especially those that affect people's civil rights. It emerged recently that Templeton (acting in a personal capacity, not on behalf of his Foundation) was one of the biggest funders (after the Mormon church) of the successful Proposition 8 campaign. I'm still at a loss to understand why these homophobic religious types are so keen to stop gay people marrying, when it would have no impact whatever on their own practices or beliefs. There seems to be a certain failure to understand the separation of church and state - the churches don't own civil marriage, and they are perfectly free to carry on restricting church marriages to heterosexual couples, if that's their wish.

Supporters of gay marriage may have lost the battle - for now - but they can still laugh at their opponents. I liked this response from some of Hollywood's finest (The West Wing's Alison Janney does a good impersonation of an uptight religious matron):

(Via)

N.B.Having received advice from the Templeton Foundation since writing this (see comment below) I've amended the above post to make it clear that John Templeton Jr's donation to the Prop 8 cause was made in a private capacity and had nothing to do with the Foundation.

Palinguistics

Imagine you're a teacher and you ask a student whether she believes climate change is a man-made problem. And this is the answer you get:

You know there are - there are man's activities that can be contributed to the issues that we're dealing with now, these impacts. I'm not going to solely blame all of man's activities on changes in climate. Because the world's weather patterns are cyclical. And over history we have seen change there. But kind of doesn't matter at this point, as we debate what caused it. The point is: it's real; we need to do something about it.

If you were teaching a science class, you might question the student's grasp of the facts. If you were teaching debating skills, you'd probably worry about her ability to construct an argument: surely a person's beliefs about the causes of climate change will determine what they think ought to be done about it?

And if you were this student's English teacher, you'd certainly challenge her ability to put together a meaningful sentence: 'man's activities that can be contributed to'? 'blame all of man's activities on changes in climate'? Did she really mean to say that climate change is responsible for human actions, rather than vice versa?

The worrying thing is, the person who gave this garbled and illogical answer is no school student, but a candidate for the vice-presidency of the world's most powerful country. OK, so she may have got flustered in the heat of the interview, but shouldn't candidates for high office be able to give meaningful answers to questions from relatively mild interviewers such as Katie Couric?

After 8 years of Bushisms, who would've thought the Republicans would put up a candidate who makes W. seem articulate? Or is it 'elitist' to expect political leaders to have a basic grasp of the English language? Most members of Congress, or local state legislatures - most people you know - could have given better answers than Palin to Couric's questions about the environment, the economy, or the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, as the hour of the VP debate draws near, here's a strategy that hadn't occurred to me: get your surrogates to cast last-minute doubts on the impartiality of the moderator.

Don't worry be happy

There was a terrific article by Darian Leader in the Guardian the other day, about the current vogue for the 'quick fix' of cognitive behavioural therapy. Leader argues that CBT is based on a view of the personality as 'a set of skills that we can learn and modify' and he draws parallels with the promises of transformation held out by reality TV:

CBT promises change just as swiftly. Unwanted character traits or symptoms are no longer seen as a clue to some inner truth, but simply as disturbances to our ideal image that can be excised. Instead of seeing a bout of depression or an anxiety attack as a sign of unconscious processes that need to be carefully elicited and voiced, they become aspects of behaviour to be removed.

The market has triumphed here, as our inner worlds become a space for buying and selling. We pay experts such as life coaches to teach us how to change in the desired way. Aspects of ourselves, such as shyness or confidence, become commodities that we can pay to lose or amplify.

Leader bemoans the popularity of CBT with government agencies and is critical of Lord Layard, the so-called 'happiness tsar', for persuading ministers to divert resources from more traditional therapies based on rather more complex views of the human psyche. He compares this development with government plans to regulate mediums and spiritualists:

It will not longer be up to us to believe in them or not, but a higher power will tell us who is legitimate and who is not. Just as a new rhetoric of 'science' tells us  that CBT is the best treatment, so it will arbitrate the 'other side'.

If you've been longing for a comprehensive riposte to 'positive' psychology and the government-backed 'happiness' industry, you can read the whole thing here.

Spirituality, science, etc: a couple of links

Following on from this post, in which I expressed my doubts about Jill Bolte Taylor's interpretation of her experience of stroke, and rehearsed my arguments with Buddhism and other kinds of New Age spirituality: here's an interview with Taylor which is refreshingly balanced, and a rather old piece (but I've only just come across it) by John Horgan articulating his own journey away from Buddhism, which says some of the things I was trying to say, but does it somewhat better.

Only connect

In a recent post I described my conflicted feelings about the issue of Tibet, as well as my brief flirtation and ultimate disillusionment with Buddhism. A propos of this, and via Butterflies and Wheels, I recently came across an article by Donald Lopez at The Immanent Frame, about the apparent connections between Buddhism and neurobiology. If you follow the links back, you reach this New York Times piece about neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor's experience of having a stroke, and her comparison of her sensations with Buddhist descriptions of the effects of meditation. And from there you can link back further to the Youtube video of Taylor talking about her experience.

 

The way Taylor describes her experience is extremely moving and she has a great gift for conveying sensations and emotions, but some aspects of her testimony made me feel quite uncomfortable. It also helped me to pinpoint one of the reasons why, despite my own experience of the benefits of meditation, I eventually drifted away from Buddhism. 

The integrity of Taylor's experience is unquestionable, but the interpretation she constructs around it is, I think, open to challenge. She makes a great deal of the differences, and supposed separation, between the right and left sides of the brain, controlling our immediate sensory experience of the world, and language and communication respectively. Now I'm no neuroscientist, but I do find this kind of brain science, popularised in a thousand self-help books, overly simplistic. Taylor describes her experience of the first few minutes of a stroke as like having the left, rational side of the brain switched off, and basking temporarily in the immediate, sensory world of the right brain. Moreover, she describes this in the kind of mystical language that has got some Buddhists and New Age types all excited.

I found myself wanting to challenge some of the implications that Taylor drew from her experience. She suggests that our immediate, sensory, right-brain experience is what enables us to feel at one with the world and is the source of our connexion to each other and to the world - while it's our left brain's constant, rationalising chatter that is the basis of our individuality and thus our separateness from others. From this, it's a short step to arguing (as she does) that if we all spent more time in the former mode of being (and, by implication, less time being rational and critical), we'd be better people and the world would be a more peaceful and harmonious place.

I believe this to be profoundly mistaken and dangerous. As a humanist, I would argue that it's precisely our capacity to reason, articulate and communicate that makes it possible for us to escape from the prison-house of self and make connexions with other human beings. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that the quest for mystical oneness leads not to mutual understanding but to selfishiness and solipsism. Moreover, it can end up in an apolitical outlook that is open to all kinds of dangerous irrationalism. 

In the days when I used to browse Buddhist websites, I came across an account by a group of western Buddhists who, in the aftermath of 9/11, wanted to do something to heal the perceived rift between the west and the Arab world. They described visiting a Middle Eastern country and making contact with a group of intellectuals who seemed open to dialogue. The latter were eager to meet westerners, and wanted to know their opinions about the Arab world - its politics, history and literature. But the Buddhist group had to admit they knew nothing of these things, and had done no reading about them as preparation for their trip. Instead, following the logic of their Buddhist beliefs, they had hoped to connect with their Arab interlocutors on the basis of their 'oneness' as human beings - that is, at the level of feeling and emotion, rather than knowledge, reason and debate. Needless to say, the encounter was something of a failure, and a massive missed opportunity. 

One of the commenters on the Immanent Frame piece links to an article by Slavoj Zizek, who views western Buddhism as a contemporary opium of the people, the ideal spiritual gloss for global capitalism. Now, you can argue that Zizek is being overly reductive and make the obvious points about the complex relations of base and superstructure, but after listening to Jill Bolte Taylor and reading some of the commentary on her experience, I began to wonder if he had a point. He also has some insightful things to say about the place of Tibet in the western imagination, managing to be critical of western romanticisation of the country without falling into the trap of excusing the Chinese occupation.

Sex on the brain

Scientists claim to have discovered that gay men and heterosexual women share similar kinds of brains, as do straight men and lesbians. Apparently studies have shown that gay men and straight women both tend to have a poor sense of direction, while they outperform straight men and lesbians in tasks that require verbal fluency.

I'm not sure where this leaves all those lesbians and straight men who happen to be brilliant writers, or all those heterosexual men who have difficulties with maps. Nor is it easy to see how this theory would account for bisexuality, or for the experience of those who go through a gay phase in their youth only to settle down with a partner of the opposite sex, not to mention those whose sexual preferences change in more subtle ways throughout their lives. 

I can see the usefulness of all this neuroscientific stuff for challenging those who insist that sexual preference is a mere lifestyle 'choice', but it's really far too reductive to account for the complexities and vagaries of human desire. Like all positivist science, it isolates historically and culturally shifting phenomena (the notion of 'the homosexual' as a distinct category was unknown 200 years ago), treats them as if they were fixed and unchanging, and attempts to identify 'hard-wired' causes that explain them. I often wonder if, in a hundred years time, this kind of neuroscience will seem as peculiar as the theories of those Victorian phrenologists who claimed to have identified the key features of the 'criminal' brain now appear to us.

On reading Richard Dawkins

Some thoughts on The God Delusion, which I've just finished reading.

It's a highly enjoyable, wonderfully-written piece of iconoclastic, rationalist polemic. The first third of the book - in which Dawkins smashes a path through a variety of religious totems - is probably the best, despite being scatter-gun rather than systematic in its choice of targets. I also enjoyed the riotous deconstruction of scripture and the tirade against religious education in later chapters.

Dawkins' demolition job on the philosophical grounds for belief is more cursory and less satisfying than the more scientifically-based chapters. And the attempt to explain the persistence of religion in evolutionary terms didn't quite convince me. It may be because I'm not a scientist (and generally, the book made me painfully aware of the deficiencies of my scientific education) and come from a humanities/social sciences background, but I found this account quite reductive. I'm not sure evolutionary biology can adequately explain religion any more than it can account for Marxism, or painting, or cricket. Some reviewers (like Terry Eagleton) have criticised Dawkins for a lack of familiarity with theology: I wanted more sociology, social psychology and politics.

Dawkins didn't quite make a (de?)convert of me. After reading his book, I'm probably at No.5 on his 10-point scale between strong atheism and strong theism - 'Technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism' - where I might have been at 3 or 4 before. But what the book has definitely done is renew my belief in secularism and provided it with some powerful ammunition. Here's Dawkins' reply to those who say we should automatically 'respect' religion:

I am not in favour of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of it. But I am mystified by the disproportionate privileging of religion in our otherwise secular societies. All politicians must get used to disrespectful cartoons of their faces, and nobody riots in their defence. What is so special about religion that we grant it such uniquely privileged respect?

Oh - and the book has left me with a desire to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge of evolutionary theory - probably by reading more books by Dawkins.