39. Brefczynski-Lewis, Lutz, Schaefer, Levinson, & Davidson, 2007; Lutz, Brefczynski-Lewis, Johnstone, & Davidson, 2008; Lutz, Greischar, Rawlings, Ricard, & Davidson, 2004; Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, & Davidson, 2008; A. Newberg etal., 2001.
40. Anastasi & Newberg, 2008; Azari et al., 2001; A. Newberg, Pourdehnad, Alavi, & d'Aquili, 2003; A. B. Newberg, Wintering, Morgan, & Waldman, 2006; Schjoedt, Stodkilde-Jorgensen, Geertz, & Roepstorff, 2008, 2009.
41. S.Harris etal., 2008.
42. Kapogiannis et al., 2009.
43. S. Harris et al, 2009.
44. D'Argembeau et al., 2008; Moran, Macrae, Heatherton, Wyland, & Kelley, 2006; Northoff et al, 2006; Schneider et al., 2008.
45. Bechara et al., 2000.
46. Hornak et al., 2004; O'Doherty et al, 2003; Rolls, Grabenhorst, & Parris, 2008.
47. Matsumoto & Tanaka, 2004.
48. A direct comparison of belief minus disbelief m Christians and nonbelievers did not show any significant group differences for nonreligious stimuli. For religious stimuli, there were additional regions of the brain that did differ by group; however, these results seem best explained by a common reaction in both groups to statements that violate religious doctrines (i.e., "blasphemous" statements).
The opposite contrast, disbelief minus belief yielded increased signal in the superior frontal sulcus and the precentral gyrus. The engagement of these areas is not readily explained on the basis of prior work. However, a region-of-interest analysis revealed increased signal in the insula for this contrast. This partially replicates our previous finding for this contrast and supports the work of Kapogiannis et al., who also found signal in the insula to be correlated with the rejection of religious statements deemed false. The significance of the anterior insula for negative affect/ appraisal has been discussed above. Because Kapogiannis et al. did not include a nonreligious control condition in their experiment, they interpreted the insula's recruitment as a sign that violations of religious doctrine might provoke "aversion, guilt, or fear of loss" in people of faith. Whereas, our prior work suggests that the insula is active for disbelief generally.
In our study, Christians appeared to make the largest contribution to the insula signal bilaterally, while the pooled data from both groups produced signal in the left hemisphere exclusively. Kapogiannis et al. also found that religious subjects produced bilateral insula signal on disbelief trials, while data from both believers and nonbelievers yielded signal only on the left. Taken together, these findings suggest that there may be a group difference between religious believers and nonbelievers with respect to insular activity. In fact, Inbar et al. found that heightened feelings of disgust are predictive of social conservatism (as measured by self-reported disgust in response to homosexuality) (Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009). Our finding of bilateral insula signal for this contrast in our first study might be explained by the fact that we did not control for religious belief (or political orientation) during recruitment. Given the rarity of nonbelievers in the United States, even on college campuses, one would expect that most of the subjects in our first study possessed some degree of religious faith.
49. We obtained these results, despite the fact that our two groups accepted and rejected diametrically opposite statements in half of our experimental trials. This would seem to rule out the possibility that our data could be explained by any property of the stimuli apart from their being deemed "true" or "false" by the participants in our study.
50. Wager etal., 2004.
51. T. Singer etal., 2004.
52. Royet et al., 2003; Wicker et al., 2003.
53. Izuma, Saito, & Sadato, 2008.
54. Another key region that appears to be preferentially engaged by religious thinking is the posterior medial cortex. This area is part of the "resting state" network that shows greater activity during both rest and self-referential tasks (Nor-thoff et al., 2006). It is possible that one difference between responding to religious and nonreligious stimuli is that, for both groups, a person's answers serve to affirm his or her identity: i.e., for every religious trial, Christians were explicitly affirming their religious worldview, while nonbelievers were explicitly denying the truth claims of religion.
The opposite contrast, nonreligious minus religious statements, produced greater signal in left hemisphere memory networks, including the hippocampus, the para-hippocampal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, temporal pole, and retrosplenial cortex. It is well known that the hippocampus and the parahippocampal gyrus are involved in memory retrieval (Diana, Yonelinas, & Ranganath, 2007). The anterior temporal lobe is also engaged by semantic memory tasks (K. Patterson, Nestor, & Rogers, 2007), and the retrosplenial cortex displays especially strong reciprocal connectivity with structures in the medial temporal iobe (Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, & Schacter, 2008). Thus, judgments about the nonreligious stimuli presented in our study seemed more dependent upon those brain systems involved in accessing stored knowledge.
Among our religious stimuli, the subset of statements that ran counter to Christian doctrine yielded greater signal for both groups in several brain regions, including the ventral striatum, paracingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, the frontal poles, and inferior parietal cortex. These regions showed greater signal both when Christians rejected stimuli contrary to their doctrine (e.g., The Biblical god is a myth) and when nonbelievers affirmed the trurh of those same statements. In other words, these brain areas responded preferentially to "blasphemous" statements in both subject groups. The ventral striatum signal in this contrast suggests that decisions about these stimuli may have been more rewarding for both groups: Nonbelievers may take special pleasure in making assertions that explicitly negate religious doctrine, while Christians may enjoy rejecting such statements as false.
55. Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, [1956] 2008.
56. Atran, 2006a.
57. Atran, 2007.
58. Bostom, 2005; Butt, 2007; Ibrahim, 2007; Oliver & Steinberg, 2005; Rubin, 2009; Shoebat, 2007.
59. Atran, 2006b.
60. Gettleman, 2008.
61. Ariely, 2008, p. 177.
62. Pierre, 2001.
63. Larson &Witham, 1998.
64. Twenty-one percent of American adults (and 14 percent of those born on American soil) are functionally illiterate (www.nifl.gov/nifl/facts/reading_facts .html), while only 3 percent of Americans agree with the statement "I don't believe in God." Despite their near invisibility, atheists are the most stigmatized minority in the United States—beyond homosexuals, African Americans, Jews, Muslims, Asians, or any other group. Even after September 11,2001, more Americans would vote for a Muslim for president than would vote for an atheist (Edgell, Geteis, & Hartmann, 2006).
65. Morse, 2009.
66. And if there were a rider to this horse, he would be entirely without structure and oblivious to the details of perception, cognition, emotion, and intention that owe their existence to electrochemical activity in specific regions of the brain. If there is a "pure consciousness" that might occupy such a role, it will bear little resemblance to what most religious people mean by a "soul." A soul this diaphanous would be just as at home in the brain of a hyena (and seems just as likely to be there) as it would in the brain of a human being.
67. Levy (2007) poses the same question.
68. Collins, 2006.
69. It is worth recalling in this context that it is, in fact, possible for an established scientist to destroy his career by saying something stupid. James Watson, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, a Nobel laureate, and the original head of the Human Genome Project, recently accomplished this feat by asserting in an interview that people of African descent appear to be innately less intelligent than white Europeans (Hunte-Grubbe, 2007). A few sentences, spoken off the cuff, resulted in academic defenestration: lecture invitations were revoked, award ceremonies canceled, and Watson was forced to immediately resign his post as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Watson's opinions on
race are disturbing, but his underlying point was not, in principle, unscientific. There may very well be detectable differences in intelligence between races. Given the genetic consequences of a population living in isolation for tens of thousands of years, it would be very surprising if there were no differences between racial or ethnic groups waiting to be discovered. I say this not to defend Watson's fascination with race, or to suggest that such race-focused research might be worth doing. I am merely observing that there is, at least, a possible scientific basis for his views. While Watson's statement was obnoxious, one cannot say that his views are utterly irrational or that, by metely giving voice to them, he has repudiated the scientific worldview and declared himself immune to its further discoveries. Such a distinction would have to be reserved for Watson's successor at the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins.
70. Collins, 2006, p. 225.
71. Van Biema, 2006; Paulson, 2006.
72. Editorial, 2006.
73. Collins, 2006, p. 178.
74. Ibid., pp. 200-201.
75. Ibid., p. 119.
76. It is true that the mysterious effectiveness of mathematics for describing the physical world has lured many scientists to mysticism, philosophical Platonism, and religion. The physicist Eugene Wigner famously posed the problem in a paper entitled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" (Wigner, 1960). While I'm not at all sure that it exhausts this mystery, I think there is something to be said for Craik's idea (Craik, 1943) that an isomorphism between brain processes and the processes in the world that they represent might account for the utility of numbers and certain mathematical operations. Is it really so surprising that certain patterns of brain activity (i.e., numbers) can map reliably onto the world?
77. Collins also has a terrible tendency of cherry-picking and misrepresenting the views of famous scientists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. For instance he writes:
Even Albert Einstein saw the poverty of a purely naturalistic worldview. Choosing his words carefully, he wrote, "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
The one choosing words carefully here is Collins. As we saw above, when read in context (Einstein, 1954, pp. 41-49), this quote reveals that Einstein did not in the least endorse theism and that his use of the word "God" was a poetical way of referring to the laws of nature. Einstein had occasion to complain about such deliberate distortions of his work:
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it (cited in R. Dawkins, 2006, p. 36).
78. Wright, 2003, 2008.
79. Polkinghorne, 2003; Polkinghorne & Beale, 2009.
80. Polkinghorne, 2003, pp. 22-23.
81. In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal submitted the nonsense paper "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to the journal Social Text. While the paper was patently insane, this journal, which still stands "at the forefront of cultural theory," avidly published it. The text is filled with gems like following:
[T]he discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities ... In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science— among them, existence itself—become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science (Sokal, 1996, p. 218).
82. Ehrman, 2005. Bible scholars agree that the earliest Gospels were written decades after the life of Jesus. We don't have the original texts of any of the Gospels. What we have are copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts that differ from one another in literally thousands of places. Many show signs of later interpolation—which is to say that people have added passages to these texts over the centuries, and these passages have found their way into the canon. In fact, there are whole sections of the New Testament, like the Book of Revelation, that were long considered spurious, that were included in the Bible only after many centuries of neglect; and there are other books, like the Shepherd of Hermas, that were venerated as part of the Bible for hundreds of years only to be rejected finally as false scripture. Consequently, it is true to say that generations of Christians lived and died having been guided by scripture that is now deemed to be both mistaken and incomplete by the faithful. In fact, to this day, Roman Catholics and Protestants cannot agree on the full contents of the Bible. Needless to say, such a haphazard and all-too-human process of cobbling together the authoritative word of the Creator of the Universe seems a poor basis for believing that the miracles of Jesus actually occurred.
The philosopher David Hume made a very nice point about believing in miracles on the basis of testimony: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish..." (Hume, 1996, vol. IV, p. 131). This is a good rule of thumb. Which is more likely, that Mary, the mother of Jesus, would have sex outside of wedlock and then feel the need to lie about it, or that she would conceive a child through parthenogenesis the way aphids and Komodo dragons do? On the one hand, we have the phenomenon of lying about adultery—in a context where the penalty for adultery is death—and on the other, we have a woman spontaneously mimicking the biology of certain insects and reptiles. Hmm...
83. Editorial, 2008.
84. Maddox, 1981.
85. Sheldrake, 1981.
86. I have publicly lamented this double standard on a number of occasions (S. Harris, 2007a; S. Harris & Ball, 2009)
87. Collins, 2006, p. 23.
88. Langford et al., 2006.
89. Massermanetal., 1964.
90. Our picture of chimp notions of fairness is somewhat muddled. There is no question that they notice inequity, but they do not seem to care if they profit from it (Brosnan, 2008; Brosnan, Scruff, & de Waal, 2005; Jensen, Call, & Tomasello, 2007; Jensen, Hare, Call, &Tomasello, 2006; Silk etal, 2005).
91. Range et al., 2009.
92. Siebert, 2009.
93. Silver, 2006, p. 157.
94. Ibid., p. 162.
95. Collins, 2006.
96. Of course, I also received much support, especially from scientists, and even from scientists at the NIH.
97. Miller, it should be noted, is also a believing Christian and the author of Finding Darwin's God (K. R. Miller, 1999). For all its flaws, this book contains an extremely useful demolition of "intelligent design."
98. C. Mooney & S. Kirshenbaum, 2009, pp. 97-98.
99. The claim is ubiquitous, even at the highest levels of scientific discourse. From a recent editorial in Nature, insisting on the reality of human evolution:
The vast majority of scientists, and the majority of religious people, see little potential for pleasure or progress in the conflicts between religion and science that are regularly fanned into flame by a relatively small number on both sides of the debate. Many scientists are religious, and perceive no conflict between the values of their science—values that insist on disinterested, objective inquiry into the nature of the Universe—and those of their faith (Editorial, 2007).
From the National Academy of Sciences:
Science can neither prove nor disprove religion... Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies have increased their awe and understanding of a creator ... The study of science need not lessen or compromise faith (National Academy of Sciences [U.S.] & Institute o
f Medicine [U.S.], 2008, p. 54).
Chapter 5: The Future of Happiness
1. Allen, 2000.
2. Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1910.
3. As indicated above, I think it is reasonably clear that concerns about angering God and/or suffering an eternity in hell are based on specific notions of harm. Not believing in God or hell leaves one blissfully unconcerned about such liabilities. Under Haidt's analysis, concerns about God and the afterlife would seem to fall under the categories of "authority" and/or "purity." I think such assignments needlessly parcel what is, at bottom, a more general concern about harm.
4. Inbar etal., 2009.
5. Schwartz, 2004.
6. D. T. Gilbert, 2006.
7. www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_mem ory.html.
8. Ibid.
9. Lykken &Tellegen, 1996.
10. D. T. Gilbert, 2006, pp. 220-222.
11. Simonton, 1994.
12. Rilling etal., 2002.
REFERENCES
Aaronovitch, D. (2010). Voodoo histories: The role of the conspiracy theory in shaping modern history. New York: Riverhead Books.
Abe, N., Suzuki, M., Tsukiura, X, Mori, E., Yamaguchi, K., Itoh, M., et al. (2006). Dissociable roles of prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices in deception. Cereb Cortex, 16(2), 192-199.
Abraham, A., & von Cramon, D. Y. (2009). Reality = relevance? Insights from spontaneous modulations of the brain's default network when telling apart reality from fiction. PLoS ONE, 4(3), e4741.
Abraham, A., von Cramon, D. Y., & Schubotz, R. I. (2008). Meeting George Bush versus meeting Cinderella: The neural response when telling apart what is real from what is fictional in the context of our reality. / Cogn Neurosci, 20(6), 965-976.
Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Koenigs, M., & Damasio, A. R. (2005). Preferring one taste over another without recognizing either. Nat Neurosci, 8(7), 860-861.
Ainslie, G. (2001). Breakdown of will. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Allen, J. (2000). Without sanctuary: Lynching photography in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms.