Why Do People Believe in Creationism or Evolution?

For anyone interested in the evolution/creationism debate, I would like to direct your attention to this extremely interesting podcast from SciAm.com. It is somewhat long, but the first ten minutes are an interview with University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Tania Lombrozo, who talks about why people believe what they do, especially regarding evolution or creationism.

Why People Believe What They Do

Prop 8: The Web Series - Episode 1 - Religion

If Atheists Ruled The World...

Does Requiring Evidence Make You Close-Minded???

PrayerMax 5000

The Dalai Lama on Science and Religion

The Dalai Lama "favors scientific evidence over classical Buddhist concepts" (from SciAm.com):

Editor's note: We are posting this feature from our February 2006 issue to commemorate the 50th anniversary this month of the Dalai Lama's forced exile from China.

Many years ago a curious boy looked through a telescope and, on seeing the shadows in the craters of the moon, realized that he had to make a choice. His religion taught him to respect the moon as a generator of light, but science taught him that the moon reflected the sun’s rays. The subtle clarification offered by science ultimately trumped the Buddhist interpretation for Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama.

Today when this political and religious leader is faced with conflicting explanations of life’s mysteries, the Dalai Lama still favors scientific evidence over classical Buddhist concepts. At a time when Americans are battling state by state for religion-free science education, he urges people to take a path of peace between the perspectives. An estimated 14,000 people attended his lecture on November 12, 2005, at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D.C., with most of them watching from overflow rooms where the talk was broadcast on large screens. Dressed in gold and crimson robes, he suggested a healthy dose of skepticism toward religious pronouncements. Although science can overturn spiritual teachings, people can benefit from scientific understanding without losing faith, he reasoned. Read more...

More on the 50th anniversary of the exile of the Dalai Lama (from npr.org):

China has overseen a "brutal crackdown" in Tibet since protests shook the Himalayan region last year, part of decades of Chinese oppression that have driven Tibetan culture to the verge of extinction, the Dalai Lama said Tuesday in a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the failed uprising that sent him into exile. Read more...

NPR podcast on 50th anniversary of the exile of the Dalai Lama

On the topic of the Dalai Lama and the influence of Western culture on his views...if you haven't seen Seven Years in Tibet, watch it NOW!

Religion is "Natural"

Or at least a natural thought, while evolutionary thinking is unnatural, according to psychological researchers - although that doesn't make it right (from SciAm.com):

Presently I’m attending a small symposium on “Belief and Reason” at Trinity College, Cambridge, being sponsored by the Perrott-Warrick Fund. It’s a rather intimate affair with mostly cognitive scientists discussing the latest research and theory on everything from paranormal beliefs to free will to the placebo effect. One of the standout talks Monday was by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who gave a presentation titled “Is Religion Natural?” He focused on the puzzling case of creationist beliefs.

As Bloom pointed out, many people believe that one’s acceptance of evolutionary theory boils down to whether that person was indoctrinated as a child by religious parents or educated by science-minded teachers. But it's not that simple. By her own accounts, even Helen Keller, who was born deaf and blind, spontaneously pondered, “Who made the sky, the sea, everything?” prior to being taught how to communicate. As a retrospective anecdote, the example should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they say—but if true, it’s quite something, since her linguistic isolation meant that Keller hadn’t a culturally transmitted concept of God to revert to but nevertheless intuited ‘someone’ had created the world. Read more...

Are Religious People Scared To Die?

Check out this post from 60 Second Science about a study that found religious people are more likely to pursue intensive treatment to prolong their lives (seems counter-intuitive to me, wouldn't people who believe in an afterlife be less afraid to die - that is unless they think they're going to hell):

Terminally ill cancer patients who lean heavily on religion to deal with their disease are about three times more likely than others in their shoes to receive aggressive treatment during their final days, according to a new study.

"Patients who rely more heavily on religion to cope are more likely to receive intensive life-prolonging care at the end of life," says Andrea Phelps, a senior internal medicine resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Mass. and co-author of the study published online yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Read more...

"Visualizing the Bible"

One of Wired Science's "Finest Science Images of 2008":

All 1,189 chapters of the Bible are depicted as a bar graph along the bottom of the illustration - the length of each bar is proportional to the number of verses in the chapter (books alternate in color between white and light grey). Rendered above this are 63,779 cross references, each represented by a single arc connecting two pieces of the text; different colors are used to denote varying distances between connected chapters. By Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University; Christoph Römhild, North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church.

No "God Spot"

A recent article discusses findings which dispel the myth that there is a single "God Spot" in the brain. In fact, religious thoughts originate from many different regions of the brain...Check it out (from 60 Second Science).

Do Religious People Have More Self-Control?

From TierneyLab (NYTimes.com):

Dr. McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami, says he learned a lot from the comments here at the Lab:

I was fascinated by the variety of religious activities that many of you have found useful for increasing self-control, including ritual dietary restrictions, meditation, ritual fasting, and rituals of self-examination and repentance. It seems that many readers could also identify with the idea that overdoing it in the religious realm can cause breakdowns in self-control—a sort of “spiritual burn-out.” Finally, many contributors felt that non-religious ideals—one contributor listed equanimity, mindfulness, compassion, for instance—could help to generate the self-control benefits that seem to be associated with religiosity (though some of you were skeptical about this possibility).

Here are answers from Dr. McCullough to three questions repeatedly raised by Lab readers:

1. “Isn’t it possible that religious people are lying about how much self-control they have.” Sure, but this possibility has grown more unlikely as more evidence has come in. We’re doing studies in my lab right now that enable us to measure people’s self-control by way of behavior and physiological functioning, rather than relying solely on what people say about themselves. These results should tell us more about how meaningful the links between religion and self-control really are.

2. “Couldn’t self-control make people more religious, rather than the other way around?” Absolutely. The fact two variables are related doesn’t mean that one causes the other. Some good causal evidence exists, but we’re doing more research that should help us determine whether religion improves self-control, whether low self-control turns people off of religion, or whether some other variable increases people’s self-control and their religiosity.

3.“What about all those pedophile priests and suicide bombers?” Religion spawns a lot of ugliness, it’s true, and some religious people (and religious leaders) are responsible for some truly horrible behavior. However, those facts are a bit of a distraction from the main question we’ve been asking, which, in its simplified form, is this: “If you take two people who are identical in every way except that one is more religious than the other, will the religious person have more self-control?” I’m not claiming that religion is a panacea, but the scientific support for the idea that religiosity is associated with many benefits for health, well-being, and social adjustment is now quite overwhelming. You can review the evidence here (pdf) and decide for yourself.

We want to determine whether these linkages come from religion’s ability to promote self-control. Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn’t. That’s why we do research! A religion/self-control link could also tell us some things about how the propensity for religion evolved to become a universal human characteristic.