It also seems that both Christians and nonbelievers were probably less certain of their religious beliefs. In our previous study of belief, in which a third of our stimuli were designed to provoke uncertainty, we found greater signal in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) when subjects could not assess the truth-value of a proposition. Here we found that religious thinking (when compared with nonreligious thinking) elicited this same pattern in both groups. Both groups also took considerably longer to respond to religious stimuli, despite the fact that these statements were no more complex than those in the other category. Perhaps both atheists and religious believers are generally less sure about the truth and falsity of religious statements. 54
Despite vast differences in the underlying processing responsible for religious and nonreligious modes of thought, the distinction between believing and disbelieving a proposition appears to transcend content. Our research suggests that these opposing states of mind can be detected by current techniques of neuroimaging and are intimately tied to networks involved in self-representation and reward. These findings may have many areas of application—ranging from the neuropsychology of religion, to the use of "belief detection" as a surrogate for "lie detection," to understanding how the practice of science itself, and truth claims generally, emerge from the biology of the human brain. And again, results of this kind further suggest that a sharp boundary between facts and values does not exist as a matter of human cognition.
Does Religion Matter?
While religious belief may be nothing more than ordinary belief applied to religious content, such beliefs are clearly special in so far as they are deemed special by their adherents. They also appear especially resistant to change. This is often attributed to the fact that such beliefs treat matters aloof from the five senses, and thus are not usually susceptible to disproof. But this cannot be the whole story. Many religious groups, ranging from Christian sects to flying saucer cults, have anchored their worldviews to specific, testable predictions. For instance, such groups occasionally claim that a great cataclysm will befall the earth on a specific date in the near future. Inevitably, enthusiasts of these prophecies also believe that once the earth starts to shake or the floodwaters begin to rise, they will be spirited away to safety by otherworldly powers. Such people often sell their homes and other possessions, abandon their jobs, and renounce the company of skeptical friends and family—all in apparent certainty that the end of the world is at hand. When the date arrives, and with it the absolute refutation of a cherished doctrine, many members of these groups rationalize the failure of prophecy with remarkable agility. 55 In fact, such crises of faith are often attended by increased proselytizing and the manufacture of fresh prophecy—which provides the next target for zealotry and, alas, subsequent collisions with empirical reality. Phenomena of this sort have led many people to conclude that religious faith must be distinct from ordinary belief.
On the other hand, one often encounters bewildering denials of the power of religious belief, especially from scientists who are not themselves religious. For instance, the anthropologist Scott Atran alleges that "core religious beliefs are literally senseless and lacking in truth conditions" 56 and, therefore, cannot actually influence a person's behavior. According to Atran, Muslim suicide bombing has absolutely nothing to do with Islamic ideas about martyrdom and jihad; rather, it is the product of bonding among "fictive kin." Atran has publicly stated that the greatest predictor of whether a Muslim will move from merely supporting jihad to actually perpetrating an act of suicidal violence "has nothing to do with religion, it has to do with whether you belong to a soccer club." 57
Atran's analysis of the causes of Muslim violence is relentlessly oblivious to what jihadists themselves say about their own motives. 58 He even ignores the role of religious belief in inspiring Muslim terrorism when it bursts into view in his own research. Here is a passage from one of his papers in which he summarizes his interviews with jihadists:
All were asked questions of the sort, 'So what if your family were to be killed in retaliation for your action?' or 'What if your father were dying and your mother found out your plans for a martyrdom attack and asked you to delay until the family could get back on its feet?' To a person they answered along lines that there is duty to family but duty to God cannot be postponed. 'And what if your action resulted in no one's death but your own?' The typical response is, 'God will love you just the same.' For example, when these questions were posed to the alleged Emir of Jemaah Islamiyah, Abu Bakr Ba'asyir, in Jakarta's Cipinang prison in August 2005, he responded that martyrdom for the sake of jihad is the ultimate fardh 'ain, an inescapable individual obligation that trumps all others, including four of the five pillars of Islam (only profession of faith equals jihad). What matters for him as for most would-be martyrs and their sponsors I have interviewed is the martyr's intention and commitment to God, so that blowing up only oneself has the same value and reward as killing however many of the enemy. 59
What may appear to the untutored eye as patent declarations of religious conviction are, on Atran's account, merely "sacred values" and "moral obligations" shared among kin and confederates; they have no propositional content. Atran's bizarre interpretation of his own data ignores the widespread Muslim belief that martyrs go straight to Paradise and secure a place for their nearest and dearest there. In light of such religious ideas, solidarity within a community takes on another dimension. And phrases like "God will love you just the same" have a meaning worth unpacking. First, it is pretty clear that Atran's subjects believe that God exists. What is God's love good for? It is good for escaping the fires of hell and reaping an eternity of happiness after death. To say that the behavior of Muslim jihadists has nothing to do with their religious beliefs is like saying that honor killings have nothing to do with what their perpetrators believe about women, sexuality, and male honor.
Beliefs have consequences. In Tanzania, there is a growing criminal trade in the body parts of albino human beings—as it is widely imagined that albino flesh has magical properties. Fishermen even weave the hair of albinos into their nets with the expectation of catching more fish. 60 I would not be in the least surprised if an anthropologist like Atran refused to accept this macabre irrationality at face value and sought a "deeper" explanation that had nothing to do with the belief in the magical power of albino body parts. Many social scientists have a perverse inability to accept that people often believe exactly what they say they believe. In fact, the belief in the curative powers of human flesh is widespread in Africa, and it used to be common in the West. It is said that "mummy paint" (a salve made from ground mummy parts) was applied to Lincoln's wounds as he lay dying outside Ford's Theatre. As late as 1908 the Merck medical catalog sold "genuine Egyptian mummy" to treat epilepsy, abscesses, fractures and the like. 61 How can we explain this behavior apart from the content of people's beliefs? We need not try. Especially when, given the clarity with which they articulate their core beliefs, there is no mystery whatsoever as to why certain people behave as they do.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), published by the American Psychiatric Association, is the most widely used reference work for clinicians in the field of mental health. It defines "delusion" as a "false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary." Lest we think that certain religious beliefs might fall under the shadow of this definition, the authors exonerate religious doctrines, in principle, in the next sentence: "The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith)" (p. 765). As others have observed, there are several problems with this definition. 62 As any clinician can attest, delusional patients often suffer from religious delusions. And the criterion that a belief be widely shared suggests that a belief can be delusional in o
ne context and normative in another, even if the reasons for believing it are held constant. Does a lone psychotic become sane merely by attracting a crowd of devotees? If we are measuring sanity in terms of sheer numbers of subscribers, then atheists and agnostics in the United States must be delusional: a diagnosis which would impugn 93 percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences. 63 There are, in fact, more people in the United States who cannot read than who doubt the existence of Yahweh. 64 In twenty-first-century America, disbelief in the God of Abraham is about as fringe a phenomenon as can be named. But so is a commitment to the basic principles of scientific thinking—not to mention a detailed understanding of genetics, special relativity, or Bayesian statistics.
The boundary between mental illness and respectable religious belief can be difficult to discern. This was made especially vivid in a recent court case involving a small group of very committed Christians accused of murdering an eighteen-month-old infant. 65 The trouble began when the boy ceased to say "Amen" before meals. Believing that he had developed "a spirit of rebellion," the group, which included the boy's mother, deprived him of food and water until he died. Upon being indicted, the mother accepted an unusual plea agreement: she vowed to cooperate in the prosecution of her codefendants under the condition that all charges be dropped if her son were resurrected. The prosecutor accepted this plea provided that that resurrection was "Jesus-like" and did not include reincarnation as another person or animal. Despite the fact that this band of lunatics carried the boy's corpse around in a green suitcase for over a year, awaiting his reanimation, there is no reason to believe that any of them suffer from a mental illness. It is obvious, however, that they suffer from religion.
The Clash Between Faith and Reason
Introspection offers no clue that our experience of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, depends upon voltage changes and chemical interactions taking place inside our heads. And yet a century and a half of brain science declares it to be so. "What will it mean to finally understand the most prized, lamented, and intimate features of our subjectivity in terms of neural circuits and information processing?
With respect to our current scientific understanding of the mind, the major religions remain wedded to doctrines that are growing less plausible by the day. While the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter has not been settled, any naive conception of a soul can now be jettisoned on account of the mind's obvious dependency upon the brain. The idea that there might be an immortal soul capable of reasoning, feeling love, remembering life events, etc., all the while being metaphysically independent of the brain, seems untenable given that damage to the relevant neural circuits obliterates these capacities in a living person. Does the soul of a person suffering from total aphasia (loss of language ability) still speak and think fluently? This is rather like asking whether the soul of a diabetic produces abundant insulin. The specific character of the mind's dependency on the brain also suggests that there cannot be a unified self at work in each of us. There are simply too many separable components to the human mind—each susceptible to independent disruption—for there to be a single entity to stand as rider to the horse. 66
The soul doctrine suffers further upheaval in light of the fatal resemblance of the human brain to the brains of other animals. The obvious continuity of our mental powers with those of ostensibly soulless primates raises special difficulties. If the joint ancestors of chimpanzees and human beings did not have souls, when did we acquire ours? 67 Many of the world's major religions ignore these awkward facts and simply assert that human beings possess a unique form of subjectivity that has no connection to the inner lives of other animals. The soul is the preeminent keepsake here, but the claim of human uniqueness generally extends to the moral sense as well: animals are thought to possess nothing like it. Our moral intuitions must, therefore, be the work of God. Given the pervasiveness of this claim, intellectually honest scientists cannot help but fall into overt conflict with religion regarding the origins of morality.
Nevertheless, it is widely imagined that there is no conflict, in principle, between science and religion because many scientists are themselves "religious," and some even believe in the God of Abraham and in the truth of ancient miracles. Even religious extremists value some of the products of science—antibiotics, computers, bombs, etc.—and these seeds of inquisitiveness, we are told, can be patiently nurtured in a way that offers no insult to religious faith.
This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates. But it is based on a fallacy. The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas and bad ones is possible. Is there a conflict between marriage and infidelity? The two regularly coincide. The fact that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto—in a single brain, in an institution, or in a culture—does not mean that there isn't a perfect contradiction between reason and faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the world's "great," and greatly discrepant, religions.
What can be shown by example is how poorly religious scientists manage to reconcile reason and faith when they actually attempt to do so. Few such efforts have received more public attention than the work of Francis Collins. Collins is currently the director of the National Institutes of Health, having been appointed to the post by President Obama. One must admit that his credentials were impeccable: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist, and the former head of the Human Genome Project. He is also, by his own account, living proof that there can be no conflict between science and religion. I will discuss Collins's views at some length, because he is widely considered the most impressive example of "sophisticated" faith in action.
In 2006, Collins published a bestselling book, The Language of God, 6H in which he claimed to demonstrate "a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony" between twenty-first-century science and Evangelical Christianity. The Language of God is a genuinely astonishing book. To read it is to witness nothing less than an intellectual suicide. It is, however, a suicide that has gone almost entirely unacknowledged: The body yielded to the rope; the neck snapped; the breath subsided; and the corpse dangles in ghastly discomposure even now—and yet polite people everywhere continue to celebrate the great man's health.
Collins is regularly praised by his fellow scientists for what he is not: he is not a "young earth creationist," nor is he a proponent of "intelligent design." Given the state of the evidence for evolution, these are both very good things for a scientist not to be. But as director of the NIH, Collins now has more responsibility for biomedical and health related research than any person on earth, controlling an annual budget of more than $30 billion. He is also one of the foremost representatives of science in the United States. We need not congratulate him for believing in evolution.
Here is how Collins, as a scientist and educator, summarizes his understanding of the universe for the general public (what follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008):
Slide 1
Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.
Slide 2
God's plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.
Slide 3
After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced "house" (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.
Slide 4
We humans use our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.
Slide 5
If the Moral Law is just a side effect of
evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It's all an illusion. We've been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?
Is it really so difficult to perceive a conflict between Collin's science and his religion? Just imagine how scientific it would seem to most Americans if Collins, as a devout Hindu, informed his audience that Lord Brahma had created the universe and now sleeps; Lord Vishnu sustains it and tinkers with our DNA (in a way that respects the law of karma and rebirth); and Lord Shiva will eventually destroy it in a great conflagration. 69 Is there any chance that Collins would be running the NIH if he were an outspoken polytheist?
Early in his career as a physician, Collins attempted to fill the God-shaped hole in his life by studying the world's major religions. He admits, however, that he did not get very far with this research before seeking the tender mercies of "a Methodist minister who lived down the street." In fact, Collins's ignorance of world religion appears prodigious. For instance, he regularly repeats the Christian canard about Jesus being the only person in human history who ever claimed to be God (as though this would render the opinions of an uneducated carpenter of the first century especially credible). Collins seems oblivious to the fact that saints, yogis, charlatans, and schizophrenics by the thousands claim to be God at this very instant. And it has always been thus. Forty years ago, a very unprepossessing Charles Manson convinced a band of misfits in the San Fernando Valley that he was both God and Jesus. Should we, therefore, consult Manson on questions of cosmology? He still walks among us—or at least sits—in Corcoran State Prison. The fact that Collins, as both a scientist and as an influential apologist for religion, repeatedly emphasizes the silly fiction of Jesus' singular self-appraisal is one of many embarrassing signs that he has lived too long in the echo chamber of Evangelical Christianity.