Tag Archives: Religion

Pursuing Truth Together: On Dan Dennett, science, & what the humanities have to offer

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Jonathan Morgan

conflictDebate between the humanities and science is nothing new, so Steven Pinker’s latest manifesto for science is no real surprise.  He argues for science’s rightful place at the table discussing questions about life, morality, and human nature.  That’s a reasonable enough request; but Pinker, unfortunately, goes overboard, instead arguing that science should be at the head of the table… maybe even the only one at the table.  What a boring dinner party.  And, like any polarizing argument, he’s garnered some very strong reactions.

In fact New Republic’s editor, Leon Wieseltier, placed his defense of the humanities directly within Pinker’s article.  He argues, like many within the humanities, against the hubris of science as the exclusive holder of truth.  Other, more pragamatic, critiques of Pinker argue that his condescending attitude only deepens the rift he is, supposedly, trying to bridge.

In the midst of all this mud-slinging, it’s refreshing to hear some voices that are reasonable and nuanced.  I was more than a bit surprised to find Daniel Dennett, who is typically as vitriolic as Pinker, as one of those voices.  In his recent piece on the Edge, Dennett urges the humanities to “join forces” with science, to drop defenses and quit making itself off-limits.  I don’t think this is just a Trojan horse attempt by science to infiltrate the humanities.  I think it’s a very reasonable appeal to drop the war-ladened metaphors all together, and to again take up the mantle of pursuing truth.

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Scientists as philosophers

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Jonathan Morgan

SpaceThe end of summer is rapidly approaching, which means I’ve been catching up on my Internet movie watching (a luxury that classes and lab work don’t afford!). The last piece I watched was the most recent Issac Asimov Memorial debate. Asimov is best known for his science fiction novels- remember I, Robot, the 2004 Will Smith movie? That film was based on an Asimov story. But he was also an incredible scientist and thinker. A true polymath, Asimov wrote on everything from astronomy to Shakespeare, from chemistry to the Bible. If that wasn’t cool enough, he even has an asteroid named after him. Okay, that ends my Asimov shout-out.

The Memorial debate is hosted by the American Museum of Natural History in honor of Asimov.* The purpose is to debate pressing questions at the scientific frontier. This year the debate was about the concept of nothing. Neil deGrasse Tyson** lead a panel of physicists, philosophers, and other thinkers in a discussion about the beginnings of the universe and how to think about nothing.

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Statistics on Religion- Part III

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Jonathan Morgan

man praying and looking up I began the series on religious statistics by asking the question: is religion disappearing? Okay, I didn’t ask it that explicitly, but it’s the question at the heart of secularization.  And the question keeps intriguing me because it’s so difficult to answer. In America alone there are increasing numbers of religiously unaffiliated, but among those ranks, religion is still described as important to their daily lives.  How do we explain that?  Worldwide, the picture becomes even more complex.

One of the most difficult things to figure out is why most industrial nations show a decline in religious affiliation, but worldwide the number of people holding strong religious beliefs is at an all time high.  How do we juggle these seemingly opposed trends? Continue reading →

Statistics on Religion- Part II

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Jonathan Morgan

Profile shot of professional man holding hands up to face againsLast week I wrote about the rise of the Nones.  The Pew Forum on Religion documented a rise in the religiously unaffiliated over the last five years.  Many interpret this as a decline in religious authority, saying religion no longer holds the power it once had.  Others see it merely as a shifting religious landscape, not necessarily a decline.  You could take either side of the debate with good reasons, but the question is too complex to be resolved by any one set of statistics.  So we turn to another set of data to gain a different perspective on the American religious landscape.

If you’re arguing with a friend about how religion is changing (do other people do this?), the Baylor Religion Surveys are a great resource to have in your back pocket.  Beginning around 2004, a team of sociologists, religion scholars, and other researchers began a twenty-year process of tracking religious belief in America.  Each wave of results focuses on different aspects of religious life.  The first wave, published in 2006, sheds light on last week’s topic.  In the latest wave, they didn’t just collect data on people’s individual beliefs, but also on how those beliefs impact their well-being, their entrepreneurial spirit, their belief in the American Dream, their sense of control… the list goes on, giving a fascinating picture of how deeply religion is interwoven with other parts of our lives.

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Statistics on Religion- Part I

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Jonathan Morgan

Muslim Friday prayer, blue mosque TurkeyBack in the sixties, the American sociologist Peter Berger proposed the Secularization Hypothesis – a fancy term for the theory that as cultures become more modern, they will move out from under the umbrella of religion. This change could be seen in a number of ways. It could show up as a declining importance of religion in organizations; think about hospitals, many of which still bear religious names, but not much else religious. Or secularization could show up as fewer and fewer people professing belief or affiliation.

Berger recanted his theory and now argues that development leads to a diversity of religions, but the secularization debate continues. And the debate persists for a good reason – it’s really difficult to gain a clear picture of how religion is changing among individuals, communities, and cultures. Over the next few weeks I’m going to review some of the research that tries to follow religious change.

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The Frequencies Project

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Jonathan Morgan

monitoring wavesLast week I wrote about the challenges of categorizing spirituality or religiosity. Part of the difficulty lies in the porous nature of the two concepts; each seeps into and encroaches on the other. But another difficulty, one I didn’t touch on last week, is that both concepts are alive – metaphorically of course. They’re dynamic; the ways people and communities use the terms is constantly changing. They aren’t scientific categories, like mammal or friction, with precise definitions. Instead, they’re fluid. This makes the task of studying spirituality or religion challenging and exciting.

A prime example of the nebulous nature of spirituality is the Frequencies Project. This experiment, produced by the people at The Immanent Frame and Killing the Buddha (both worth checking out), aims to be a “collaborative genealogy of spirituality.” They collected reflections from scholars, writers, and artists on what they think of when they think about spirituality. Where a social scientist attempts to be precise and hone in on the concept, this experiment blows open the category and accepts the dynamic and fluid nature of people’s lived spirituality. And the result is fascinating.

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Is spirituality distinct from religion?

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Jonathan Morgan

Young pretty caucasian girl praying

How do we categorize someone’s religiosity?  It seems easy enough when people choose their affiliation, but even that category can contain many different types of spirituality: not all Methodists are the same.  This complexity gets even trickier when it comes to categorizing the large group of people who are not affiliated.  The “nones” (a moniker for those who answer “unaffiliated” on survey questions about their religion) encompass everyone from atheists to agnostics to the simply uninterested.  And of course, each of these groups contains an even wider array of personalities.  The complexity is staggering and poses a difficult challenge to anyone studying religion.

On a more basic level, it’s quite difficult to even distinguish between spirituality and religiosity.  In everyday conversation, people readily make this distinction by identifying as “spiritual but not religious,” but new research by Boston University sociologist Nancy Ammerman shows just how blurry the distinction actually is.

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Meditation and Compassion

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Jonathan Morgan

MeditationOne of the challenges of the scientific study of religion is to avoid reducing religion into only one of its parts. Evolutionary models suggest that religion may have helped early societies address the problem of people benefiting from the group’s resources without also contributing; but is religion’s only function to prevent free-riders? Psychological studies suggest that specific types of religious belief relate to our health; but if you focus solely on those findings, what parts of religion do you lose sight of? Do we risk ignoring some essential features of the very thing we hope to study?

The psychologist David DeSteno, at Northeastern University, is attuned to these concerns and designed a clever study to augment our understanding of meditation. In a recent piece for the New York Times[4] , he explains that his motivation stemmed from a concern that meditation studies focus on certain effects of meditation, but may lose sight of the heart of meditation. As he explains, the goal of meditation is not simply to enhance individual performance; it’s “supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.”

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Religion and Morality

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classic columns blueprint sketch, vectorHow does our morality affect our religious beliefs?  Perhaps more appropriately: how do our religious beliefs affect our morality? Or do both emerge from something else, like personality? The boundaries and relationships between these different aspects of who we are are very fuzzy. We can’t just point to some behavior and call it exclusively moral, or religious, or just their personality. But while the problem is deeply complex, an abundance of data (some of it collected here) is bringing certain trends into the foreground.

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Is Religion Beyond the Brain?

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gears and headThe field of neuroscience is booming.  New discoveries emerge daily, and given the overwhelming complexity of the brain, many profound and important discoveries surely await.  This creates a furor of research, but it also encourages over-reaching generalizations.  People are quick to offer up interpretations about what all these new discoveries mean for our daily lives, for our religiosity, our relationships, our work, our health…  The brain and the mind are so intrinsic to who we are, and the research is so fascinating, that it’s hard to resist making these leaps of interpretation.  As a result, we see a slew of books and articles describing religion in terms of the brain, or vice-versa.  But, all too often, these works are philosophical speculation with a scientific façade.

Last week the New York Times columnist David Brooks critiqued the tendency to overextend these discoveries, by describing the difficulties faced in exploring the brain.  But in the end, he just returned to his philosophical camp by proclaiming, in opposition to most neuroscientists, that “The brain is not the mind.”  Okay, that’s fine to say and true to what most of us feel, but it does little to unearth the real richness of the problem: if the brain is not the mind, then how are the two interacting?  For a deep and quick overview of the mind-brain problem, see this lecture (if you’re worried about time, the relevant section is only six minutes long, starting at 9:27).

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