Education, religion, and wealth

An interesting graphic from yesterday's New York Times Magazine.  (X axis is percentage of college graduates, Y axis is percentage of households with annual income above $75,000, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Baptists at lower left, reform Jews and Hindus at upper right, secularists just above middle of the line.).  Click on the graphic to enlarge it. :

Religion and brain atrophy...

I guess I might as well continue the religion theme of yesterday's post with this piece from Owen et al., on religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in later life:

Despite a growing interest in the ways spiritual beliefs and practices are reflected in brain activity, there have been relatively few studies using neuroimaging data to assess potential relationships between religious factors and structural neuroanatomy. This study examined prospective relationships between religious factors and hippocampal volume change using high-resolution MRI data of a sample of 268 older adults. Religious factors assessed included life-changing religious experiences, spiritual practices, and religious group membership. Hippocampal volumes were analyzed using the GRID program, which is based on a manual point-counting method and allows for semi-automated determination of region of interest volumes. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was observed for participants reporting a life-changing religious experience. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was also observed from baseline to final assessment among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants not identifying as born-again. These associations were not explained by psychosocial or demographic factors, or baseline cerebral volume. Hippocampal volume has been linked to clinical outcomes, such as depression, dementia, and Alzheimer's Disease. The findings of this study indicate that hippocampal atrophy in late life may be uniquely influenced by certain types of religious factors.

A Sunday School Hymn - Evolution Made Us All

From The Laughing Squid site, a spoof of a sunday school hymn:


Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.

Foundations of religious belief

Judith Shulevitz reviews James Kugel's "In the Valley of the Shadow - on the Foundations of Religious Belief." The book rose from the author's experience of still being alive seven years after being told he would die of cancer within a few years. His points on the utility of religious belief (even it if is a cognitive error) remind me of last Friday's MindBlog post on the utility of the size-weight illusion in throwing. Here are a few clips from the review:

...the recent debates about religion — is it a force for good or for evil, intrinsically violent or intrinsically peaceful? — have on the whole been a bit “narrow.” Too many pundits, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists fail to imagine their way into the rich, elusive mental condition called “believing in God” or “being religious.” They dismiss it as a neurosis, a superstition or a mistake. An otherwise appealing evolutionary theory of religion, for instance, holds that God and the gods are ghostlike entities created by a “hyperactive agent detection device” in the brain — that is, a hair-trigger response to unusual stimuli that evolved to protect us from danger, but wound up making us mistakenly attribute intention and even divinity to things that have none.

Kugel asks whether it’s the skeptics who are being willfully blind to the ancient truths bundled into these apparent errors. Consider the band of prehistoric hunter-gatherers made aware of their fragility by the magnitude of what they were up against. “This little group was endlessly overshadowed by all that was outside of them, forever on the receiving end of whatever You — immanent in the great Outside all around — happened to be dishing out,” he reminds us. To call their brains “hyperactive” because they identify that “You” as a mindful agent, Kugel says, is “ludicrous.” The “great Outside” was nearly all-powerful: why shouldn’t it mean to make things happen? “On the contrary,” Kugel writes, “it would require some sort of extraordinarily twisted spirit to look up and not see You, Your hand gloved in cloud and sky, Your voice mingling with cricket song and crashing waves, doing all the things that impinged on the little band’s existence. You were practically everything, and You completely overwhelmed their own little reality.”

Believing in God, Kugel suggests — possibly being a tad ahistorical — originally meant aligning yourself with the force of the universe, of humbly opening yourself up to its grandeur, more than it meant asserting faith in a particular deity. Kugel reviews the literature on epilepsy and the “God spot,” the “verbal conceptual association area” where various lobes of the brain come together. When stimulated, as in epileptic seizures, it has been shown to lead to visions of God or at least a sense of what one researcher called “connection with an overwhelmingly powerful being.” You could say the God spot proves that religion is a matter of brain malfunction, Kugel observes. Or you could call the epileptic’s aura “a privileged moment, an opening of the mind to something it cannot normally perceive.”

To the religious — or at least to Kugel and his sources — religion is an experience more than a cosmology. “It is not God’s sovereignty over the entire universe that is at issue so much as his sovereignty over the cubic centimeter of space that sits just in front of our own noses,” he writes. “That is to say, religion is first of all about fitting into the world and fitting into one’s borders. There may indeed be something ‘mythic’ about it, but it pales before the mythic quality of our own clumsy, modern selves.”

The biology of morality

I have already pointed to a TED talk by Sam Harris, and thought I would pass on a few clips from a review of his related book, "The Moral Landscape - How Science Can Determine Human Values." On Harris:

...his dispensation is that “Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.” In applying reason to questions of morality, Harris claims that we can define morality only as it relates to the well-being of conscious organisms and that such well-being is completely measurable using the methods of neurobiology. This suggests to him that any action can be clearly classified as moral (increasing well-being) or immoral (decreasing well-being) without ambiguity. However, it doesn't mean that there is only one answer to a question of morality. He contends that “the existence of multiple peaks on the moral landscape does not make them any less real or worthy of discovery. Nor would it make the difference between being on a peak and being stuck deep in a valley any less clear or consequential.” But Harris firmly disagrees with the moral relativist views that there is no clearly defined morality that cuts across different societies and that therefore all views of morality are equally meritorious. He writes, “Multiculturalism, moral relativism, political correctness, tolerance even of intolerance—these are the familiar consequences of separating facts and values on the left.” “My goal,” he states, “is to convince you that human knowledge and human values can no longer be kept apart.”

Harris isn't choosy when it comes to vilifying religions. He notes the willingness of many to ignore genocide or cases of sexual abuse within their churches while taking strong actions against individuals who perform abortions (or refuse to prohibit them). He also draws from history examples of undeniably immoral choices in the name of religion. Harris criticizes scientists for persisting in their faith and for failing to confront head-on a society that he thinks is mired in superstition.

Harris thinks too many scientists have compromised on principles. “Many of our secular critics worry that if we oblige people to choose between reason and faith, they will choose faith and cease to support scientific research.” Even the journal Nature upholds the idea of nonoverlapping magisteria of Gould. Harris complains, “It is one thing to be told that the pope is a peerless champion of reason and that his opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is both morally principled and completely uncontaminated by religious dogmatism; it is quite another to be told this by a Stanford physician who sits on the President's Council on Bioethics.”

One might conclude that although at one time the best way to define and enforce moral behavior was through revealed faith, as science and reason advance, we can chip away at the old edifice and build anew. Stories of a young-Earth creation now look rather untenable, but in the past they might have been the only way to instill awe and teach a new and meaningful moral code. Rather than nonoverlapping magisteria, the domains of science and religion are intermingling all the time. The Moral Landscape may represent a new beach-head in this quest.

Modern virtue - the religion of physical fittness

As I have morphed during my life from a devout teenage christian church organist into a crusty old materialistic atheist, I have found a new church in the cult of physical exercise and fitness. Virtue and badness can be simply measured by whether I have worked out today. Until I read this fascinating tribute to Jack LeLane, who recently died at the age of 96, I had not realized what a modern invention my church is, growing from the opening of his first gym in Oakland, CA. in 1936:

With “The Jack LaLanne Show,” he also had a hand in the spread — a contagion, really — of television programs exhorting viewers to rise up from their La-Z-Boys...An army of spandex missionaries was unleashed....What he left behind when he died last week...was not only a sweaty culture of relentless crunching and spinning but also the notion that fitness equals character, and that self-actualization begins with the self-discipline to get and stay in shape. In the post-LaLanne landscape, it’s not the eyes but the abdominals that are windows to the soul...A “new you” usually means a trimmer, tauter version, not someone who has learned to speak Mandarin or picked up woodworking skills...There’s a bullying strain to the modern fitness ethos, a blurred line between cheerleading and hectoring...When exercise comes wrapped in value judgments, does it wind up entangled in an anxiety that threatens the very resolve to get fit? As Mr. LaLanne was siring new methods for shaping up, he was fathering something else, too: a potent, and in some cases immobilizing, strain of contemporary guilt.

Living for "The Whoosh"

Scanning my long list of links that haven't quite made it into a MindBlog post, I note this Op-Ed piece by David Brooks from Dec. 31, in which he summarizes the main arguments in a new history of Western Philosophy by Dreyfus and Kelly, "All Things Shining."

Dreyfus and Kelly start with Vico’s old idea that each age has its own lens through which people see the world. In the Middle Ages, for example, “people could not help but experience themselves as determined or created by God.” They assumed that God’s plans encompassed their lives the way we assume the laws of physics do...For the past hundred years or so, we have lived in a secular age...individuals have to find or create their own meaning.

Dreyfus and Kelly...are on to something important when they describe the way — far more than in past ages — sports has risen up to fill a spiritual void...Spiritually unmoored, many people nonetheless experience intense elevation during the magical moments that sport often affords. They call this experience “whooshing up.” We get whooshed up at a sports arena, at a political rally or even at magical moments while woodworking or walking through nature...We should not expect these experiences to cohere into a single “meaning of life.” Transcendent experiences are plural and incompatible...Our most vibrant institutions are collective, not individual or religious. They are there to create that group whoosh: the sports stadium, the concert hall, the political rally, the theater, the museum and the gourmet restaurant. Even church is often more about the ecstatic whoosh than the theology...Real life is more about serial whooshes than coherent meaning. (Though they try, Dreyfus and Kelly don’t give us a satisfying basis upon which to distinguish the whooshing some people felt at civil rights rallies from the whooshing others felt at Nazi rallies.)

Robust exchanges on MindBlog

Just as I have been following the commentaries (19 when I last looked) on the topic of last Wednesday's post "Our minds extend beyond our heads" another comment came in on a older post, "Neuroscience and the soul" which also triggered a robust exchange, so I thought I would just repeat that link here.

The anxiolytic power of religion

Inzlicht and Tullett add a bit of information to the growing field of the cognitive science of religion (which examines religious beliefs as a natural by-product of the way human minds and brains work, meeting a number of people’s myriad needs.) They find that a brain activity related to defensive responses to error (a sort of cortical 'alarm bell') is lower in religious than in non-religious individuals:

The world is a vast and complex place that can sometimes generate feelings of uncertainty and distress for its inhabitants. Although religion is associated with a sense of meaning and order, it remains unclear whether religious belief can actually cause people to feel less anxiety and distress. To test the anxiolytic power of religion, we conducted two experiments focusing on the error-related negativity (ERN)—a neural signal that arises from the anterior cingulate cortex and is associated with defensive responses to errors. The results indicate that for believers, conscious and nonconscious religious primes cause a decrease in ERN amplitude. In contrast, priming nonbelievers with religious concepts causes an increase in ERN amplitude. Overall, examining basic neurophysiological processes reveals the power of religion to act as a buffer against anxious reactions to self-generated, generic errors—but only for individuals who believe.

Seeking immortality in words, not religion

Christopher Hitchens, atheist author of "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," is most likely dying of esophageal cancer. Liesl Schillinger writes on how his writing of an essay on his experience of illness has

...elicited hundreds of responses from well-wishers (and some foes), who urge Mr. Hitchens in online comments (and in their prayers, many write) to accept salvation...When asked, “Do you find it insulting for people to pray for you?” Mr. Hitchens responded: “No, no. I take it kindly, under the assumption that they are praying for my recovery.”..All the same, Mr. Hitchens dismissed both the notion that his cancer would lead him to make a tardy profession of faith and the idea that, if it did, such a profession would be valid...“The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he said. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark, but no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a remark.”

Hitchens' friend, novelist Martin Amis,

...said his friend, like other writers, surely believed that after death, “not all of you will die,” because the printed words they leave behind constitute a kind of immortality. He added, “The desire for immortality ... explains all the extraordinary achievements, both good and bad.”

Another British-born intellectual's faith in articulacy caught the public eye this summer. On Aug. 6, Tony Judt died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He had told a former student

...that he wanted his epitaph to read, “I did words.”

Thoughts of randomness enhance supernatural beliefs.

Kay et al. do some interesting experiments in which thoughts of randomness are primed in subject by a set of manipulations. They:

...supraliminally primed half the participants with randomness-related words; the other half were primed with words matched in negative valence. To assess the role of arousal, we employed a misattribution paradigm, which involved requiring all participants to swallow a pill ostensibly containing an herbal supplement. Half the participants were told that the pill sometimes induces arousal as a side effect, and half were told that the pill has no side effects. Previous work has shown that the side-effect condition leads participants to attribute the cause of any experienced arousal to this salient source. Hypothesizing that beliefs in supernatural control function, at least in part, to down-regulate the aversive arousal associated with randomness, we expected the randomness primes to increase beliefs in God, but only for those participants not given the opportunity to attribute the cause of their arousal to the ingested pill.

Their observations were that:

...participants primed with randomness-related words exhibited heightened beliefs in spiritual control compared with participants primed with negatively valenced control words. This effect disappeared when participants were given the opportunity to attribute the cause of any arousal they experienced to a pill ingested earlier in the session. 

They take their data to suggest:

...that belief in supernatural sources of control, such as God and karma, may function, in part, to defend against distress associated with randomness, even when the perception of randomness is not related to traumatic events.

Religiosity tied to socioeconomic status.

Gregory Paul makes an interesting comment on an article by Cullota that was the subject of my Nov. 17 post.  I think his point that belief in gods and an afterlife is unlikely to be a "strongly genetically programmed result of major selective evolutionary pressures such as social cohesion" is a good one.   But, I assume he would agree that there is genetic/development programming of things like the facial muscles that are specialized for signaling affiliative gestures that are universal across cultures. Here is his letter:

The Science News Focus story "On the origin of religion" (E. Culotta, 6 November 2009, p. 784) did not incorporate the growing body of psychosociological research that is revealing the crucial role of socioeconomics in the origin and popularity of religion, as well as in creationism (1–6). Some hunter-gatherers have minimal religion (7), and those who do not believe in the gods and an afterlife have spontaneously expanded in prosperous democracies until they are the majority in some nations, such as France, Sweden, and Denmark (1, 3, 4). Because religion is not universal, as implied in the News Focus article, serious religiosity cannot be the strongly genetically programmed result of major selective evolutionary pressures such as social cohesion (8).

In modern nations, nonreligion and the acceptance of evolution become popular when the middle class majority feels sufficiently secure and safe, thanks to low income inequality, universal health care, job and retirement security, and low rates of lethal crime; this has occurred to greater and lesser degrees in most first-world countries, from Japan to Scandinavia (1–6). Religion thrives when the majority seek the aid and protection of supernatural powers because they are impoverished, as in the third- and second-world countries or, in the case of the United States (the most religious and creationist first-world country), because the majority of Americans fear losing their middle-class status as a result of limited government support, high levels of social pathology, and intense economic competition and income disparity (1–6). Prosperous modernity is proving to be the nemesis of religion.

References

* 1. G. Paul, Evol. Psychol. 7, 398 (2009); www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07398441_c.pdf.
* 2. T. Rees, J. Relig. Soc. 11 (2009); moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2009/2009-17.html.
* 3. P. Zuckerman, Soc. Compass 3, 949 (2009). [CrossRef]
* 4. P. Norris, R. Inghelart, Sacred and Secular (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2004).
* 5. A. Gill, E. Lundsgaarde, Rational. Soc. 16, 399 (2004). [CrossRef]
* 6. S. Verweii, P. Ester, R. Naata, J. Sci. Study Relig. 36, 309 (1997). [CrossRef] [Web of Science]
* 7. F. Marlowe, in Ethnicity, Hunter-Gatherers, and the "Other," S. Kent , Ed. (Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington, DC, 2002), pp. 247–281.
* 8. C. N. Wade, The Faith Instinct (Penguin, New York, 2009).

Thinking of God moves attention

Here is an interesting tidbit:

The concepts of God and Devil are well known across many cultures and religions, and often involve spatial metaphors, but it is not well known if our mental representations of these concepts affect visual cognition. To examine if exposure to divine concepts produces shifts of attention, participants completed a target detection task in which they were first presented with God- and Devil-related words. We found faster RTs when targets appeared at compatible locations with the concepts of God (up/right locations) or Devil (down/left locations), and also found that these results do not vary by participants’ religiosity. These results indicate that metaphors associated with the divine have strong spatial components that can produce shifts of attention, and add to the growing evidence for an extremely robust connection between internal spatial representations and where attention is allocated in the external environment.

God's beliefs as what we want them to be.

Epley et al., in an open access article, find that what we believe about God's views is more egocentric than what we believe about the views of other humans:

People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent's beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God's beliefs than with estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 1–4). Manipulating people's beliefs similarly influenced estimates of God's beliefs but did not as consistently influence estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 5 and 6). A final neuroimaging study demonstrated a clear convergence in neural activity when reasoning about one's own beliefs and God's beliefs, but clear divergences when reasoning about another person's beliefs (Study 7). In particular, reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs.

The faith instinct

Schulevitz reviews Nicholas Wade's new book "The Faith Instinct - How it evolved and how it endures."

According to Wade, a New York Times science writer, religions are machines for manufacturing social solidarity. They bind us into groups. Long ago, codes requiring altruistic behavior, and the gods who enforced them, helped human society expand from families to bands of people who were not necessarily related. We didn’t become religious creatures because we became social; we became social creatures because we became religious. Or, to put it in Darwinian terms, being willing to live and die for their coreligionists gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for resources.

...Rituals take time; sacrifices take money or its equivalent. Individuals willing to lavish time and money on a particular group signal their commitment to it, and a high level of commitment makes each coreligionist less loath to ignore short-term self-interest and to act for the benefit of the whole. What are gods for? They’re the enforcers. Supernatural beings scare away cheaters and freeloaders and cow everyone into loyal, unselfish, dutiful and, when appropriate, warlike behavior.

...our innate piety has adapted to our changing needs. Hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and, shamans aside, had direct access to the divine. But when humans began to farm and to settle in cities and states, religion became hierarchical. Priests emerged, turning unwritten rules and chummy gods into opaque instruments of surveillance and power. Church bureaucracies created crucial social institutions but also suppressed the more ecstatic aspects of worship, especially music, dance and trance. Wade advances the delightfully explosive thesis that the periodic rise of exuberant mystery cults represent human nature rebelling against the institutionalization of worship: “A propensity to follow the ecstatic behaviors of dance and trance was built into people’s minds and provided consistently fertile ground for revolts against established religion,”

The religious wars

In a NYTimes OpEd piece appropriate to yesterday's Thanksgiving rituals Kristof notes a new crop of books on religion that that he feels are less combative and more thoughtful than extreme fundamentalist (The "Left Behind" novels) or atheist (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens) efforts.

One of these is “The Evolution of God,” by Robert Wright, who explores how religions have changed — improved — over the millennia. He notes that God, as perceived by humans, has mellowed from the capricious warlord sometimes depicted in the Old Testament who periodically orders genocides...Karen Armstrong’s “The Case for God,” likewise doesn’t posit a Grandpa-in-the-Sky; rather, she sees God in terms of an ineffable presence that can be neither proven nor disproven in any rational sense. To Ms. Armstrong, faith belongs to the realm of life’s mysteries, beyond the world of reason, and people on both sides of the “God gap” make the mistake of interpreting religious traditions too literally...“The Faith Instinct,” by...Nicholas Wade, suggests a reason for the durability of faith: humans may be programmed for religious belief, because faith conferred evolutionary advantages in primitive times. That doesn’t go to the question of whether God exists, but it suggests that religion in some form may be with us for eons to come.

Evolution of "the God gene"

Articles on a particular topic seem to come out in clusters. Shortly after doing yesterday's post on the origin of religions I see this article by Nicholas Wade in the NYTimes. He makes some further interesting points.

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless...For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.

It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.

The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community. Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal.

Could the evolutionary perspective on religion become the basis for some kind of detente between religion and science? Biologists and many atheists have a lot of respect for evolution and its workings, and if they regarded religious behavior as an evolved instinct they might see religion more favorably, or at least recognize its constructive roles. Religion is often blamed for its spectacular excesses, whether in promoting persecution or warfare, but gets less credit for its staple function of patching up the moral fabric of society. But perhaps it doesn’t deserve either blame or credit. If religion is seen as a means of generating social cohesion, it is a society and its leaders that put that cohesion to good or bad ends.

Cognitive science and the origin of religions

Elizabeth Culotta writes the 11th essay in Science's series in honor of the Year of Darwin, which explores the human propensity to believe in unseen deities. She describes a new field:'the cognitive science of religion', which draws on psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to understand the mental building blocks of religious thought. Here are a few slightly edited clips from the essay:

...there remains a yawning gap between the material evidence of the archaeological record and the theoretical models of psychologists. Archaeological objects fall short of revealing our ancestors' minds while on the psychological side more evidence is needed.
...Many researchers take the use of symbols as a clue to budding spirituality. As far back as 100,000 years ago, people at the South African site of Blombos Cave incised pieces of ochre with geometric designs, creating the first widely recognized signs of symbolic behavior.

...While archaeologists trace the outward expressions of religious and symbolic behavior, another group of researchers is trying to trace more subtle building blocks of religious belief, seeking religion's roots in our minds.
...According to the emerging cognitive model of religion, we are so keenly attuned to the designs and desires of other people that we are hypersensitive to signs of "agents": thinking minds like our own... a "hypertrophy of social cognition" leads us to attribute random events or natural phenomena to the agency of another being.
...young children prefer "teleological," or purpose-driven, explanations rather than mechanical ones for natural phenomena...in several studies British and American children in first, second, and fourth grades were asked whether rocks are pointy because they are composed of small bits of material or in order to keep animals from sitting on them. The children preferred the teleological explanation. They give an animistic quality to the rock; it's protecting itself...we all from childhood have a bias to see the natural world as purposefully designed. It's a small step to suppose that the design has a designer.
...a hair-trigger agency detector could work with another sophisticated element of the human mind to make us prone to believe in gods: what's called theory of mind, or the understanding that another being has a mind with intentions, desires, and beliefs of its own.
...If you suspect that an agent was responsible for some mysterious event, it's a short step to thinking that the agent has a mind like your own. Higher order theory of mind enables you to represent mental states of beings not immediately or visibly present, and who could have a very different perspective than your own. That's what you need to have a rich representation of what it might be like to be a god. (It's also what is needed to have a functional religion, because people need to know that others share their beliefs.) As Darwin put it, humans developing religion "would naturally attribute to spirits the same passions, the same love of vengeance, or simplest form of justice, and the same affections which they themselves feel."
...Some fMRI studies lend support to this idea. When subjects in an fMRI scanner are asked to evaluate statements about God's emotions and relationships to humans, such as, "God is removed from the world" and "God is forgiving," the areas that light up, such as the inferior frontal gyrus on both sides of the brain, are also involved in theory of mind. This and other results argue against any special "god region" of the brain as some have suggested; rather, religious belief might co-opt widely distributed brain sectors, including many concerned with so-called theory of mind.

Many favor an additional class of explanations for why religion is so prominent in every culture: It promotes cooperative behavior among strangers and so creates stable groups. The hypothesis is that religion is actually adaptive: By encouraging helpful behavior, religious groups boost the biological survival and reproduction of their members. Adhering to strict behavioral rules may signal that a religion's members are strongly committed to the group and so will not seek a free ride, a perennial problem in cooperative groups

Perpetual revelations

Ross Douthat reviews a book, "The Case for God" by Karen Armstrong, that tries to land somewhere between the militant atheists and the religious fundamentalists. Armstrong makes a case for an approach to religion:

...which emphasizes the pursuit of an unknowable Deity, rather than the quest for theological correctness ... compatible with a liberal, scientific, technologically advanced society. She argues that it’s actually truer to the ancient traditions of Judaism, Islam and (especially) Christianity than is much of what currently passes for “conservative” religion. And the neglect of these traditions, she suggests, is “one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so troublesome today.”

Both modern believers and modern atheists, Armstrong contends, have come to understand religion primarily as a set of propositions to be assented to, or a catalog of specific facts about the nature of God, the world and human life. But this approach to piety would be foreign to many premodern religious thinkers, including the greatest minds of the Christian past, from the early Fathers of the Church to medieval eminences like Thomas Aquinas.

These and other thinkers, she writes, understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred” and emphasizes what we can’t know about the divine. And their religion was a set of skills, rather than a list of unalterable teachings — a “knack,” as the Taoists have it, for navigating the mysteries of human existence.

The neuropsychology of religion - neural correlates of belief

Sam Harris (the guy who wrote "The End of Faith" and "Letters to a Christian Nation"), along with a group of collaborators, has made fMRI measurements on fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. Religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.