NewsTrust - Science and Religion - Most Recent Stories: Opinion

When God is Watching, People Are More Generous.

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Psychology Today - By Gad Saad - Nov. 09 (Opinion) - One argument in support of religiosity is that it makes people more moral. I am not particularly moved by this premise, as I find it a lot more impressive to be ethical, moral, kind, honest, and decent for reasons other than the fact that a "celestial dictator" (to borrow Christopher Hitchens' brilliant term) is watching over me. Moral and immoral acts are committed both by atheists and believers so neither group holds a monopoly over either form of behaviors.

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Atheism: class is a distraction

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Carlo Strenger - Oct. 15 (Opinion) - Reading through some of the contributions on class and atheism I am struck by a glaring omission. Brown's opening salvo has been to argue that atheism can be a class thing worn for the status it presumably imparts in certain circles – thus implying that there might not be an intrinsic, intellectual reason for choosing atheism. Nick Spencer shows that there is indeed a correlation between educational level and atheism. In the US this phenomenon is far more pronounced: a recent Pew survey shows that among scientists in the US only one-third believe in God, as opposed to 83% in the general population.

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Author’s Personal Forecast: Not Always Sunny, but Pleasantly Skeptical

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Patricia Cohen - Oct. 10 (Review) - Barbara Ehrenreich wants to make clear that she is not a spoilsport. “No one can call me a sourpuss,” she declared. “I have a big foot in the joy camp.” She is the author of “Dancing in the Streets,” a history of “collective joy,” she notes, and a lot of fun at parties. So her new book, “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” should not be mistaken for a curmudgeonly rant. It is serious social history. Many of the 17 books that Ms. Ehrenreich has written during the past three and half decades have taken her into alien worlds. In her fantastically successful 2001 book, “Nickel and Dimed,” for example, she details her experience of trying to get by on the salary of an unskilled, minimum-wage worker. By contrast, this newest volume is based on her stay in a world that she became intimately familiar with: the smiley-faced, pink-ribboned, positive-thinking culture that surrounds breast cancer patients. Ms. Ehrenreich found out she had the disease in 2000, and the news left her dazed, fearful and, most of all, angry. What she found when she sought information and support, however, was cheerfulness, and that shocked her. “There were exhortations to be positive,” Ms. Ehrenreich said. She had stopped for lunch recently in Manhattan’s theater district after meeting with her publisher at Metropolitan Books, and before returning to Alexandria, Va., where she moved two years ago to be close to her daughter and grandchildren. Smartly dressed in pants and a sweater with black rectangular glasses that frame her blue eyes, Ms. Ehrenreich, 68, looks like someone who is content to be fashionable rather than fashion forward. The unrelenting message was “that you had to be cheerful and accepting and that you would not recover unless you were,” said Ms. Ehrenreich, who also writes frequently for The New York Times. Most infuriating, she added, was the advice to “consider your cancer a gift.”

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Bob McChesney interviews Chris Mooney, blogger for Discover Magazine and author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

will.illinois.edu - By Bob McChesney, Chris Mooney - Sep. 13 (Interview) - Chris Mooney is a visiting associate in the Center for Collaborative History at Princeton University and the author of The Republican War on Science, Storm World and, with Sheril Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. Chris's blog can be found at blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection

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Reporting From the Front Lines of the Texas Evolution Debate

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Juli Berwald - Apr. 01 (Opinion) - Just hours before the Texas State Board of Education held its final hearings on the science education standards that would be put in place for the next decade, I set my kitchen timer for three minutes. I practiced my testimony among open jars of peanut butter and jelly strewn about from making kids' lunches. Ding. I still had my conclusion to read. What could I cut? For months I had been slinking around the controversy in Texas. I had gone to every public hearing, sitting on the floor in the back of the packed room. Behind rows of folding chairs, I had gotten to know the voices, if not the faces, of the board members. At issue was the wording of a science standard that states students must be taught the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution. Since Kansas passed similar legislation in 2005 and Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2006, scientists have viewed these three words as a means for inserting the creationist theology that goes under the name "intelligent design" into science classes.

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Creationism Feels Right, but That Doesn't Make it So

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Jesse Bering - Mar. 22 (Review) - 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.

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Mind Matters

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Steven Johnson, Jonah Lehrer - Mar. 18 (Review) - Most great stories revolve around decisions: the snap brilliance of Captain Sullenberger choosing to land his plane in the Hudson, or Dorothea’s prolonged, agonizing choice of whether to forsake her husband for true love in “Middlemarch,” or your parents’ oft-told account of the day they decided to marry. There is something powerfully human in the act of deliberately choosing a path; other animals have drives, emotions, problem-solving skills, but none rival our capacity for self-consciously weighing all the options, imagining potential outcomes and arriving at a choice. As George W. Bush might have put it, we are a species of deciders.

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The God of Eth (Skeptical Inquirer September/October 2005)

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

csicop.org - By Stephen Law - Feb. 14 (Advocacy) - Most people who believe in God assume their belief to be pretty reasonable. “Perhaps God’s existence can’t be conclusively proved,” they’ll say, “but it’s a fairly sensible thing to believe—far more sensible than, say, belief in fairies or Santa Claus.” But are they right? Christians, Muslims, and Jews all believe that God is both all-powerful and all-good. Indeed, God is often characterized as an infinitely loving father. Yet most of the popular arguments for the existence of God allow us to deduce little if anything about his moral character. Take the argument from design, for example. Even if it can be shown that the universe does show signs of design, what’s the evidence that its creator is all-good? There is also a well-known argument that, even if the universe was created by an all-powerful being, that being is not all-good. The argument is called the problem of evil, and runs roughly as follows: if God is both all-powerful and all-good, why is there so much suffering in the world? Why does God inflict earthquakes, floods, famines, and the Black Death upon us? Why does he give small children cancer? Why does he make life so grindingly miserable for so many? Why does he arrange for millions of us to end our lives horrendously scarred—in many cases both physically and psychologically crippled—by the world he created for us? This hardly sounds like the behavior of a supremely compassionate and loving father figure, does it? Surely, there’s overwhelming evidence that the universe is not under the control of a limitlessly powerful and benevolent character.

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The Darwins' marriage of science and religion

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Deborah Heiligman - Jan. 29 (Opinion) - Although they never were able to see eye-to-eye on the question of religion and God, they were able to reach their hands across the gulf. In the end, each of them accepted and, it seems, truly understood what the other believed. If it is a sign of intelligence to be able to hold two opposite thoughts or opinions in your head, then it is a mark of a successful marriage to be able to truly see the other person's point of view. This is also the mark of a successful society.

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Why should I respect these oppressive religions?

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Independent - By Johann Hari - Jan. 28 (Editorial) - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated 60 years ago that "a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest aspiration of the common people". It was a Magna Carta for mankind – and loathed by every human rights abuser on earth.

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Divine Impulses: Kath Jefferts Schori

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - Dec. 22 (Interview) - The presiding bishop of the Episcopal church talks about homosexuality as a gift and the future of her church

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A sustainable world

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The Christian Century - By James Halteman - Dec. 16 (Review) - Speth devotes an entire chapter to research showing that material growth not only fails to enhance human welfare but in many cases diminishes the quality of life. When workers migrate in search of higher pay and living standards, families and communities are fractured. Lonely people are surrounded by goods, the production of which has destroyed the environment. Much of this production has come from large corporations which are legally and socially constructed in ways that give them power in markets and policy circles where the interests of the wealthy are promoted first. Sensitivity to social concerns is low on the list of goals for most corporations, according to Speth. That is why it is appropriate to change the rules of the game so corporations are not privileged in their operations. But regulations that achieve this goal are not enough. Mere tinkering with incentives will have only a limited impact on the environmental crisis.

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Equating evolution with atheism will turn Muslims against science

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Salman Hameed - Dec. 12 (Opinion) - The next battle between science and Creationism is likely to take place in the Muslim world, argues Salman Hameed today in the US journal Science. Here, he suggests how scientists should approach the debate

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Sarah Palin's War on Science

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Christopher Hitchens - Oct. 28 (Opinion) - With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

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What's God's interest in pipeline?

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Hubert G. Locke - Sep. 25 (Opinion) - On Nov. 4, voters have a vested interest in ensuring that someone who is so glibly confident about knowing God's plan does not get within a heartbeat of the presidency of the United States. People who profess to know what God is thinking engage in the worst, most dangerous form of self-delusion. They should never be allowed anywhere near positions of public responsibility that put the rest of us -- and the world -- at risk.

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Sarah Palin's Creationism Will Rape the Environment

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Chip Ward - Sep. 23 (Opinion) - Evolution is largely about connection and interaction -- the linear connection of one species evolving into another (speciation), but also how species fill niches created by one another, how they interact, exchanging energy and information, how they compete as well as cooperate, and how all of them -- from microbial soils to migrating birds -- form dynamic communities that, in turn, are also woven together, web within web within web. Pull one thread of that living tapestry and you tug at so many others, which is why precaution is so wise.

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Without God

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Steven Weinberg - Sep. 22 (Review) - In his celebrated 1837 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard, titled "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that a day would come when America would end what he called "our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands." His prediction came true in the twentieth century, and in no area of learning more so than in science. This surely would have pleased Emerson. When he listed his heroes he would generally include Copernicus and Galileo and Newton along with Socrates and Jesus and Swedenborg. But I think that Emerson would have had mixed feelings about one consequence of the advance of science here and abroad--that it has led to a widespread weakening of religious belief.[1]

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Subconscious Decisions: Voting in Churches and Buying Designer Labels

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Jonah Lehrer - Aug. 31 (Interview) - Jonah Berger, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, made news a few months ago when he published the results of a study demonstrating that where people cast ballots affects how they vote. Although voters think they are making rational decisions based solely on the issues and facts, they are actually subtly influenced by a long list of other variables, most of which operate at an unconscious level. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Berger about what this new research can teach us about elections, expensive clothing and the human brain.

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How Anti-Intellectualism Is Destroying America

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Terrence McNally, Susan Jacoby - Aug. 18 (Interview) - "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant." Barack Obama finally said it. Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right's stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them -- and us -- unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.

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Review interview: Richard Dawkins

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Times - By Rosie Millard - Aug. 03 (Interview) - Well, it's a distinction of sorts. Professor Richard Dawkins, who holds the chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford, was last week nominated as one of the country's Groovy Old Men - a group of sexy "silver foxes" that also includes the actors Bill Nighy and Terence Stamp. There is even an ongoing poll to choose the favourite. "Although Richard's not really old enough to be up there with David Atten-borough, is he?" complains his third wife, the actress Lalla Ward (who was once the sidekick to another groovy older man - Tom Baker - in his incarnation as Doctor Who). At 67, Dawkins is certainly rather gorgeous. Actually, he looks somewhat like an older version of David Tennant, the Doctor Who de nos jours, with his deep green eyes and distinguished profile. He's also a serial smiler - until he starts talking about religion, at which point he becomes glittery-eyed and red-cheeked with indignation.

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The Neural Buddhists

Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - May. 13 (Opinion) - In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists. To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are "hard-wired" to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

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Connecting the Holy to Health: the Link between Religious Beliefs & Well-Being

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

CNW Telbec - Apr. 19 (Press Release) - "Dr. Pargament has been a leading figure in the effort to bring a balanced perspective of religion and spirituality to the attention of scientists and professionals," she said. "We are also actively conducting our own research locally on spiritually based psychotherapy at the IMHR, so his findings are definitely of interest to us." The author of four books and more than 156 articles on the link between health and spirituality, Dr. Pargament's current research examines how elderly people who struggle with their religious beliefs and hold negative perceptions about their relationships with God have an increased risk of death.

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Religion can make you honest

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

British Humanist Association - Apr. 11 (Opinion) - One of the major claims made by advocates of religion is that it promotes good behaviour. Believers, so it is claimed, are nicer people - they are more generous and more honest, for example. A number of studies support this hypothesis, at least on the surface. But many of these studies are weak because they are based on self report (i.e. what individuals say about themselves in questionnaires). Self-report is notoriously unreliable as a measure of what a person actually thinks. Not only do people sometimes not tell the truth, but frequently they don't actually know what's going on inside their own head (in other words, their beliefs about how they behave can differ quite a lot from how they actually behave).

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Religion: biology, psychology, sociology, history

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Gene Expression - Apr. 01 (Review) - On the most recent bloggingheads.tv you can watch Paul Bloom explaining why he thinks the propensity for theism is an innate bias of our species. Several years back Bloom wrote a piece for The Atlantic, Is God an Accident?, where he makes a similar case. But the general outline of Bloom's line of thinking is actually most powerfully argued in Scott Atran's In God's We Trust. The cognitive psychologists and anthropologists who work within this paradigm operate under some background assumptions in regards to our mental architecture. First, human cognitive states are strongly biased by innate tendencies which have a biological origin. Perception and language acquisition are easily explained by nativist treatments, but Atran and others have argued that more obscure biases such as folk biology also exist, while other domains such as theory of mind are broadly accepted within the scholarly community.

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Morality and Religion

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Bloggingheads.tv - By Paul Bloom, Joshua Knobe - Mar. 30 (Interview) - Is morality hardwired into us? (11:41) Could we learn truly arbitrary moral rules? (05:04) The big booming voice inside you that says God exists (12:12) The mind-body dualism of children (10:07) Do you need to have a body to get pissed off? (09:01) The morality of killing gods and robots (06:46)

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