Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that carries a signal across nerve junctions. You might know of it because of its links to Parkinson’s disease, but it’s actually pretty widespread in the brain and does a number of interesting things.

Variants of one particular molecular receptor for dopamine, the D4 receptor, seem to have interesting links with risk taking and novelty seeking. But the links are not at all straightforward, and recent research suggests that what it actually does is tweak your susceptibility to environmental influences.

Joni Sasaki at the University of California, Santa Barbara wanted to know if this could help explain the mixed responses to religious priming that have been reported before. As regular readers of this blog will know, giving people subliminal religious prompts seems to make them more prosocial, but the effect doesn’t seem clear cut.

So what Sasaki and her colleagues did was to run a straightforward religious priming experiment. The subjects (all undergraduates) had to unscramble words to form sentences. Half the subjects were given sentences that had a religious theme, the other had nonreligious sentences. The idea is to get people thinking about religion without realizing what they are doing.

Afterward, they measured their subjects’ willingness to volunteer for a bunch of actual organizations and clubs around the college.

The top line results were similar to other studies. Overall, religious people were no more willing to volunteer than the nonreligious, but people who had been primed with religion were more willing to volunteer—regardless of whether or not they were religious themselves.

But not everybody responded to the priming. As the graphic below shows, the response depended on the variant of the D4 gene. People with one particular variation (2-/7-repeat allele) got a really big prosocial boost from the religious prime. People with the other variant were pretty prosocial without the prime, and their prosociality actually decreased with priming!

All this goes to show that the relationship between genetics and religion is not at all straightforward (something I’ve touched on before.) This particular gene variant seems to make people more susceptible to environmental influences—whether religious or otherwise.

If you looked at these people in a religious environment, then you would say that this is a gene “for” religion. Put these same people in a nonreligious environment, and you would say that is a gene “against” religion!

It seems likely that religious people in the West give more to charity—in the narrow sense of financial donations, at least (see “Atheists are generous—they just don’t give to charity” for more details).

But what is it about religion that has this effect? Is it that the fear of being watched makes people behave nicer? Perhaps it’s that religious teachings simply encourage charity. Or maybe it’s being in a religious congregation and having someone demand that you hand over cash.

One way to dig into this is to take a look at other cultures. Taiwan is a good case study because it has a good mix of folk religion, atheism, and world religions (Buddhism and Christianity). Hiewu Su and colleagues from the National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan interviewed 410 Taiwanese about their charitable and religious habits, among other things. Christians gave the most, followed by Buddhists, then folk religionists, and finally those with no religion.

These were not large differences, and indeed they also found that giving is a “rational and planned behavior for both religious and nonreligious people.” In other words, regardless of religion, what people give can be predicted on the basis of their income, age, and whether they felt that charities were open about how they spent their money.

There was one other crucial factor that affected charitable giving (the most important, in fact), and that was religious service attendance. They found that religious service attendance was the most important factor determining whether and how much people gave to charity—even for people with no religion.

However, there were big differences here between the religions. Buddhists who went to religious services were 2.4 times as likely to give to charity, and Christians were 2.2 times as likely. However, folk religionists and atheists who went to services were only 1.7 times as likely to give as those who did not attend. When it came to the amount of giving, they found that this was significantly increased for Christians and Buddhists who went to religious services, but not for folk religionists and atheists.

What I take from this is that we can discount simplistic ideas that a watchful “eye in the sky” encourages us to give more. After all, it doesn’t seem to encourage folk religionists to give.

On the other hand, religious gatherings do seem to encourage charitable giving. That might be because people are actually encouraged to give on the spot, or it might be that giving to co-religionists is easier than random giving, or it might be something to do with religious teachings.

And with that last idea in mind, I find it fascinating that the effect of religious gatherings is largest for Christians and Buddhists. These are two very different religions—about the only thing they have in common is that they are both “world religions.” What that means is that they are religions that have been adopted by people from a wide variety of different cultural backgrounds. As a result, they have special features that make them especially attractive to people who live in large, organized mega-societies. The kinds of societies in which dealing with strangers is commonplace.

Previous research has found that world religions are linked to the emergence of ideas of fairness to and sharing with strangers. This research adds to that, suggesting that it’s only in the religious congregations of these world religions that charity gets a boost—it’s not an intrinsic consequence of religion in general terms.

Does religion actually make any difference? By that I mean, does the brand of religion that takes hold in a particular region (Islam, Buddhism, Animism, etc.) actually change the culture in any meaningful way? Of course, we know that there are real, measurable differences between adherents of different religions. But is that caused by the religion, or is it simply that cultures differ and that the local religion molds itself to the local culture?

Adam Cohen at Arizona State University thinks that religion can change culture, and he’s written an excellent, plain English introduction to his research in the open-access journal Readings in Psychology and Culture.

A key point that Cohen makes is that Jews and Christians differ on whether simply thinking something wicked is as bad as actually doing something wicked. So, for example, he found that Christians were more likely than Jews to believe that a man who thinks adulterous thoughts has done something wrong. And not just adultery either—there were similar differences of opinion over a student who fantasizes about poisoning his professor’s dog after getting a bad grade.

In another test, he asked Jews and Christians to:

Imagine a son, Mr. K., who does not like his parents very much, because they have very different personalities from him. That son can either pretend to like his parents, or he can ignore and neglect them. If he doesn’t like his parents inside, does it mean anything for him to behave nicely toward them?

As the figure below shows, Jews and Christians see Mr. K the same if he both inwardly dislikes his parents and also neglects them in reality (the “Sincere condition” in the graph). But Jews, in contrast to Christians, were much more likely to think favorably of Mr. K if he pretends to like his parents.

Cohen attributes these differences to differences in their respective holy books. For example, Jesus explicitly condemns thought crime (“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”). In contrast, Cohen says:

the Jewish attitude is that it is better to override your temptations out of obedience to God. True virtue is doing what God says even if you don’t internally want to.

All of this puts me in mind of George Orwell’s novel, 1984, in which he wrote about thoughtcrime:

The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed—would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.

Now, Orwell was an atheist, and his book had a pretty big impact on me when I was a kid. All of which set me to thinking: Is thinking bad thoughts a crime for atheists, or are they more like Jews? Even more interesting, are atheist Jews different from atheist Christians in this regard?

There is one study out there, which I wrote about last year, which found that Protestants were more likely than atheists to conflate thinking and doing. (Protestants tempt fate, but atheists don’t!)

I’d love to hear your perspective, though. Should you feel guilty about thinking nasty things about someone and then lying to them? Is that kind of dishonesty bad? If not, why not?

From Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman of Sinai and Synapses:

Quite often, what makes us happy and what is actually good for us are directly at odds with each other. What worked for us evolutionarily over the millenia frequently becomes counterproductive in our current world. For example, fat was a scarce and valuable resource when Homo sapiens evolved on the African savannah, but with vending machines, Starbucks Trentas, and the KFC Double-Down, what made our bodies happy millions of years ago are now things we should be trying to avoid today.

But if those same issues arise with our bodies, what about our brains? What do we do with our evolutionary cognitive history?

David DiSalvo, who writes about science, technology, and culture for Scientific American, Forbes, and Psychology Today, has a new book coming out entitled What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite. I had the opportunity to interview DiSalvo, exploring questions about the cognitive aspects of religion and atheism, hope and faith, certainty and doubt, and the creation of meaning.

1. You recently wrote a piece asking, “Religion vs. Atheism: Which Fights Dirtier?” If we wanted to tone down the anger on both sides, what would help facilitate a more productive discussion?

DD: I think the major thing would be for all of us to realize that we’re operating with essentially the same cerebral hardware, with all the foibles and biases contained therein. We often begin difficult discussions about belief (religious or otherwise) as if we are somehow set apart from the biases that plague the other person. In truth, we are all swimming in murky water, and there is nothing flawless or absolute about the iterative process of learning to navigate the waters with more clarity.

GM Response: I think DiSalvo is right—recognizing that we are all “swimming in the same murky water” allows us to focus the question differently. Rather than asking someone, “Why do you believe in God?” or “Why don’t you believe in God?”, we can ask, “What do I believe? What is leading someone else to believe something different? And what are the consequences of my beliefs?”

My rule of thumb whenever I talk with anyone (believer, atheist, or anything in between) is, “Will this be a productive conversation?” I have rarely had productive conversations with people who are totally certain that God has told them what to do, and I have rarely had productive conversations with people who are totally certain that there is no God (and there’s a big difference between “being certain there is no God” and “not being certain there is a God”). But I have had many wonderful conversations with people across the spectrum of belief about the question, “How can I create more fulfillment in my life and make a more positive impact on the world?”

So he’s right on—we all need to realize that we are not set apart from the biases others have. Accepting that none of us has absolute truth and that we all see the world through our own imperfect lens is what allows us to engage in fruitful dialogue, rather than vituperative attacks and counterattacks.

2. You say in the introduction to your book, “If we could live our lives without bias, distortions and delusions involved, the world would truly be idyllic.” Yet hope and optimism—which certainly bias and distort the way we view the world—are crucial aspects for our drive to make ourselves and our world better. So when do we need to look at the world as it is, and when do we need to envision the world as it could be? How do we reconcile those two ways we look at the world?

DD: The “bias, distortions and delusions” I discuss in the book are outcomes of mismatches between several of our brains’ evolved tendencies and our social and cultural environments. My contention is that cultural evolution moves much faster than natural evolution; as a result, the built-in leanings of our brains are frequently as odds with the situations we face on a daily basis.

Hope and optimism are “biases” of a different sort—arguably, they are adaptive responses to the constant undercurrent of adversity we face as self-reflective, sentient beings living on this planet. Recently, a solid body of research has emerged suggesting that optimism is actually an evolved trait (cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot’s work comes to mind).

Another way to describe the difference is by way of comparison. Would we be better off without, for example, restraint bias, which leads us to believe we can expose ourselves to more temptation than we can actually handle? Probably so. Would we be better off without the transformative power of hope that drives us to overcome obstacles and adversity in our lives? Certainly not.

GM Response: Actually, Tali Sharot’s book The Optimism Bias was one of the inspirations for this question. And I love the image on the cover of her book—a pair of glasses, with one lens clear and the other rose-colored.

And I think we need to look at the world through both of those lenses. The scientific lens can help us see the world as it is, since it strives to give us objectivity. The religious lens can help us see the world as it could be, since it strives to help us examine the subjective nature of our experiences.

It’s important to remember that hope and optimism are primarily subjective experiences—they cannot change reality, but they can change how we look at reality. They change how we feel about our lives, and they give us fuel to keep going when life becomes difficult. And in fact, I think that’s what draws people to religion—a desire to find a sense of purpose, meaning, and hope, all in the context of a supportive community.

So as DiSalvo implies, even if hope and optimism aren’t rational, they are valuable. So yes, when it comes to objective truth, science needs to be the way we look at the world. But religion can help us enhance our subjective experiences, as it allows us to make moments powerful, to create deep connections with others, and to find hope and purpose.

3. You mention that one of the problematic things our brain does is to create meaning out of coincidence. But there’s a difference between believing that meaning is inherent (such as thinking that “clearly this was God’s plan”) and believing that we create meaning (such as asking, “How can I make sense of what’s going on?”). So do the same problems arise in creating meaning as they do when we believe meaning is inherent? What would it imply if “meaning” arose in different ways?

DD: Your question highlights one of the more frustrating aspects of being human. It is precisely because our brains evolved to “make sense of what’s going on” that we stumble on pattern-based biases like the clustering illusion, and are prone to stringing together coincidences in search of an explanatory pattern. In a sense, we can’t escape this tendency no matter how aware of it we become because pattern identification is so central to our brains’ reason for being.

What we can do, however, is short-circuit pattern detection on the verge of, or already going, haywire—as is the case, for example, with people who live their lives around certain sequences of numbers appearing as signs telling them how to think and act in given situations. Psychics and other hucksters exploit these sorts of tendencies, in effect making a living on peoples’ absorption in patterns.

Frequently, believing meaning is inherent goes hand-in-hand with searching out patterns to make sense of what’s going on. Once, for example, someone invests confidence in a psychic to tell him what the patterns in his life mean, it’s a short journey to believing that someone or something must be producing the patterns. Whether that thing is thought to be a personal God or some impersonal force (“the universe,” etc.) depends largely on the sociocultural context that person lives within.

So, yes, I do think some of the same problems occur whether we are searching out or “creating” meaning as they do in believing meaning is inherent because the underlying “meaning infrastructure” of our brains is prone to tendencies that we are all, in one way or another, subject to.

GM Response: I think we agree on what “meaning” is—it’s about how we place events and facts into a larger context, helping us make sense of the world. But for me, the most crucial question about meaning is how it arises—is it top-down, dictated, and discovered, or is it bottom-up, self-owned, and created? Since we all have a “meaning infrastructure,” who do we see as its builders?

Think about how we read a text. The author certainly has an intended meaning. But what the readers find in the text may be very different from what the author had in mind. Now, who owns the meaning of that text? While the answer is clearly both the author and the reader, it’s a major mistake for the reader to say, “I know what this author meant.” Instead, the reader needs to be able to say, “This is my own interpretation.”

So the problem with psychics, hucksters, and religious fundamentalists is that they try to prevent the reader from creating their own interpretations. They encourage a top-down approach to meaning, and lead people to say, “This is what God/the universe/the Bible means.” But a bottom-up approach of creating meaning may be able to prevent that system from going haywire, since we can later edit or revise our interpretations.

We will always be looking for patterns and meaning—but I think there’s a big difference between thinking we “discover” meaning and realizing that we “create” meaning, since one implies an eternal, unchanging truth, and the other implies an ability to rewrite as need be.

4. Why is doubt so valuable? And since our minds seek certainty, how can we embrace doubt more easily?

DD: Doubt is an applied “checks and balances” mechanism that is not unique to humans. My speculation is that it’s an adaptive trait that began evolving very early (well before human ancestors arrived on the scene) as a means to differentiate beneficial from harmful things in the environment, particularly when the differences were slight. We see this trait evidenced by primates and monkeys in lab studies: When offered grapes under two different conditions, one slightly more cumbersome than the other, a capuchin monkey will quite observably make a doubtful evaluation about the grapes with more strings attached.

In humans, the only true existential animal on the planet, doubt is elevated to far more abstract levels of evaluation (“Is there a God?” and similarly high-level questions), but is also useful at lower levels, such as determining if another person’s intentions are sincere. In that practical application, among others, doubt can save our lives.

The interesting thing is that to exercise doubt about meaning-laden positions (those involving belief and value judgments), we have to face off against other tendencies of our brains, like the desire for stability and certainty. That’s what makes those high-level evaluations so spirited, tense, and frequently explosive. If someone is “certain” that their belief position is correct, someone else introducing doubt about that position is likely to set off fireworks. But it’s important that we have those discussions because people’s lives are directly affected by the outcomes.

GM Response: That face-off between doubt and certainty is absolutely one of the biggest challenges we face when we are engaging in conversation about beliefs and values. The challenge is how we embrace stability without it lapsing into absolutism.

One of my teachers, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, talks about the need to be able to be committed without being certain. The analogy that I like is to a marriage. You are never certain when you get married what the future will bring, and if you are always looking for surety, you will never be satisfied. But at some point, even though you will never be certain, you make a decision to commit to this other person because that’s how you will build a life and a relationship.

It’s similar to how we need to look at our worldview. In order for us to make an impact on the world, we need to stake our claim somewhere—we need to hold certain beliefs and values because if we always go, “I’m not sure, it could be this way, or it could be that way,” we become paralyzed and cannot make decisions.

So the goal should be seeking stability without requiring certainty and clarity—indeed, we can’t ever find certainty in science, religion, or life in general. Instead, we need to make a commitment despite the lack of certainty, and use that sense of doubt for (as he says) a mechanism of “checks and balances.”

Because while certainty shuts down conversation and fosters a sense of arrogance, doubt can open up the dialogue and encourage humility.
DiSalvo argues that many of the things that make our brains happy are now more harmful than helpful. And some people place religion in that category, as well. Religion is like fatty foods, they claim—something we should outgrow and move beyond. But I think the better question is, what aspects of religion should we try to outgrow?

Because religion is not one thing. Religion has so many varied parts to it that rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we can try to move beyond the elements that are so counterproductive, and at the same time, try to keep the ones that are valuable.

Clearly, when religion fosters absolutism, certainty, and a lack of critical thinking, it is doing more harm than good.

But we need hope and purpose in our life when it seems dark and difficult. We need to find ways to strengthen our commitments when we feel adrift. And we need a sense of community when we feel isolated and alone. Those are the things we can and should never outgrow—and so those are the things religion can and should offer us for today.

I think this is one of best brief justifications for astronomy and space sciences. Yes, it is hard to place a monetary value at tomorrow’s dreams. Enjoy!

In the mid-2000s, the archaeologist Steven Mithen published a book called The Singing Neanderthals, about the evolutionary origins of music. We all know that music may shift our emotional state. For me, it’s at Springsteen/E Street Band concerts that I become most joyously transformed by music. Mithen reviews the evidence for this music-emotion link, then explores a second key benefit: Music may enhance social cooperation.

To our ancestors living in a harsh hunting-and-gathering world, groups whose individuals shared some kind of music (perhaps playing flutes made from animal bones or chanting and singing in deep caves) might have fared just that one evolutionary iota better. Indeed, Mithen’s argument for why Neanderthals had heightened musical sensitivities compared to our species—not despite but because of the fact that Neanderthals weren’t as fiercely linguistic as we are—is provocative and sets the stage for looking even more widely at music in the natural world.

Our closest living relatives express themselves in musical ways. In captivity, the gorilla Michael (a sign-language-using confederate of the famous Koko) invented guitars for himself using various at-hand materials for the strings, and enjoyed listening to Pavarotti recordings. In the book Kanzi’s Primal Language, researchers write: “The bonobos listen to music every night and enjoy the sound of musical instruments. Kanzi plays the drums and the xylophone, and Panbanisha the synthesizer and the harmonica. It might not satisfy a music teacher, but they enjoy it just as children enjoy creating sounds with musical instruments.”

In the wild, gibbons sing male-female duets, chimpanzees drum on trees and other surfaces, and gorillas too pound out rhythms, including on their own chests. Apes feel deep emotion and, being so group-oriented, benefit from social coordination, so perhaps Mithen’s framework fits here as well.

Questions about animal music sang in my head this week when I came upon an intriguing article by James Barron in The New York Times. A cat named Ketzel had one day in 1996 worked her way across the piano keys—starting at the treble and progressing in an innovate pattern to the bass—belonging to the composer Morris Moshe Cotel, then of the Peabody Conservatory.

Cotel, impressed by what he heard, transcribed the notes. The resultant piece he described as an “exquisite atonal miniature,” and he entered it into a one-minute-music competition. The judges (who did not know they were considering a feline-composed piece) awarded the composition a special mention. After that, the piece was played in concert at the Peabody and also in Europe—and even once in New York, “with the composer in attendance.”

Ketzel may be uniquely cat-composer famous, but other musical cats exist. My friend here in Gloucester County, the writer Nuala Galbari (see especially her wonderful children’s book The Woods of Wicomico) lives with one. Nuala kindly shares a description of her cat Tinky’s musical proclivities:

On some days, I would play piano and place Tinky, then a kitten, beside me on the piano bench. Often, during these times, he would climb onto my knee and he seemed to enjoy the sounds of the keys and watched attentively as I played, sometimes turning around to look up at me, as a child might do. I thought this quite unusual, as most kittens or cats would become bored with such activities within less than a minute. After a few weeks of this “practice with Tinky,” I began to notice that he really enjoyed being around the piano. While he was on my knee one day, I lifted him up and placed his right paw on the keyboard, playing a few notes from “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” At first, he pulled his paw away, but after about a week of playing the same tune, he would purr, and let me place his paw on the keys.

After a few months, music had become a part of his daily life, along with wild runabouts up and down stairs, and other play. It wasn’t only the piano that interested him; I would settle him into his basket for the night, and sing to him, or play Mozart softly. He would curl up and purr loudly, and often sit close to the radio during the day. I listened to Minnesota Public Radio’s classical station—and Tinky seemed to have an affinity for the music.

As time passed, he grew into a very loving cat and he helped nurse me through a bad illness by placing his paw in my hand at night; when I would awaken, Tinky was always there, only leaving the bed to eat or to visit the litter box. More than that, he had begun to climb up on the piano stool and play a few notes on his own. Music, at first a method of play for him, had become a communicative tool. When Tinky wanted attention, he would play the piano; when he was hungry and his “hard stares” were being ignored, he would play a few notes to get our attention. Sometimes, though, he just played for what appeared to be fun. Gradually, we began to applaud his playing. If, for example, Tinky hit two notes together, we would not applaud. However, if he played two or three “clean” notes, then we would applaud loudly. Occasionally, he would play for friends, and they would also applaud. On several occasions, Tinky played up to six notes in an octave with his right paw. Following applause, he might then decide to play some lower notes with his left paw. No doubt, the little cat had somehow figured out that I played with both hands, and so he used both paws.

In 2005, I moved to Virginia and brought Tinky with me. Tinky is now the grand age of 18. He has witnessed the coming and going of many other felines of whom we have taken care, and although he remains the No. 1 cat, he is a great feline ambassador, when it comes to settling other animals in to the house, including birds and rabbits. Tinky takes everything in his stride. He now has a little arthritis in the back legs, but he still reaches up to the piano—when the mood takes him—and gives us and our friends concerts. When Tinky plays well, he now receives both applause and a little treat. It didn’t take the other cats long to figure this pattern out (few among us have ever said that felines lack intelligence). Up to five cats may now sit in various positions around the piano, waiting for Tinky to play. They know that if there is applause, a treat will follow, and they all receive treats.

Thus, the piano has become a communicative tool for Tinky and the other cats. I have little doubt that he loves music, and even though Tinky can only hear through one ear now, it has not diminished his desire to play or his apparent enjoyment at disrupting proceedings when we are conversing or watching a film with friends.

This little cat is, quite simply, inspired by music and he has learned to use his talents productively!

Do cats and other domestic animals, then, experience altered emotion and induce enhanced social cooperation via music? Sure, we have all seen “viral videos” of cats and birds “being musical,” and some scientists (e.g., Tecumseh Fitch) have tackled the origins of music in scientific journals, but maybe someone should research a book on animal music. What are the evolutionary benefits of animal music, and when do animals create or appreciate music for pure pleasure purposes? Instances of animal music must be legion, even beyond the better-known examples such as whale song and bird song. Consider this an invitation. Add your own knowledge or questions here!

Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at UCLA, has come up with a way to measure how fearful nations are. Many surveys ask respondents how worried they are about a range of subjects—war, terrorism, crime, environmental pollution, etc. What Treisman found is that if individuals admit to being worried about one threat, they are also highly likely to say they are worried about the others. In other words, any given individual tends to be generally fearful, or generally unafraid. That means you can construct an “Index of Fear” by averaging the responses to several questions.

Now, the interesting thing is that fear is often not all that closely linked to real danger. There was no relationship between fear of mad cow disease and the actual number of cases, and only a weak relationship between fear of medical errors and the number of medical errors, and between terrorism and the number of terrorist attacks. Fear of bird flu was actually highest in the countries with the fewest cases.

Fear was influenced by all sorts of weird effects. People are less scared if you quiz them in the evenings—Treisman speculates they may have partaken of a few bevvies already! Treisman also found that Catholic countries were more fearful than Protestant countries. Greece, the only Orthodox country analyzed, was more fearful still.

But more important than religious affiliation (or, indeed, virtually anything else) was belief in heaven and hell. Belief in heaven tended to lower fear somewhat, but belief in hell had a dramatic and opposite effect. Those countries where a lot of people believed in hell were more fearful across the range of potential threats. In fact, much of the apparent relationship between religious traditions and fear could be explained by the degree of hell belief. That chimes with some other research showing that British Christians are made less anxious by thoughts of death than are British Muslims, mainly because the Christians are less likely to believe in hell.

Of course, it may be that people living in genuinely scary countries are more likely to believe in hell. But Treisman adjusted for factors that are linked to real danger, like poverty, authoritarian rule, war, and even more touchy-feely factors like educational styles, cultural masculinity, and individualism. And remember, he also found that fear is a social construct, and only loosely related to objective threats.

To me, this looks like good evidence that putting the fear of God into people actually makes them more fearful of everything else—and that, of course, has a number of interesting political and social ramifications.

Back in 2009, I blogged about some then-unpublished studies by Will Gervais, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. The results suggested that one of the reasons that atheists in the United States are so disliked is because they are distrusted, and that at least part of this distrust was simply because atheists are few and far between—and so they seem strange and unfamiliar. Gervais has a new paper out that covers some of the same territory but extends it in interesting ways.

In particular, he looked at how distrust varies across countries, depending on how numerous atheists were locally. As predicted, people living in countries with more atheists were more likely to be comfortable with the idea of an atheist president. In another study, students were asked to read an essay that either told them that there were very few atheists at their university (only 5 percent of students), or alternatively one that told them atheists were very common (50 percent of students at their university, and the fourth largest religious group in the world). Sure enough, those students who were told that atheists were common also thought that they were more trustworthy. The last study used a cunning test (the implicit association test) to find out whether this shift in attitudes was only superficial, or something deeper.

In this test, the subjects are given pictures of two people—one they are told is an atheist, the other a religious person. They then have to categorize words related to trust/distrust when paired with one or the other person. How long it takes to do this depends on whether the pairings jar with your preconceptions. And, as you can see in the graph, their implicit, subconscious trust of atheists really does seem to have been affected by the simple expedient of making them think that atheists are more common than they realized. (Click on image for larger view.)

So what’s going on here? Well, Gervais outlines all sorts of possible explanations. It might be that if they think that atheists are common, they conclude that some of the people they’ve met around the place must be atheists after all—and they were OK. Alternatively, they might think that if there are a lot of atheists, then a lot of people must think that atheists are OK. There are various other ways in which simply being more numerous can make a group of “others” seem less weird.

Personally, however, I think there is a special feature of atheism that separates it from many other kinds of prejudice—and that’s the fact that atheism is a choice. When there are only very few atheists, then the only people who are going to “come out” as atheists are likely to be those who are a little maverick. If lots of people choose to be atheists, then it’s clearly something that “normal” people do. In other words, distrust of atheists when they are a tiny minority might well be a perfectly rational rule of thumb.

I recently had a conversation with a neuroscientist, who also happened to be a self-described atheist. He knew I was a rabbi and so in the middle of the conversation, he very tentatively asked me. “So … do you believe in evolution?” I think what he was really asking was, “Can you be a religious person who believes in science?” And my answer to that question is, “Of course.”

While some people think of science and religion as being inherently in conflict, I think it’s because they tend to define “religion” as “blind acceptance and complete certainty about silly, superstitious fantasies.” Quite honestly, if that’s what religion really was, I wouldn’t be religious!

In fact, it’s not “religion” in general but that particular definition of religion that is so often in conflict with science. Instead, my experience with Judaism has been that it embraces science quite easily. So why is that?

While there may be many reasons, there are three in particular that I have found to be especially significant:

1. The Bible is almost never read simply literally

Yes, the Bible is the basis of Judaism. But Judaism as it is practiced today is not biblical, it’s rabbinic, which means that it’s about studying and engaging with the text, but not stopping at face value. I’ve met people who haven’t understood that distinction. When I had a student pulpit in Sandusky, Ohio, for example, a group came to the synagogue asking “where we offered up our sacrifices” because they believed that Jews still followed the literal laws of Leviticus.

Instead, when Jews read the Bible today through a rabbinic worldview, we are trying to answer two separate questions—first, what did the text mean in its time, and second, how can we create interpretations that will give us lessons for our time?

Indeed, the Bible shouldn’t be taken simply literally today because circumstances, societies, norms, and knowledge have all changed.

A great example of that comes from how the Rabbis interpret the verse “an eye for an eye.” While that is what the Bible says, to the Rabbis, that’s not what the verse means. Instead, the Rabbis argue, “an eye for an eye” actually means financial compensation, and they go on for multiple pages in the Talmud trying to explain their reasoning. They don’t read that verse on its simple, literal level, but through the lenses of fairness, of common sense, of other verses in the Torah, and of the best legal knowledge they had at that time.

So now we can also see why in Judaism, the beginning of Genesis is not in conflict with the big bang theory or natural selection. On the one hand, for its time, the Bible provided an origin story that was a story that worked then, but now, science provides a much better explanation for how we got here.

But the Bible isn’t meant to be taken only literally—it’s designed to be a source of study and exploration for the questions of our time. The point of the creation story is really to challenge us with questions like, “How should we treat people if everyone is created in the image of God? What are our responsibilities to this world if God has called it ‘good’?”

In Judaism, there’s no concept of “God says it, I believe it, that settles it.” Instead, Judaism pushes us to embrace the text for what it was back then, and to create new ways of reading the text for what it can be now.

2. Questioning is not only acceptable—it’s encouraged

There’s a phrase that recurs all the time in rabbinic literature: “How do we know this?” The Rabbis always had to explain their reasoning. And if there was a choice between believing something because of a divine miracle or believing something because of thoughtful and reasoned arguments, there was no question which one the Rabbis would accept—reason and logic would always win.

The classic story about this comes from the Talmud, where a Rabbi named Eliezer was arguing with all the other Rabbis about a minute detail of Jewish law, and trying to convince them all that he was right. As the story goes:

Rabbi Eliezer brought forward every imaginable argument, but the Rabbis did not accept any of them. Finally he said to them: “If I am right, let this carob tree prove it!” Sure enough, the carob tree immediately uprooted itself and moved one hundred cubits, and some say 400 cubits, from its place. “No proof can be brought from a carob tree,” the Rabbis retorted.

And again he said to them “If I am right, let this river prove it!” Sure enough, the river of water flowed backward. “No proof can be brought from a river,” they rejoined …

Finally, Rabbi Eliezer then said, “If I am right, let God Himself prove it!” Sure enough, a Divine voice cried out, “Why are you arguing with Rabbi Eliezer? He is always right!” Rabbi Joshua then stood up and protested: “The Torah is not in heaven! We pay no attention to a Divine voice, [because now that the Torah has been given to humanity, people are the ones who are to interpret it.]” (Baba Metzia)

So even though the Torah was seen to be a gift from God and was sacred scripture, as soon as the Torah had been given to humans, any arguments would have to be settled by logic and reason—and would trump even a voice from God.

Similarly, science is never to take anything on faith. Science is about continually questioning assumptions, revising theories, and integrating new data. So critical thinking, an essential aspect of science, is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition.

3. There is no fixed, systematic theology

There’s a great Yiddish expression that says, “If I knew God, I’d be God.” In fact, I think that claiming that you “know God’s will” is an act of incredible hubris. Instead, what we say about God has much more to say about us than what it says about God. There are, in fact, a whole range of different theologies within Judaism (you can find some of them in the terrific books Finding God and The God Upgrade, both of which describe a whole range of differing, and sometimes even conflicting, theologies.)

And while I can only speak personally here, to me, “God” isn’t really a noun at all—it’s a verb.

Here’s why. The most common name that God gives Godself in the Torah is “YHVH,” a name that is sometimes thought to be so holy that no one was allowed to pronounce it. But that’s not exactly right. It’s not that “YHVH” was not allowed to be pronounced; it’s that it is literally unpronounceable, since it consists of four Hebrew vowels (yod, hay, vav, and hay). By the way, that’s also why some people incorrectly call this name “Yahweh,” since (as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner once said), if you tried to pronounce a name that was all vowels, you’d risk serious respiratory injury.

But even more importantly, the name “YHVH” is actually a conflation of all the tenses of the Hebrew verb “to be.” God’s name could be seen as “was-is-will be,” so God isn’t something you can capture or name—God is only something you can experience.

And indeed, when Moses is at the burning bush, having just been told by God that he will be leading the Israelites out of Egypt, he says, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”

God responds that God’s name is “Ehyeh asher ehyeh,” which is often translated as “I am what I am.” But it could also be translated as, “I am what I will be.” So God is whatever God will be—we simply have no idea. Indeed, for my own theology, I believe that God is found in the “becoming,” transforming “what will be” into “what is.”

Science, too, is very much about process. Science at its best is about testing hypotheses, setting up experiments, and exploring ideas. And if new data or new evidence arises, scientific knowledge changes. Science can’t be tied down to old theories—it is dynamic and ever-changing.

Just like our experience of God.

And perhaps that’s how science and religion can be reconciled—not as two realms that are in conflict or as “non-overlapping magesteria” (as Stephen Jay Gould once described them), but as things you do.

Science is about creating hypotheses and testing data against these theories. Judaism is about how we act to improve this world, here and now. And these processes can easily go hand in hand.

So yes, if science and religion are seen to be competing sources of truth and authority, they will always be in conflict, especially if religion is “blind acceptance and complete certainty about silly, superstitious fantasies.” But if, instead, religion is about helping people create a deeper sense of meaning and a stronger sense of their values, then I truly believe that science and religion can be brought together to improve ourselves, our society, and our world.

Are the religious in America more or less likely than average to support the use of torture?

To find out, Ariel Malka of Yeshiva University in New York and Christopher Soto of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, used data from a couple of opinion polls, one conducted in 2004 for ABC News/The Washington Post and a larger one (nearly 2,000 people) conducted in 2008 (the 2008 American National Election Studies time series).

Here’s an example of what they asked (this is from the 2004 poll):

Some people say it’s acceptable to torture people suspected of terrorism, in cases where other methods have failed and the authorities believe the suspect has information that could prevent terrorist attacks and save lives. Other people say the use of torture is never acceptable because it’s cruel, it may violate international law, it may not work, and it could be used unnecessarily or by mistake on innocent people.

Well, it turns out that, in both surveys, religious Americans were actually slightly less likely than the less religious to condone torture (they measured religion using a composite of attendance, prayer, and subjective ratings of importance). But that’s only half the story.

They were also interested in the interaction with political persuasion (liberal or conservative), and they tested this using a statistical technique that allows you to check if one variable (in this case, religiosity) might be influencing another variable (in this case, attitudes to torture) only indirectly—via its effects on a third variable (political persuasion).

What they found was consistent with a set up where religion makes people conservative, and that, in turn, makes them support torture. In other words, religion has a direct and an indirect effect. Basic religion (in their model) opposes torture, but it also increases support for conservative politics. As a result, it indirectly increases support for torture.

What’s more, this indirect effect was much stronger in educated people. In educated people, religion is more likely to be linked to conservative views, and conservative views are more likely to be linked to support for torture.

In my view, the real interest in these results is that they underscore once again just how complex religion is. I think that the motives for educated people to embrace religion differ from the motives of the less educated. As a result, the kind of religion they have, and the purposes they put it too, are different. They make religion in their own image.