Belief in the Brain: Sacred and secular ideas engage identical areas

Not surprising to me. Much of the activity you'd see in this experiment would be related to more mundane cognitive activity like language processing, semantic recall (remembering facts like what's in the middle of our solar system), metamemory (e.g, where did I learn that?), guessing the intent of the question, and thinking about what's for lunch.

Any activity related to theology could easily blend right in with this background activity. They're making the assumption that because theology is a "big issue" that it should stick out like a sore thumb on an fMRI. That's not necessary true. The average church-going Christian adult has probably heard about Jesus's life thousands of times in their life. They could easy answer a question about him without even considering the theological implications of the question. It's just another semantic detail to them.

Edit: Added second paragraph.

A more interesting control would be to have two groups: one which had no direct experience in proving a statement, and another that had empirically proven a statement. You could ask a group of normal folks whether equilateral triangles always have internal angles of 60˚ and then you could ask some mathematics grad students the same question.

The key distinction I'm going after here is whether a fact believed on authority or believed because of empirical proof. I believe that the earth rotates around the Sun and that gravity accelerates things at 9.8m/s^2 and that there once existed a fellow named Kublai Khan (who in Xanadu did a stately pleasure dome decree). But I believe all of these things because I read about them in books written by experts, not because I made observations with a telescope and did the orbital calculations, or because I've timed dropping objects from various heights, or because I've examined the historical record of the Yuan Dynasty.

Presumably an expert who has done the empirical work will not accept these facts on the basis of belief, but on the basis of real-world observed evidence/proof. That ought to trigger a different part of the brain than in someone who believes a scientific fact based on the authority of scientists and the scientific method.

This is exactly what one would expect.

To the brain, beliefs are beliefs, whether they concern god, angels or motor oil.

Not all cognition about religious things involves a "mystical experience". In fact, theologians tend to be an incredibly dry bunch and study their creeds with all the emotional investment of an accountant.

I seem to recall a similar article that was on Hacker News a while back, but with seemingly opposite results (probably not testing for exactly the same thing, but it seemed to suggest that secular and religious thoughts were distinctly different). I'm curious to compare now, can anybody help me find it?