Neuroscientists must not be afraid to study religion | Hacker News Reader

Neuroscientists must not be afraid to study religion

nature.com

22 pointspseudolus24 comments

But what if they find a cure?

Funny comment of the week.

Oh, it'd be great if they did. Seriously. :)

more seriously though, why isolate religion. it should be a study of "belief".

I dont think anyone would honestly argue that religion isn't a belief, and if it is then it sits in the same area as flat earthers and 9/11 truthers and Andrew Tate devotees etc etc.

Belief is the nurological architecture that people are building on.

There's a tendency for Westerners to view every religion through the lens of protestant Christianity. Religion is a notoriously hard to define concept (this was the running joke of a sociology of religion unit I took at university; each week we'd look to another attempt to define it.) The idea that it's all about 'belief', some confession of fact-statements, is very much from that protestant Christian understanding, a post-Enlightenment focus on words.

The boundaries between religion, culture, language, myth and storytelling, reflection.. these are all extremely porous and vary widely. It looks to me that the researchers in the article are aware of this.

Brent Nongbri's book "Before Religion" is excellent on all of this.

(Full disclosure, I'm an Anglican [Episcopalian in the US] priest)

There's a neurological argument that overgeneralizing cause from effect has survival benefits. There will be a high false alarm rate for tigers in moving grass, but that's a win if, sometimes, there really is a tiger. This leads to a tendency to assign causes for random events. That in turn leads to various belief systems not justified by the evidence.

Wikipedia has some notes in this area.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion

It has always struck me as odd that when this example is recited, the animal of choice is always a tiger. The situation is supposed to play out in very early prehistory during the evolution of humanity. That evolution occurred in the savannahs of Africa, where there are no tigers.

You have to get grants to do research. Grants don't come from scientists (usually), and are subject to the forces of politics. Thus, it's hard to find money to study religion, as it's not politically tenable.

As I get older, this seems obvious to me; the idea of a scientist who's also to some extent religious makes just as much sense, maybe more, than a strongly atheist one -- especially given, that historically, religion and science weren't strongly mutually exclusive?

if it seems that obvious, you surely can explain why it would make semse?

Sure, it's the appreciation that there are unknowns and how to treat them. As you know, the best SCIENTISTS aren't 100% sure about very much. Reverence and wonder can cut across it all.

Religion tends to make people more sure about things that they don't really know for sure. In my mind that has always struck me as an obstacle to being a good scientist. Appreciating that there are unknowns is exactly what gets a lot of people into science, and the correct way to treat those unknowns in science is to say that you're not sure about something until you've run the experiment.

Hm, whether a scientist is religious should bear little relation to studying religion or anything adjacent to it.

For historians it'd be more obvious I think: it would be foolish to ignore religion since it's an artifact of human history. A historian who is an atheist can still study and compare religions.

But what about science? While the object of religion itself, i.e. the supernatural, is outside the scope of the scientific method, the existence of religion and religious practices themselves is not. What if there's a biological cause of religious belief? What if religious belief is a side effect of the same brain structures that make humans social animals, or that makes capable of language, or conscious, or something like that?

As long as you're not making a religious argument, religion as a human artifact should be fair game for science. The risk could be to offend religious people, of course.

There is also the inevitable anger, rage, and death threats that will follow when people who regularly claim to commune with God are determined to merely be schizophrenic or using the same brain pathways as LSD users.

Religions haven't stopped being resistant to investigation and their members remain zealous.

Even the claim about meditation in the article will upset people, as then it isn't God delivering peace to your mind.

Doing research in this area could easily lead to something you wouldn’t want to publish out of fear.

I know this is unpopular but we need to stop being so afraid of studying IQ. If you look at research like the NYLS there are very clear differences, and they seem to be heavily influenced by genetics. Your IQ is incredibly important for everything from earning potential to lifespan, and we could make meaningful societal advancements from that kind of research.

Also as an aside from my time doing research, I don’t think anyone is afraid to conduct research that’s critical of religion.

> I don’t think anyone is afraid to conduct research that’s critical of religion.

Anyone? Anyone at all? Or did you mean anyone in your social circles and you forgot that people outside of it exist? Such as people in countries with Sharia law?

> Meanwhile, more people around the globe classed as Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) seem to be embracing highly traditional religious affiliations, such as traditional Catholicism or Judaism.

There isn't a reference provided for that sentence in the article, but it's something that seems true to me, from my own experience. I'd really love to see some hard research confirming or denying this.

Religious people seem to be having more children.

- /? religion out of body experiences and epilepsy neuroimaging: https://www.google.com/search?q=religion+out+of+body+experie...

- /? auditory cortex verbal hallucinations: https://www.google.com/search?q=auditory%20cortex%20verbal%2...

- /? auditory cortex for schizophrenia treatment: https://www.google.com/search?q=auditory%20cortex%20for%20sc...

- Humanism > Varieties of humanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism#Varieties_of_humanism re: the many ways bootstrapping a sufficient morality because the Golden Rule and the 3 Laws of Robotics are insufficient in comparison to e.g. statutes printed out every year; and because LLMs lack reasoning, inference, and critical thinking and thus also ethics.

However, you may want to pour yourself a stiff drink.

I don't think religion is different from so many other biases, illusions, delusions etc. There's no need to define it as a separate field of study just because there are so many people participating in it. Plus there is the personal attacks, death threats and occasional murders associated with many of them.

Religion is not only (and perhaps also not mainly) about belief, but also involves philosophy, community, etc. (And, there are many different kind of religion; they are different in many ways.)

(There are also differences within one religion, although it can also depend how you divide "one religion", because there is denominations, etc. However, what I mean is there are differences even within one denomination and within one community, and whatever else you may wish to divide, etc.)

People do bad things with religion, although people can do bad things with any things. People can also do good things with religion and with others.

I don't understand why scientists don't study dragon fossils.

Presumably there are plenty who would, if any were available to study. ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com