“Is religion natural? Why is belief in gods, souls, and the afterlife so common across cultures? Why do some religious ideas and practices out-compete others? Can the new sciences of the mind help answer these and questions like them? The £1.9 million Cognition, Religion, & Theology Project, launched in October 2007 at the University of Oxford, set out to get some answers to these questions and likewise begin to determine whether such scientific explanations for religion support or undermine religious beliefs. It is three years and over 40 studies later, so what have we learned? Among the many scientific findings, we now have better evidence that:
- Children and adults have a tendency to see the natural world as having function or purpose—even those with advanced scientific education. This tendency makes the idea of forest spirits or creator gods satisfying.
- In early childhood we have a natural tendency to attribute super properties to other humans and gods, including super knowledge, super perception, and immortality. In fact, it takes longer for children to learn about human limitations than divine super abilities. Children commonly invent invisible friends, and even these friends are more like God than like visible friends in many ways.
- The idea that some part of us—our mind, soul, or spirit—does not need a physical body and can persist after death may be largely intuitive. Here, too, it may be that we have to be talked out of beliefs in the afterlife (or even a life before birth!), rather than talked into them.
- Adolescents and young adults may find religious ideas easier to remember and use than older adults.
- Religious beliefs and practices might persist in part because they make us more cooperative and generous with others.
But do such explanations for religion mean we that shouldn’t be religious (as the New Atheists have suggested)? That we should? Twelve philosophers from across the world over three years weighed in on these sorts of questions, both working separately, and coming together in Oxford for intensive conferences, and other discussions. They agreed that new empirical research is demonstrating that impulses to religion are part of the most basic ways the human mind works. Religion has always been a basic feature of human life and is always likely to be. Atheism is as sophisticated a response to this fact as any theology. Which is right cannot be settled by empirical discovery, but religion cannot be dismissed as the private preoccupation of a few. Religious responses to the world, right or wrong, are part of what it is to be human.
In 2007, the John Templeton Foundation made an award of £1.87 million to the University of Oxford for the Cognition, Religion, & Theology Project (CRT Project). The principal aims of the CRT Project were to: (1) shore up the empirical foundations of cognitive science of religion area through data collection and training new researchers in the scientific study of religion; and (2) increase the philosophical rigour of the cognitive science of religion by increasing the number of philosophers and theologians engaged with the potential implications of the area, and to better refine the scientific questions needing answers. Both missions were accomplished with goals exceeded” (source).
Editor’s note: The first two issues of the journal Religion, Brain, and Behavior will feature articles from the CRT project, as will an upcoming special issue of the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion. Many of the ideas and themes from the project will appear in Justin Barrett’s two forthcoming books Cognition, Religion, and Theology (Templeton Press, Autumn 2011) and Born Believers (The Free Press, late 2011 or early 2012).
