The first addresses the utter fallacy of creationism and intelligent design. At issue is the essence of whether we base our lives on fear and fallacy, or on curiosity and the daring to challenge our world, all of it, internally and externally.
Lawrence M. Krauss
A Universe Without Purpose
The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis. Everywhere we look, it appears that the world was designed so that we could flourish.
The position of the Earth around the sun, the presence of organic materials and water and a warm climate -- all make life on our planet possible. Yet, with perhaps 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy alone, with ubiquitous water, carbon and hydrogen, it isn't surprising that these conditions would arise somewhere. And as to the diversity of life on Earth -- as Darwin described more than 150 years ago and experiments ever since have validated -- natural selection in evolving life forms can establish both diversity and order without any governing plan.
As a cosmologist, a scientist who studies the origin and evolution of the universe, I am painfully aware that our illusions nonetheless reflect a deep human need to assume that the existence of the Earth, of life and of the universe and the laws that govern it require something more profound. For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.
But science has taught us to think the unthinkable. Because when nature is the guide -- rather than a priori prejudices, hopes, fears or desires -- we are forced out of our comfort zone. One by one, pillars of classical logic have fallen by the wayside as science progressed in the 20th century, from Einstein's realization that measurements of space and time were not absolute but observer-dependent, to quantum mechanics, which not only put fundamental limits on what we can empirically know but also demonstrated that elementary particles and the atoms they form are doing a million seemingly impossible things at once.
And so it is that the 21st century has brought new revolutions and new revelations on a cosmic scale. Our picture of the universe has probably changed more in the lifetime of an octogenarian today than in all of human history. Eighty-seven years ago, as far as we knew, the universe consisted of a single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by an eternal, static, empty void. Now we know that there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, which began with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. In its earliest moments, everything we now see as our universe -- and much more -- was contained in a volume smaller than the size of a single atom.
And so we continue to be surprised. We are like the early mapmakers redrawing the picture of the globe even as new continents were discovered. And just as those mapmakers confronted the realization that the Earth was not flat, we must confront facts that change what have seemed to be basic and fundamental concepts. Even our idea of nothingness has been altered.
We now know that most of the energy in the observable universe can be found not within galaxies but outside them, in otherwise empty space, which, for reasons we still cannot fathom, "weighs" something. But the use of the word "weight" is perhaps misleading because the energy of empty space is gravitationally repulsive. It pushes distant galaxies away from us at an ever-faster rate. Eventually they will recede faster than light and will be unobservable.
This has changed our vision of the future, which is now far bleaker. The longer we wait, the less of the universe we will be able to see. In hundreds of billions of years, astronomers on some distant planet circling a distant star (Earth and our sun will be long gone) will observe the cosmos and find it much like our flawed vision at the turn of the last century: a single galaxy immersed in a seemingly endless dark, empty, static universe.
Out of this radically new image of the universe at large scale have also come new ideas about physics at a small scale. The Large Hadron Collider has given tantalizing hints that the origin of mass, and therefore of all that we can see, is a kind of cosmic accident. Experiments in the collider bolster evidence of the existence of the "Higgs field," which apparently just happened to form throughout space in our universe; it is only because all elementary particles interact with this field that they have the mass we observe today.
Most surprising of all, combining the ideas of general relativity and quantum mechanics, we can understand how it is possible that the entire universe, matter, radiation and even space itself could arise spontaneously out of nothing, without explicit divine intervention. Quantum mechanics' Heisenberg uncertainty principle expands what can possibly occur undetected in otherwise empty space. If gravity too is governed by quantum mechanics, then even whole new universes can spontaneously appear and disappear, which means our own universe may not be unique but instead part of a "multiverse."
As particle physics revolutionizes the concepts of "something" (elementary particles and the forces that bind them) and "nothing" (the dynamics of empty space or even the absence of space), the famous question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is also revolutionized. Even the very laws of physics we depend on may be a cosmic accident, with different laws in different universes, which further alters how we might connect something with nothing. Asking why we live in a universe of something rather than nothing may be no more meaningful than asking why some flowers are red and others blue.
Perhaps most remarkable of all, not only is it now plausible, in a scientific sense, that our universe came from nothing, if we ask what properties a universe created from nothing would have, it appears that these properties resemble precisely the universe we live in.
Does all of this prove that our universe and the laws that govern it arose spontaneously without divine guidance or purpose? No, but it means it is possible.
And that possibility need not imply that our own lives are devoid of meaning. Instead of divine purpose, the meaning in our lives can arise from what we make of ourselves, from our relationships and our institutions, from the achievements of the human mind.
Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing. Living in a strange and remarkable universe that is the way it is, independent of our desires and hopes, is far more satisfying for me than living in a fairy-tale universe invented to justify our existence.
Then we have Rick Santorum who would rather have no one go to college, and prevent students from learning critical thinking and logic, than risk a challenge to religious belief. Well, to be fair, Santorum really only cares if someone is or is not a Roman Catholic. Typical of the more extreme among the religious right, what he really seems to care about is coercing other people to conform and submit to his belief system, regardless of THEIR religious beliefs. Personally I reject any religion which requires or is based on a lie, or on a denial of objective fact. In that context, the most famous, classic example would be the Galileo helio-centric controversy with the Roman Catholic church, but there are others, smaller, and sadly too frequent. A valid belief can't be based on invalid information. The wide world is a sufficiently extraordinary place, we don't need to make stuff up, much less penalize or punish people based on fiction, no matter how ardently embraced. We do not have to avoid critical thinking and logic; rather we need to embrace them, pursue them, to discover and appreciate the miracle that surrounds us. We need to challenge ourselves and each other; the solution is not to dumb down ourselves and wrongly call it virtue. That is the kind of primitive superstition one finds in the Taliban - and too often, among the more extreme fundies of the religious right.
Psychologists William Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, set out to determine whether or not critical thinking promotes religious disbelief. Their cleaver experiments show that this is indeed true, and the results illuminate how our two minds -- one analytical and the other intuitive -- compete in reaching a decision about what we believe.
But before we risk launching off on another crusade of science against religion, a bit of background will be helpful. Pascal Boyer, at the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, argued in an essay published in Nature in 2008 that religious thinking is an inescapable property emerging from the human cognitive system, but that "disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions." This is why atheists will never predominate, he argues.
Jonathan Evans, at the Centre for Thinking and Language at the University of Plymouth in England, argues that when it comes to belief, we in fact have two minds -- that is, two distinct cognitive systems in our brain that contribute to belief. The first cognitive system is an evolutionarily ancient one, shared with animals, that runs on instinct and intuition. The second cognitive process is an evolutionarily recent invention, unique to humans, that permits abstract reasoning. Somehow, these two minds have to come to terms. In fact, Evans argues, our two minds constantly battle for attention in our decision-making process, and functional brain imaging provides evidence that different regions of our cerebral cortex are involved in either analytical reasoning or intuition.
A prime example of the more ancient cognitive system at work is President George Bush, who famously relied on his "gut instinct" to guide his decision-making process. Albert Einstein, the epitome of rational, analytical thinking, exemplifies the other cognitive system. Both men, incidentally, spoke publicly and frequently of their belief in God, although their religious concepts differed in more fundamental ways than even the Christian and Jewish traditions that separated them. "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," Einstein concluded. In a subtle way, Einstein's pithy remark seems to recognize the internal struggle between reason and intuition that wrestle out our individual beliefs.
All of this is great fodder for philosophers, but how to design a scientific experiment to answer the question, going back to the Apostle Thomas and even earlier, of whether logical thinking and analysis promotes disbelief in religion?
Gervais' and Norenzayan's first experiment tested the idea that analytical thinkers tend to be less religious. They recruited 179 Canadian undergraduates and gave them analytic thinking tests, followed by a survey to gauge their religious disbelief. As expected, the results showed that higher scores in analytical thinking correlated with greater religious disbelief. But this is just a correlation.
To test for a causal relationship between analytical thinking and religious disbelief, the researchers devised four different ways to promote analytic thinking and then surveyed the students to see if their religious disbelief had increased by the interventions that boosted critical thinking. Varieties of these interventions had already been shown in previous psychological studies to elevate critical thinking measurably on tests of reasoning. In one intervention, when people are shown a visual image that suggests critical thinking (for example, Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker," seated head-in-hand, pondering) just before taking a test of analytic reasoning, their performance on the test increases measurably. Subconscious suggestion about thinking apparently gets the cognitive juices flowing and suppresses intuitive processes. The researchers confirmed this effect but also found that the self-reported religious disbelief also increased compared with subjects shown a different image before being tested that did not suggest critical thinking.
The same result was found after boosting critical reasoning in three other ways known to stimulate logical reasoning and improve performance on reasoning tests. This included having subjects rearrange jumbles of words into a meaningful phrase, for example. When the list of words connoted thought (for example, "think, reason, analyze, ponder, rational," as opposed to control lists like "hammer, shoes, jump, retrace, brown"), manipulating the thought-provoking words improved performance on a subsequent analytic thinking task and also increased religious disbelief significantly.
Belief is a fascinating and difficult subject of study for neuroscientists, psychologists, and theologians. These new findings provide new understanding of the different cognitive strategies that are associated with religious belief, but Norenzayan cautions, "Analytic thinking is only one of several factors that contribute to disbelief. Belief and disbelief are complex phenomena that have multiple causes. We have identified just one factor in these studies."
Furthermore, one should not consider either cognitive strategy superior to the other. "Both intuitive and analytic thinking are useful ways of thinking about the world; they both have their costs and benefits," he says.
Terrence Reynolds, professor and chairman of the Department of Theology at Georgetown University, agrees on this point and reminds us that religion is about more than understanding the world: "Religious believers ought not to be in any way unnerved by the findings of science. At the same time, one has to be careful not to engage in reductionist thinking about religion."
"Religion tends to focus on questions of meaning and value, which may not be available through analytic verification processes," he says. "If one won't think beyond that range of inquiry one would be less prone, I suppose, to believe in things one can't see or experience through the senses."
This could be one reason why most scientists (but not all) tend to be disbelievers, Norenzayan says. "I emphasize, one reason, because there could be other explanations, as well. Although analytic thinking is a core part of scientific training, intuitive thinking also plays a very important role, for example in how scientists think of new ideas or connect different ideas together when they get a 'scientific insight.'"
So it would seem that in this case, science and religion are in agreement: analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. "If one takes notions of God seriously," Reynolds says, "by definition God is a being that transcends the senses. So if one limits one's potential belief to what one can experience with the five senses, then it is very difficult to imagine how one could appropriate a God given those limitations."
On the other hand, even the Apostle Thomas, after all he had been through, needed something he could touch before he could believe.
The position of the Earth around the sun, the presence of organic materials and water and a warm climate -- all make life on our planet possible. Yet, with perhaps 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy alone, with ubiquitous water, carbon and hydrogen, it isn't surprising that these conditions would arise somewhere. And as to the diversity of life on Earth -- as Darwin described more than 150 years ago and experiments ever since have validated -- natural selection in evolving life forms can establish both diversity and order without any governing plan.
As a cosmologist, a scientist who studies the origin and evolution of the universe, I am painfully aware that our illusions nonetheless reflect a deep human need to assume that the existence of the Earth, of life and of the universe and the laws that govern it require something more profound. For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.
But science has taught us to think the unthinkable. Because when nature is the guide -- rather than a priori prejudices, hopes, fears or desires -- we are forced out of our comfort zone. One by one, pillars of classical logic have fallen by the wayside as science progressed in the 20th century, from Einstein's realization that measurements of space and time were not absolute but observer-dependent, to quantum mechanics, which not only put fundamental limits on what we can empirically know but also demonstrated that elementary particles and the atoms they form are doing a million seemingly impossible things at once.
And so it is that the 21st century has brought new revolutions and new revelations on a cosmic scale. Our picture of the universe has probably changed more in the lifetime of an octogenarian today than in all of human history. Eighty-seven years ago, as far as we knew, the universe consisted of a single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by an eternal, static, empty void. Now we know that there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, which began with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. In its earliest moments, everything we now see as our universe -- and much more -- was contained in a volume smaller than the size of a single atom.
And so we continue to be surprised. We are like the early mapmakers redrawing the picture of the globe even as new continents were discovered. And just as those mapmakers confronted the realization that the Earth was not flat, we must confront facts that change what have seemed to be basic and fundamental concepts. Even our idea of nothingness has been altered.
We now know that most of the energy in the observable universe can be found not within galaxies but outside them, in otherwise empty space, which, for reasons we still cannot fathom, "weighs" something. But the use of the word "weight" is perhaps misleading because the energy of empty space is gravitationally repulsive. It pushes distant galaxies away from us at an ever-faster rate. Eventually they will recede faster than light and will be unobservable.
This has changed our vision of the future, which is now far bleaker. The longer we wait, the less of the universe we will be able to see. In hundreds of billions of years, astronomers on some distant planet circling a distant star (Earth and our sun will be long gone) will observe the cosmos and find it much like our flawed vision at the turn of the last century: a single galaxy immersed in a seemingly endless dark, empty, static universe.
Out of this radically new image of the universe at large scale have also come new ideas about physics at a small scale. The Large Hadron Collider has given tantalizing hints that the origin of mass, and therefore of all that we can see, is a kind of cosmic accident. Experiments in the collider bolster evidence of the existence of the "Higgs field," which apparently just happened to form throughout space in our universe; it is only because all elementary particles interact with this field that they have the mass we observe today.
Most surprising of all, combining the ideas of general relativity and quantum mechanics, we can understand how it is possible that the entire universe, matter, radiation and even space itself could arise spontaneously out of nothing, without explicit divine intervention. Quantum mechanics' Heisenberg uncertainty principle expands what can possibly occur undetected in otherwise empty space. If gravity too is governed by quantum mechanics, then even whole new universes can spontaneously appear and disappear, which means our own universe may not be unique but instead part of a "multiverse."
As particle physics revolutionizes the concepts of "something" (elementary particles and the forces that bind them) and "nothing" (the dynamics of empty space or even the absence of space), the famous question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is also revolutionized. Even the very laws of physics we depend on may be a cosmic accident, with different laws in different universes, which further alters how we might connect something with nothing. Asking why we live in a universe of something rather than nothing may be no more meaningful than asking why some flowers are red and others blue.
Perhaps most remarkable of all, not only is it now plausible, in a scientific sense, that our universe came from nothing, if we ask what properties a universe created from nothing would have, it appears that these properties resemble precisely the universe we live in.
Does all of this prove that our universe and the laws that govern it arose spontaneously without divine guidance or purpose? No, but it means it is possible.
And that possibility need not imply that our own lives are devoid of meaning. Instead of divine purpose, the meaning in our lives can arise from what we make of ourselves, from our relationships and our institutions, from the achievements of the human mind.
Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing. Living in a strange and remarkable universe that is the way it is, independent of our desires and hopes, is far more satisfying for me than living in a fairy-tale universe invented to justify our existence.
Then we have Rick Santorum who would rather have no one go to college, and prevent students from learning critical thinking and logic, than risk a challenge to religious belief. Well, to be fair, Santorum really only cares if someone is or is not a Roman Catholic. Typical of the more extreme among the religious right, what he really seems to care about is coercing other people to conform and submit to his belief system, regardless of THEIR religious beliefs. Personally I reject any religion which requires or is based on a lie, or on a denial of objective fact. In that context, the most famous, classic example would be the Galileo helio-centric controversy with the Roman Catholic church, but there are others, smaller, and sadly too frequent. A valid belief can't be based on invalid information. The wide world is a sufficiently extraordinary place, we don't need to make stuff up, much less penalize or punish people based on fiction, no matter how ardently embraced. We do not have to avoid critical thinking and logic; rather we need to embrace them, pursue them, to discover and appreciate the miracle that surrounds us. We need to challenge ourselves and each other; the solution is not to dumb down ourselves and wrongly call it virtue. That is the kind of primitive superstition one finds in the Taliban - and too often, among the more extreme fundies of the religious right.
Dr. Douglas Fields
According to the Bible, "doubting" Thomas, who was one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, reacted to reports of the resurrection with disbelief. He required proof, and he was not convinced until his demand to poke his finger into Jesus' wounds for verification was satisfied. After the probing, Jesus said to Thomas, "Because you have seen me, you believe, blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed." This biblical story captures the essence of a new discovery about religious disbelief published in tomorrow's edition of the journal Science.Psychologists William Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, set out to determine whether or not critical thinking promotes religious disbelief. Their cleaver experiments show that this is indeed true, and the results illuminate how our two minds -- one analytical and the other intuitive -- compete in reaching a decision about what we believe.
But before we risk launching off on another crusade of science against religion, a bit of background will be helpful. Pascal Boyer, at the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, argued in an essay published in Nature in 2008 that religious thinking is an inescapable property emerging from the human cognitive system, but that "disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions." This is why atheists will never predominate, he argues.
Jonathan Evans, at the Centre for Thinking and Language at the University of Plymouth in England, argues that when it comes to belief, we in fact have two minds -- that is, two distinct cognitive systems in our brain that contribute to belief. The first cognitive system is an evolutionarily ancient one, shared with animals, that runs on instinct and intuition. The second cognitive process is an evolutionarily recent invention, unique to humans, that permits abstract reasoning. Somehow, these two minds have to come to terms. In fact, Evans argues, our two minds constantly battle for attention in our decision-making process, and functional brain imaging provides evidence that different regions of our cerebral cortex are involved in either analytical reasoning or intuition.
A prime example of the more ancient cognitive system at work is President George Bush, who famously relied on his "gut instinct" to guide his decision-making process. Albert Einstein, the epitome of rational, analytical thinking, exemplifies the other cognitive system. Both men, incidentally, spoke publicly and frequently of their belief in God, although their religious concepts differed in more fundamental ways than even the Christian and Jewish traditions that separated them. "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," Einstein concluded. In a subtle way, Einstein's pithy remark seems to recognize the internal struggle between reason and intuition that wrestle out our individual beliefs.
All of this is great fodder for philosophers, but how to design a scientific experiment to answer the question, going back to the Apostle Thomas and even earlier, of whether logical thinking and analysis promotes disbelief in religion?
Gervais' and Norenzayan's first experiment tested the idea that analytical thinkers tend to be less religious. They recruited 179 Canadian undergraduates and gave them analytic thinking tests, followed by a survey to gauge their religious disbelief. As expected, the results showed that higher scores in analytical thinking correlated with greater religious disbelief. But this is just a correlation.
To test for a causal relationship between analytical thinking and religious disbelief, the researchers devised four different ways to promote analytic thinking and then surveyed the students to see if their religious disbelief had increased by the interventions that boosted critical thinking. Varieties of these interventions had already been shown in previous psychological studies to elevate critical thinking measurably on tests of reasoning. In one intervention, when people are shown a visual image that suggests critical thinking (for example, Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker," seated head-in-hand, pondering) just before taking a test of analytic reasoning, their performance on the test increases measurably. Subconscious suggestion about thinking apparently gets the cognitive juices flowing and suppresses intuitive processes. The researchers confirmed this effect but also found that the self-reported religious disbelief also increased compared with subjects shown a different image before being tested that did not suggest critical thinking.
The same result was found after boosting critical reasoning in three other ways known to stimulate logical reasoning and improve performance on reasoning tests. This included having subjects rearrange jumbles of words into a meaningful phrase, for example. When the list of words connoted thought (for example, "think, reason, analyze, ponder, rational," as opposed to control lists like "hammer, shoes, jump, retrace, brown"), manipulating the thought-provoking words improved performance on a subsequent analytic thinking task and also increased religious disbelief significantly.
Belief is a fascinating and difficult subject of study for neuroscientists, psychologists, and theologians. These new findings provide new understanding of the different cognitive strategies that are associated with religious belief, but Norenzayan cautions, "Analytic thinking is only one of several factors that contribute to disbelief. Belief and disbelief are complex phenomena that have multiple causes. We have identified just one factor in these studies."
Furthermore, one should not consider either cognitive strategy superior to the other. "Both intuitive and analytic thinking are useful ways of thinking about the world; they both have their costs and benefits," he says.
Terrence Reynolds, professor and chairman of the Department of Theology at Georgetown University, agrees on this point and reminds us that religion is about more than understanding the world: "Religious believers ought not to be in any way unnerved by the findings of science. At the same time, one has to be careful not to engage in reductionist thinking about religion."
"Religion tends to focus on questions of meaning and value, which may not be available through analytic verification processes," he says. "If one won't think beyond that range of inquiry one would be less prone, I suppose, to believe in things one can't see or experience through the senses."
This could be one reason why most scientists (but not all) tend to be disbelievers, Norenzayan says. "I emphasize, one reason, because there could be other explanations, as well. Although analytic thinking is a core part of scientific training, intuitive thinking also plays a very important role, for example in how scientists think of new ideas or connect different ideas together when they get a 'scientific insight.'"
So it would seem that in this case, science and religion are in agreement: analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. "If one takes notions of God seriously," Reynolds says, "by definition God is a being that transcends the senses. So if one limits one's potential belief to what one can experience with the five senses, then it is very difficult to imagine how one could appropriate a God given those limitations."
On the other hand, even the Apostle Thomas, after all he had been through, needed something he could touch before he could believe.
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