Does Analytic Thinking Erode Religious Belief?

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/science/5991/does_analytic_thinking_erode_religious_belief

Great article. This is why I mostly reject the findings of these soft sciences.

May 29, 2012Does Analytic Thinking Erode Religious Belief? By ANDREW AGHAPOUR




I have some secrets for you; feel free to tell everyone. Psychopaths have distinct types of brains, and so do left-handed people. Bar Mitzvahs aid myelination, the conversion of gray-matter neurons into white-matter neurons. Bragging makes us feel really good, which is why Facebook is better than sex. If that concerns you, don’t worry, because the pharmaceutical industry is going to save marriage. Shakespeare tickles the visual association cortex. Dopamine makes us do bad things, but meditation makes your brain quicker. Bloody Mary (the apparition, not the drink) is probably a facial recognition error. Babies are a little bit racist.

Like the zombies that populate our screens, Americans have an immense appetite for brains. Most of the above stories come from just the past month, and they are only a small sample of neuroscience’s prominent circulation in the news cycle. Neuroscience can tell us who we are, how we can improve ourselves, and why other people act in the strange ways that they do. In an increasingly complex world, brains seem to somehow point back to the one thing that all humans have in common.

Perhaps because of the high demand for news about the brain, media coverage of neuroscience is notoriously sketchy. In a recent article in the journal Neuron, the authors lament the ways that popular neuroscience is used to artificially “underline differences between categories of people in ways that [are] symbolically layered and socially loaded.” In other words, research about the brain is often stretched and extended to support existing stereotypes about race, sex, class, and religion. Neuroscience is new enough, and our desire for brain facts is strong enough, that dubious claims about brain types circulate widely.

A Trio of Wacky Experiments

Take, for example, the latest Neuroscience-of-Religion news item to make the rounds, this one claiming that critical thinking undermines religious belief. Based on two studies from The Journal of Experimental Psychologies and Science, it has been picked up by The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and (unsurprisingly) RichardDawkins.net.

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