Tag: Belief

Religious believers may seem to share little with nonbelievers when it comes to thinking and judgment. But a new study by UCLA researchers finds that both Christians and nonbelievers use the same parts of the brain when asked to label articles of religious faith as true or false. A report summarizing the study is published today in PLoS ONE.

This study was funded, in part, by Project Reason.

The author poses 3 questions to non-believers and contends that if they choose the “non-materialistic” answer, they may be more of a believer than they think.

Does the Texas governor believe his idiotic religious rhetoric, or is he just pandering for votes?

“Breivik is not a Christian; that’s impossible. No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder.”  A short tutorial in logic, as taught by television personality Bill O’Reilly.

In this excerpt from his 1995 book, The Demon Haunted World, Carl Sagan offers his famous analogy of claims for the existence of a god.

Results of a recent Gallup poll reveal that Americans are still extremely religious—unlike Canadian, U.K., or European allies.

Evolution may have delivered tendencies to believe certain things but that does not tell us whether those beliefs are true. There are risks in making up evolutionary “just-so” stories to explain the origins of complex human beliefs, such as religious ones.  Evolutionary biology will be of little help in “explaining” human beliefs in either quantum mechanics or the finer points of theology.

Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for the similarities between religions. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question…

Op-Ed piece argues that the New Atheists aren’t tolerant enough.

Two Harvard economists conclude that certain religious beliefs correlate with faster economic development.

The relationship between faith and science in the United States seems, at least on the surface, to be paradoxical. Surveys repeatedly show that most Americans respect science and the benefits it brings to society, such as new technologies and medical treatments. Nevertheless, strong religious convictions can affect some Americans’ willingness to accept certain scientific theories and discoveries, such as evolution, and new, life-changing technologies, such as genetic engineering.

Sam Harris, Jonas Kaplan, and colleagues publish the first study to compare religious faith to ordinary belief at the level of the brain.

Bill Foster is running for Mayor of Saint Petersburg, Florida. He is also believes the earth was created in six days, that humans and dinosaurs lived together and that his son should not be taught about evolution. Mr. Foster’s creationsit beliefs have called his competency to serve as mayor, if elected, into question. His opponent contends that Foster’s beliefs would be an impediment to science and techonology, and businesses related to science and technology, growing in the St. Petersburg area.

We must not preserve the myth of God – it was a useful crutch, but we’ve outgrown it. Daniel Dennett outlines the perils of belief for it’s own sake.

President Barack Obama has chosen influential genetic scientist Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health. Known for helping to unravel the human genetic codes, he is also known for trying to find common ground between belief in God and science and is author of the 2007 best-seller The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Harvard Professor Steven Pinker uses the tools of evolutionary psychology to find the origins of humans’ tendency to believe in religions.