resources-references, science-and-religionBoth science and religions have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to captivating people’s attention and providing answers to important questions. Each camp goes about resolving these issues in a different way and each is coming up with quite impressive results.
What can scientists learn from religious leaders? What would the lesson be?
What can religion learn from science? What would the lesson be?
Richard Feynman’s idea of “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” comes to mind. Are there scientists creating credible religious movements with massive following to study its dynamics? (I do not talk about Flying Spaghetti Monster and similar pranks.) Are there religious leaders doing high-quality, peer-reviewed scientific research on God’s existence (preferably using the LHC? ;)
I would be interested in all evidence of genuine, honest and recent efforts in these two directions. I do not care so much about why is this not going to work - this prevalent opinion was already sufficiently covered.
Religion has a lot to learn from science, like that the earth is a sphere, that the earth isn’t the center of the universe, that people don’t rise from the dead, that there’s no hell, etc. There’s a ton that each and every religion needs to learn from science, up to and including that their central myth is simply a myth. Once the major religions learned that (yeah, right) they’d have to confront their own lack of ethics and deal with that problem.
Science has a lot to learn about religion. For example, what the epileptic seizures are that people call ‘religious experience’, and how to cure that. We also need to learn more about how to educate children so that they don’t become so easily infected by religious memes.
There’s a lot that both sides can learn from each other.
To edit and update this:
To claim that just because stimulating the brain produces results in other areas invalidates the investigations into temporal lobe epilepsy is fatuous. Either you believe that the brain produces religious experiences, or you believe in magic. Since I choose to rule out magic, we’re left with the brain as a source, and if it’s in the brain we can quite possibly cure the sickness of religion.
Here’s that quote from wikipedia on temporal lobe epilepsy and religious experience:
The first researcher to note and catalog the abnormal experiences associated with TLE was neurologist Norman Geschwind, who noted a constellation of symptoms, including hypergraphia, hyperreligiosity, fainting spells, and pedantism, often collectively ascribed to a condition known as Geschwind syndrome.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran explored the neural basis of the hyperreligiosity seen in TLE using galvanic skin response (which correlates with emotional arousal) to determine whether the hyperreligiosity seen in TLE was due to an overall heightened emotional state or was specific to religious stimuli (Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998). By presenting subjects with neutral, sexually arousing and religious words while measuring GSR, Ramachandran was able to show that patients with TLE showed enhanced emotional responses to the religious words, diminished responses to the sexually charged words, and normal responses to the neutral words. These results suggest that the medial temporal lobe is specifically involved in generating some of the emotional reactions associated with religious words, images and symbols.
Cognitive neuroscience researcher Michael Persinger asserts that stimulating the temporal lobe electromagnetically can cause TLE and trigger hallucinations of apparent paranormal phenomena such as ghosts and UFOs. Persinger has even created a “God helmet” which purportedly can evoke altered states of consciousness through stimulation of the parietal and temporal lobes. Neurotheologians speculate that individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy, having a natural tendency to experience states of consciousness such as euphoria or samādhi, have functioned in human history as religious figures or shamans.
There are thousands and thousands of anecdotal reports and some study based evidence that messing with brain chemistry produces primary religious experience. It is well known that LSD and mescaline users report ‘seeing god’ and other such nonsense.
It is not a far leap to therefore locate the source of “primary religious/ecstatic experience” in the physical and chemical makeup of the brain. If this proves to be the case, there’s substantial hope that we could cure this kind of brain malfunction and increase the baseline rationality of the afflicted.
Perhaps the best thing science could learn from religion is: marketing. Though, sometimes and by some views certain ethics may be violated, religious leaders have a calculated charisma, presentation style, and undeniable persuasiveness that seems enthrall many. Even if you believe the followers of religious idols are dumb (which I don’t, necessarily for every single one of them) there is still a utility to persuading the masses eh? (ie enacting laws to further scientific research/discovery)
And unfortunately, due to the only other answer I’ve seen, religion can learn that strict subscribers to science can be just as bigoted as their worst zealots.
Mutual tolerance/respect will further atheistic causes- anything else is an ugly, uphill, and most likely intractable battle. And it gives me a bad name.
Science has nothing to learn from religion.
If religion learned from science, it would disappear overnight.
The two are mutually incompatible.
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