Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:00:01 PST

For the research subjects’ sacred values, the ones they wouldn’t give up on for any amount of money (they could ‘auction off their value’ for up to $100), what lit up in the brain were areas known to be involved in right-wrong decisions,�not�in cost-benefit/utilitarian parts of the brain. That is, we naturally go to right-wrong thinking in making sacred value decisions.

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:00:01 PST

By now, it should be clear that William Broad’s broadside against yoga (sorry about that) in the New York Times is thin on facts and thick on rhetoric. Excerpted from his forthcoming book, the article, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body,” is a full-on, un-fair-and-balanced...

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 12:00:01 PST

This year has marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the war between science and religion. Creationism cannot last. The New Atheists are now old (or�departed). And between these camps the middle ground continues to expand.�Indeed, many folks have been hard at it, doing a new kind of peace work. Some have done it intentionally, some have not. Outliers, both atheist and religious hardliners, continue to wage battle but they look increasingly irrelevant.�

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:00:01 PDT

What happens when a breakthrough in technology leaves religious scholars without much to go on?�

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:00:01 PDT

In a recent BBC documentary, Secrets of the Superbrands, presenter Alex Riley attended the opening of a London Apple store and noted the “evangelical frenzy” of the Apple fans lining the block.

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:00:01 PDT

Forget the war on drugs. As Jimmy Carter recently argued in the New York Times, it is time to call off this wasted effort.

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:00:01 PDT

A new study concludes that the brains of born-again Christians are smaller than those of other affiliations or non-believers. Welcome back to the 19th century.

Thu, 05 May 2011 00:00:01 PDT

Both the good and bad in our species come from our primate background, says primatologist Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy.

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 19:00:01 PDT

Something is clearly up (or down) with religious affiliation, but reading that data calls for the art for interpretation, not mathematical modeling. That’s what makes this story far more interesting—and far less funny.

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:00:01 PST

If you haven’t heard of Jonathan Haidt yet, you probably will soon. The social psychologist from the University of Virginia is making quite a media splash. Most recently, he set off a small media storm by calling out his fellow psychologists for unacknowledged liberal bias.

...

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 19:00:01 PST

The church, in its ignorance of and hostility to evolution, is passing up one of its greatest opportunities to apprehend the very God it claims to represent. This irony is due to a terrible case of what may be called “small-god-ism” and is, unfortunately, encouraged by much popular theology. This theology makes claims about scripture and church practice that reduce God to a cheerleader, or a cosmic vending machine, or some domesticated and pale image of our own confused selves.�

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 14:00:01 PST

While I might have some kind of God-experience, unlike testing aspirin, I can’t easily carry out my God-experience simultaneously on statistically significant large numbers of people, write up the experience, repeat it, compare the same number of people at the same time who don’t believe in God, but are otherwise similar, see if they have the same experience, and then have someone repeat my experiment and see if they get the same results. This method is what science is supposed to be about; this is scientific proof, this is what scientists believe in. But, says Jonah Lehrer, it’s not that simple. He describes what he calls ‘the decline effect’: many experimental results that are strikingly positive and statistically significant are not replicable.

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:00:01 PST

Although medicine should stay in the business of being evidence-based, says Harvard historian of science Anne Harrington, other healing communities don’t necessarily need to follow that model. There’s a place for data, but you need to know what data can’t tell you.

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 23:00:01 PST

Numerous studies showing that decision-making appears to occur well before we believe we’ve made the decision, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to give up on free will just yet.

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:00:01 PDT

The Dalai Lama was just in Atlanta, visiting Emory University’s “Emory-Tibet Science Initiative.” There he spoke about the easy relationship between Buddhism and science. When you whittle it down to its essence, Buddhism is very simple and amenable to Enlightenment types.

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 18:00:01 PDT

The humanist community assembled many of its leading lights recently to award Richard Dawkins a prize for furthering rational thought. A secular humanist convention is not the witches’ coven that some sheltered theists might expect. I did not see anyone smoking and never heard a profane word. Drinking at the reception was modest by anyone but a teetotaler’s standards, and far less than at the Episcopal fundraiser I’d attended the previous week. Also unlike the Episcopal affair, I did not spot a single same-sex couple. I began to wonder how much fun these people, freed from religion’s rules, were having with their liberty.

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 12:00:01 PDT

It didn’t help that Galileo would satirize and mock the Church hierarchy.�

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:00:01 PDT

Skepticism means having the courage to suspend one’s set of beliefs long enough to take another set of beliefs really seriously. That is, real skepticism means�disbelieving. So be as skeptical as possible but as open as possible, and remember that if one refuses to investigate religion in this way, then that is known as contempt prior to investigation—and is the death of the life of the mind.

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:00:01 PDT

As you probably know, a couple of weeks ago the pope was in England smack-talking the atheists. What is generally less known is that, at the same moment that pope was having his say with the UK's radical non-believers, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, also in England, was busy talking...

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:00:01 PDT

Despite these publicly marked divides, the field of religion and science cannot easily be described by sticking a “vs.” between the two words. Rather than an ideological battle in which, as Hawking states, one side of the ring will “win” over the other, for some, the question is about how the two sides might work together.

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 23:00:01 PDT

When David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute called me out last week on a recent RD post, I decided to take the opportunity to review the history of the conservative think tank’s role in promoting the inclusion of intelligent design theory in the American science curriculum.

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 17:00:01 PDT

Creation is a heavy word these days. So, when it showed up in the title of one of this summer’s hottest science papers, it drew me up short.

The word itself comes from the Latin for ‘bringing forth into being’, which already sounds pretty deep. But then it also has the...

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:00:01 PDT

The department of physics in the University of Oxford is a hodgepodge of buildings, old and new. In a warren of rooms, its scientists pursue interests from quantum computing to theoretical cosmology. The diversity says much. As a tree of knowledge, modern physics has branches that shoot off in...

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:01 PDT

A new four-volume work from the Vatical Library suggests that the concerns of the papacy in the early modern period were focused almost entirely on the new threat posed by the Protestants. If some scientists, especially the astronomers, got caught in the cross-fire, then this was only because they were perceived to be Protestant-style “free thinkers.”

Thu, 27 May 2010 00:00:01 PDT

The other day, Terry Sanderson—president of the United Kingdom’s National Secular Society—published a short, scathing indictment of theology in The Guardian, a piece titled “