Sanity, and the Religious / Non-religious Brain

Sam Harris is the successful author of The End of Faith, a book that accuses religion of being the enemy of reason.

Sam Harris is also pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at UCLA. A recent paper in PLoS ONE, The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief, uses fMRI to look at differences in brain activity between "belief" and "disbelief."

Once inside the scanner, subjects were presented with a series of short statements through a video-goggle display (Resonance Technology, Inc). After reading each statement, they were asked to evaluate its truth content with the press of a button, indicating “true” (belief), “false” (disbelief), and “undecidable” (uncertainty). The presentation of stimuli was self-paced. Stimuli were drawn from two categories, religious and nonreligious. All statements were designed to be judged easily as “true” or “false” (the response of “undecidable,” while available to subjects, was not expected).

Within each category, we attempted to balance the stimuli with respect to semantic structure and content. Strict balancing across categories was not possible, however, as the two categories differ with respect to content, in principle. For the purposes of stimulus design (not presentation) we generated our statements in groups of four (true and false; religious and nonreligious):

The Biblical God really exists. (Christian true/nonbeliever false)

The Biblical God is a myth. (Christian false/nonbeliever true)

Santa Claus is a myth. (Both groups true)

Santa Claus really exists. (Both groups false) __PLoSOne

The results indicate that questions of belief are primarily handled by parts of the brain that are involved with self-representation, emotional associations, reward, and goal-driven behaviour. This was true for both the 15 religious subjects and the 15 non-religious subjects

But when questions of religious beliefs were analysed exclusively, areas of the brain recruited are also involved in pain perception in oneself and others, disgust, reward, response conflict, and cognitive planning.

Interestingly, both religious and non-religious subjects apparently possessed a "sense of blasphemy" in rejecting statements about religion with which they disagreed.

Finally, among our religious stimuli, the subset of statements that ran counter to Christian doctrine yielded greater signal for both groups in several brain regions, including the ventral striatum, paracingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, the frontal poles, and inferior parietal cortex (see Fig 3, Table 5). These regions showed greater signal both when Christians rejected stimuli contrary to their doctrine (e.g. “The Biblical god is a myth”) and when nonbelievers affirmed the truth of those same statements. In other words, these brain areas responded preferentially to “blasphemous” statements in both subject groups.

...Despite the fact that religious believers and nonbelievers accepted and rejected diametrically opposite statements in half of our experimental trials, the same neural systems were engaged in both groups throughout. __PLosOne

The entire study is worth reading. Sam Harris -- in both his highly polemical bestseller and in his neuroscientific publication -- adopts a certain "God's eye view" when looking at religious believers. Yet the study itself seems to suggest that both "believers and non-believers" use the same parts of their brains when exercising belief and disbelief.

In other words, there really is no such thing as a believer vs. non-believer. All are both believers and disbelievers. They simply believe and disbelieve different things.

Harris appears to be trying to find a neurological basis to support the subtext of all of his polemical writing: that religious belief is a psychopathology. In the above paper, he clearly failed to achieve that goal. Still, there is a lot of time, there are a lot of fMRI machines, and there are still quite a lot of believers out there to test.

I have stated before that as an atheo-agnostic who was once a believer, I fail to understand the quasi-fanatical anti-religious zealotry of Harris, Hitchens, Dennet, Dawkins, and others who have cashed in on a current academic and social fashion.

The question of importance regarding religion is: Do the religious beliefs lead to fanaticism, disruptive intolerance, and violence? If not, then it is the person who is attacking a peaceful religion who has the problem, not the religious believer.

For Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins etc. not to understand this simple and basic distinction suggests they may be on a quasi-religious crusade of their own.

Regardless, the single belief that threatens the future of humanity more than any other, in my opinion, is the anti-scientific belief in carbon climate catastrophe. Under Obama, Pelosi, Boxer, and a parade of czars, directors, and popular hero-frauds, the quasi-religious belief in climate catastrophe threatens to cut the legs out from under the genuine movement toward a clean and abundant sustainability.

H/T Kurzweilai.net

For any readers who are curious to follow the reasoning of Al Fin in moving from religious belief to atheo-agnosticism, Walter Kaufman's Critique of Religion and Philosophy was pivotol in that transformation.