Science on Religion

The soul of religion

One often hears religion described as a spiritual journey: the soul yearns to leave its body so that it may fully commune with the transcendent. While religious believers may sincerely believe that their soul sufficiently encapsulates their religious being, it remains a scientific question as to whether the body plays a role in their religiosity. Suggesting that it does, neurologists Paul Butler, Patrick McNamara, Jessica Ghofrani, and Raymon Durso (all at Boston University) have found that patients with mid- to late-stage Parkinson’s disease experience impoverished religiosity.

Love thy neighbor

Religions across the world teach that one should love strangers, even the outcasts of society. Jesus famously ate with prostitutes and tax collectors, the most despised people of his day. Though religions may instruct their followers to love the lowly, it remains an empirical question as to whether or not they actually do. Psychologists Theta Gribbins and Brian Vandenberg (both University of Missouri—St. Louis) found that elevated religious fundamentalism combined with a high need for cognitive closure correlates with an increased willingness to help religious outsiders.

Sufism and mindfulness

“Mind-body medicine,” or the integration of spiritual practices with techniques for healing, is a big topic these days. While many of the practices that go under the heading of mind-body medicine are – how shall we put it? – scientifically dubious, mindfulness meditation and similar introspective techniques have been shown to be clinically effective in dozens of studies. But most meditation practices used in Western settings stem from Buddhism. Are there any other contemplative traditions out there that might be useful to 21st-century medicine? One researcher thinks that Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, may have the answer.

Research shows how meditation affects the brain

By now, there’s enough research on meditation to show that it reliably has positive effects on well-being. But even though researchers know that meditation seems to make people feel better, they’ve argued about which mechanisms – and which parts of the brain – are involved. Investigators are now trying to solve this riddle by designing new and more rigorous experiments. Two recent articles by well-known meditation researchers demonstrate this trend, providing some intriguing insights into how meditation affects the physical brain.

Ultra Orthodox communities use egalitarianism as a defense

It’s a bit ironic: even though many religious traditions preach egalitarianism and equality, most people think of fundamentalist religious groups as being anything but. From the Branch Dravidians to the Catholic Church, highly authoritarian and hierarchical social structures are de rigueur throughout the world’s religions. Or at least that’s how it seems from the outside. Recently, though, a British researcher has found evidence that highly conservative religious groups in Israel actually stress equality among their members, and that they may have very practical sociological reasons for doing so.

Religious ritual, or obsessive-compulsive?

All over the world, people participate in rituals. Whether it’s singing in church, participating in a shamanistic rite, or praying towards Mecca, humans spend a tremendous amount of time doing things that are regular, repetitive, stylized…and economically unproductive. After all, rituals don’t get roads built or put dinner on the table. So why do we take part in them? A team of scientists from Washington University in St. Louis thinks the answer may have to do with the deepest roots of our evolutionary heritage. And those same roots may have given rise to what we now call obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Not by prayer alone

Often when one falls ill, one hears, “I’ll pray for you.” Helpless to aid a suffering person in any other way, many religious people offer prayer as their way of trying to alleviate a precarious situation. Prayers range from small-scale, “need to recover from a cold” requests to large-scale prayers for world peace. Now, an initiative has begun in urban Newark, New Jersey, to pray for something more ambitious than recovering from a cold but less ambitious than world peace: lower crime rates. The prayer approach seemed to have some effect, until the mayor cut the police force.

All things in moderation—even religion

Sigmund Freud famously declared that religion is an illusion, and that those who embrace religion only do so in order to compensate for deeper psychological issues. Religious people, according to Freud, have an unhealthy brain. With the neurological technology of modern science, scientists can now more accurately determine religion’s effect on the brain. Research by Amy Owen (Duke University) and colleagues partially supports Freud’s prediction: they found that hippocampus atrophy correlates with people either having had an intense religious experience or having no religious affiliation.

When the secular becomes religious

Along with artistic expression and a scientific curiosity about the environment, religion evolved in humans during humanity’s earliest years. Religious cave paintings from ancient cultures attest to the early evolution of religion and the centrality of religion in the culture. Fast forward to the present day, and religion no longer holds the central place in the common culture as it once did. Yet, those parts of the brain attuned to religion remain. The result? As BBC presenter Alex Riley found out, commercial products such as Apple can trigger the “religious” parts of the brain in their devotees.

Age and the end of religion

Sociologists continue to debate whether religion in the West will eventually die out or whether it will survive. On the one hand, from 1990 to the present, a surge of people have increasingly self-identified as “non-religious.” On the other, Generation X appears to be more religious than their parents. Sociologist Philip Schwadel (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) suspects that age plays a key role in determining if religion is ending, and finds mixed results.