Overview

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.

Religion and Science as Adversaries

Science and religion have often been viewed as adversaries. A number of famous battles between scientists and religious authorities have helped to fuel this perception. For instance, Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, who 400 years ago began the first systematic astronomical observations using a telescope, was tried and convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church for his defense of the Copernican model that put the sun, rather than the Earth, at the center of the universe. Roughly 250 years later, British naturalist Charles Darwin was criticized by Anglican Church authorities who rejected his theory that life evolved through natural selection, particularly when the theory was explicitly applied to human beings.

There have been and still are scientists who are hostile to religious belief. For instance, British biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins, in his bestselling book “The God Delusion,” argues that many social ills — from bigotry to ignorance — can be blamed, at least in part, on religion. Other scientists, such as Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg, contend that one of the purposes of science is to free people from what they call “religious superstition.”

In addition, scientists tend to be much less religious than the public overall. A poll of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in May and June 2009, found that 51% of scientists believe in God or a higher power. That figure is far below the 95% of the American public that professes such belief, according to a Pew Research Center survey of the general public conducted in July 2006.

Religion and Science as Allies

Despite instances of hostility toward religion and high levels of disbelief in the scientific community, however, science and religion have often operated in tandem rather than at cross-purposes.

Indeed, throughout much of ancient and modern human history, religious institutions have actively supported scientific endeavors. For centuries, throughout Europe and the Middle East, almost all universities and other institutions of learning were religiously affiliated, and many scientists, including astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and biologist Gregor Mendel (known as the father of genetics), were men of the cloth. Others, including Galileo, physicist Sir Isaac Newton and astronomer Johannes Kepler, were deeply devout and often viewed their work as a way to illuminate God’s creation.

Even in the 20th century, some of the greatest scientists, such as Georges Lemaitre (the Catholic priest who first proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory) and physicist Max Planck (the founder of the quantum theory of physics), have been people of faith. More recently, geneticist Francis Collins, the founder of the Human Genome Project as well as President Barack Obama’s choice to head the National Institutes of Health, has spoken publicly about how he believes his evangelical Christian faith and his work in science are compatible.

In addition, many scientists, including many who are not personally religious, tend to view science and religion as distinct rather than in conflict, with each attempting to answer different kinds of questions using different methods. Albert Einstein, for instance, once said that “science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind.” And the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously referred to this separate but complementary relationship as “nonoverlapping magisteria.”

Debates Over Evolution and Other Issues

There are times when these “magisteria” do seem to overlap, however. In the United States, the debate over the origins and development of life offers a compelling example of this conflict.

All but a small number of scientists accept Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection; according to the 2009 Pew Research Center survey of scientists, 87% of scientists accept evolution through natural processes. But a complementary May 2009 Pew Research Center poll of public attitudes toward science shows that only 32% of the general public fully embraces Darwin’s theory. One-in-five (22%) believe that evolution has occurred but that it has been guided by a supreme being, and 31% contend that humans and other livings things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.

There is a similar divide between the public and the scientific community on the issue of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. But unlike the divide on evolution, which revolves around questions of fact, the division on embryonic stem cell research is largely driven by moral questions, including disputes over the status of embryos. (See the full Pew Research Center survey report for differences between scientists and the public on this and other issues.) And yet the poll of the public shows that the vast majority of Americans, including religious Americans, hold science and scientists in very high regard

What is at work here? How can majorities of Americans say they respect science and yet still disagree with the scientific community on some fundamental questions? The answer may be that many in the general public choose not to believe scientific theories and discoveries that seem to contradict religious or other important beliefs. When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, for instance, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people in an October 2006 Time magazine poll said they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept a contrary scientific finding.

Looking Ahead

Meanwhile scientists continue to use increasingly sophisticated instruments — from MRI brain scanners to the Hubble Space Telescope — to probe the natural world, raising the prospect that researchers in one field or another will continue to produce evidence that challenges some core religious beliefs. For example, some scientists claim that recent research on the human brain shows that the brain and the brain alone is the seat of consciousness and that such evidence disproves the existence of a soul.

While religion and science usually strive to answer different questions, the battles over issues such as evolution and the study of consciousness show that they also sometimes tread on each other’s turf. So far, at least in the United States, both faith and scientific endeavor have survived these clashes. And if the past is any guide, the United States will likely continue to be a nation of both high levels of religious commitment and high regard for scientific achievement.

The full package on religion and science is available at pewforum.org, including:

• Public Opinion on Religion and Science in the U.S.
• Scientists and Belief
• Religion and Science Timeline
• Religion and Science: Conflict or Harmony?
• How Our Brains Are Wired for Belief
• The Debate Over Evolution

Visit the resource page on religion and science at pewforum.org.

Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in May 2009 for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life.

Francis S. Collins, the former director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, discussed why he believes religion and science are compatible and why the current conflict over evolution vs. faith, particularly in the evangelical community, is unnecessary.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the religion correspondent for National Public Radio, discussed how the brain reacts to spiritual experiences and her belief that people can look at scientific evidence and conclude that everything is explained by material means or look at the universe and see the hand of God.

Speaker: Francis S. Collins, Former Director, National Human Genome Research Institute
Respondent: Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Religion Correspondent, National Public Radio
Moderator: Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Senior Adviser, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

In the following excerpt ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Read the full transcript, including audience discussion at pewforum.org.

FRANCIS COLLINS: I’ll spend most of the time [today] talking about the current conflict that appears, at least in this country, to be a rather unpleasant one, where the voices that are arguing that science and faith are incompatible are actually quite loud — even shrill at times. I’ll offer up from my own perspective why that conflict is an unnecessary one and provide some possibilities of how it might be resolved in a way that I think would be good for our future. I’m sure there will be opinions about this, and those would be great to hear.

Francis Collins

So let’s start with the science. I know there’s broad diversity and background in this room, but I’m not going to get deeply into the nitty-gritty of genomics. I will simply use this metaphor because I think it’s a pretty good one, that the DNA of an organism is its instruction book sitting there in the nucleus of the cell. All of the DNA of any organism is its genome. Ours happens to be about 3.1 billion of those letters of the code.

The Human Genome Project set itself up in 1990 as an international effort to read out all of those letters at a time when many people thought this was foolhardy because the technology to do this hadn’t been invented. But due to the ingenuity and commitment of a very dedicated group of over 2,000 scientists that I had the privilege of leading, we did in fact — two-and-a-half years early and about $400 million under-budget – achieve the goal of reading out all of those 3.1 billion letters in April of 2003. A lot of the effort on the genome since that time has been to understand how the instruction book actually does what it does. How do you read these instructions written in this funny language that has just four letters in its alphabet — A, C, G and T — the four bases of the DNA code?

But particularly, we’ve been interested in trying to identify the ticking time bombs in the human genome that put each of us at risk for something. Progress here has been actually quite exhilarating.We’re identifying all of these risk factors for almost any disease using the tools of the Human Genome Project. That in turn provides the opportunity to identify who’s at risk for what. You can already, for $400, send your money to one of these direct-to-consumer marketing companies, and they will tell you what your risk is for about 20 different diseases.
I just recently finished a book on personalized medicine, which will be coming out early in 2010, designed to try to explain this for a non-scientific audience, namely the general public, to try to begin the process of people imagining how to incorporate this information into their own health care.

I’ve been talking about DNA; this is actually DNA.

It’s a different sort of picture than you’re used to, where instead of looking from the side, you’re looking down the barrel of the double helix. It’s quite a beautiful picture that way, and I think this is a provocative pair of images to introduce the main topic this morning, which is, are those two worldviews that you see there incompatible? On the left is the rose window of Westminster Cathedral, a beautiful stained glass window, and on the right, a picture of DNA.

There are certainly voices out there arguing that you can’t have both of those; you’ve got to take your pick. You either are going to approach questions from a purely scientific perspective or a purely spiritual perspective, and the two are locked in eternal combat. I don’t happen to agree with that, so perhaps I should say a bit of a word about how I got there.

I grew up in a home where faith was not practiced. My parents were free spirits in the arts and theater and music. I was home schooled till the sixth grade. I was not taught that faith was ridiculous, but I was certainly not taught that it mattered very much. When I got to college and later graduate school in chemistry, I became an agnostic and then eventually an atheist. In my view at that point, the only thing that really mattered was the scientific approach to understand how the universe worked; everything else was superstition.

But then I went to medical school and discovered that those hypothetical questions about life and death and whether God exists weren’t so hypothetical anymore. I realized my atheism had been arrived at as the convenient answer, not on the basis of considering the evidence. A thoughtful person turned me onto the writings of C.S. Lewis, which was quite a revelation in terms of the depth of intellectual argument that undergirds a belief in a creator God and the existence of moral law. I began to realize that even in science, where I had spent most of my time, there were pointers to God that I had paid no attention to that were actually pretty interesting.

One obvious one, although maybe it’s not so obvious, is that there is something instead of nothing. There’s no reason there should be anything at all. Wigner’s wonderful phrase “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” also comes to mind — Eugene Wigner, the Nobel laureate in physics, talking about the amazing thing about the whole study of physics is that mathematics makes sense; it can describe the properties of matter and energy in simple, even beautiful, laws. Why should that be? Why should gravity follow an inverse square law? Why should Maxwell’s five equations describe electromagnetism in very simple terms, and they actually turn out to be true? A thoughtful and interesting question.

The Big Bang, the fact that the universe had a beginning out of nothingness, as far as we can tell — from this unimaginable singularity, the universe came into being and has been flying apart ever since – that cries out for some explanation. Since we have not observed nature to create itself, where did this come from? That seems to ask you to postulate a creator who must not be part of nature or you haven’t solved the problem. In fact, one can also make a pretty good philosophical argument that a creator of this sort must also be outside of time or you haven’t solved the problem.

So now we have the idea of a creator who is outside of time and space, and who is a pretty darn good mathematician, and apparently also must be an incredibly good physicist. An additional set of observations I found quite breathtaking is the fact that the physical constants that determine the nature of interactions between matter and the way in which energy behaves have precisely the values they would need to have for any kind of complexity or life to occur.
Various people have written about this. Martin Rees has a book on this called Just Six Numbers. Depending on how you count them up, somewhere between six and a dozen of these constants are independent of each other, and I’m talking about things like the gravitational constant. Theory can tell you that gravity is an inverse square law, but there’s that constant in there to say how strong gravity is and you can’t derive that by theory. That is something you have to measure experimentally.

It makes you wonder, suppose it didn’t have the value that it does? What kind of interesting universe would that be? [I]t turns out that if you go through the mathematical modeling of what would happen after the Big Bang if gravity was just a little weaker, things would just keep flying apart indefinitely. And I mean just a little weaker, one part in a billion. If gravity was just a little stronger, things would coalesce into stars and galaxies and planets, but a little too soon, and before we ever arrived on the scene, a Big Crunch would have followed the Big Bang.

Each one of these constants has that same amazing, precise, knife-edge tuning to it. [Y]ou can’t look at those numbers and not marvel at what’s going on here. You’re basically stuck with two options: Either those constants were set by an intelligence that was interested in having a universe that was not sterile, or the alternative is that actually there are an almost infinite number of other parallel universes out there that have different values of those constants. Of course, we have to be here in the one where everything worked or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

That second hypothesis, the multiverse hypothesis, does require a certain amount of faith because those are not other parallel universes that we ever expect we would be able to observe. So which of those is a more faith-requiring hypothesis? I would ask you to think about that from my perspective, using the Ockham’s Razor approach that the simplest explanation may in fact be the right one. This sounds a lot like all of these things are pointing us toward a creator who had an intention about the universe that would include setting these constants so that interesting things might happen.

Then there’s C.S. Lewis’ point that I discovered while reading the first chapter of Mere Christianity, “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” Where does this notion of morality come from? Is this a purely evolutionary artifact, where we have been convinced by evolution that right and wrong have meanings and that we’re supposed to do the right thing, or is there something more profound going on?

But how can you be both a believer and a biologist? I’ve certainly been asked that question on numerous occasions by people who find out that I’m a geneticist who studies DNA every day and I’m a Christian. After all, don’t you realize that evolution is incompatible with faith? If you believe in evolution, how can you be a believer? That’s the usual kind of concern.

First of all, let me say the evidence for Darwin’s theory of descent from a common ancestor by gradual change over long periods of time operated on by natural selection is absolutely overwhelming. It is not possible, I think, to look at that evidence accumulated, especially in the last few years on the basis of the study of DNA, and not come to the conclusion that Darwin was right — right in ways that Darwin himself probably never could have imagined, not knowing about DNA, not knowing that we’d have a digital record of these events to study.

Among the evidences are the ability to compare the genomes of ourselves with other species. You can feed all of that data into a computer and say, make sense of this, without telling the computer anything about what these animals look like or what the fossil record said, and the computer comes up with this analysis with all of these species lined up in order. Humans are there as part of this story, and the computer says, this really only makes sense if you derive this back to a common ancestor in this case of vertebrates. We could even extend this to invertebrates, where we have lots of sequence as well.

When you look at the details of that tree in terms of which animals are clustered close together and how long the branches are, which says something about how long it’s been since they diverged, the matchup here with the fossil record and with anatomical descriptions is breathtaking. It’s all very internally consistent. Now you might say, looking at this tree, that that doesn’t prove anything about descent from a common ancestor. If you believe that Genesis says that all of these organisms were created as individual acts of special creation, wouldn’t it have made sense for God to use some of the same DNA motifs, modifying them along the way? And wouldn’t it therefore seem to show you that DNA is more similar between creatures that look more like each other, so this doesn’t prove anything.

But when you start looking at the details, that argument really can’t be sustained anymore. I could give you many examples, but I’ll just give you one because of the time. Here is one that I think really cannot be easily understood without the common ancestor hypothesis being correct and with it involving humans.

If you look across the genome of ourselves and other species, you find genes in a particular order with space in between them. Here’s a place, for example, in the human and the cow and the mouse genome where you have the same three genes. They’re lined up in the same order, which also is consistent with a common ancestor, although it doesn’t prove it. But I picked these three for a particular reason. These genes have funny names — so what do they actually do?

I’m not going to bother you about two of them, but GULO is an interesting gene. It codes for an enzyme called gulonolactone oxidase. That is the enzyme that catalyzes the final step in the synthesis of vitamin C, ascorbic acid. You probably know that vitamin C is something that’s a vitamin because we need it. We can’t make it ourselves, and the reason for that is that our GULO gene has sustained a knockout blow About half the gene has been deleted, and there’s a little remnant left behind that you can see. The tail end of it is still evidence that GULO used to be there, but it’s not in any of us. In fact, it’s not there in any primate.

So somewhere higher up in that lineage this happened in a single individual, and that happened to be spread throughout all of the following organisms, primates and humans. That’s why we humans get scurvy if we don’t have access to vitamin C. Apparently in most of human history and primate history, there was plenty of vitamin C in the environment, so there was no great loss sustained here until we went to sea for long periods of time. Cows and mice don’t need vitamin C; they make their own. They have a GULO gene that works.

Now looking at that, of course, that immediately suggests common ancestry for all three of these species — not only suggests it, but, it seems to me, demands it because if you’re going to try to argue that the human genome was somehow special, that God created us in a different way than these other organisms, you would also have to postulate that God intentionally put a defective gene in exactly the place where a common ancestry would say it should be. Does that sound like the action of a God of all truth? I could give other examples. But — once you look at the details — it is, I think, inescapable for somebody with an open mind to conclude that descent from a common ancestor is true and we’re part of it.

Despite that, we have issues, especially here in the U.S., about what people believe about this question. You all probably have seen the Gallup Poll that gets asked every year — given the choice among three options, what do people say? That first option, that God guided a process that happened over millions of years — 38 percent; the second option, that God had no part, that being a deist or an atheist perspective — 13 percent. But the largest number — 45 percent, almost half — choose the third option, that God created human beings in their present form in the last 10,000 years. You can’t arrive at that conclusion without throwing out pretty much all of the evidence from cosmology, geology, paleontology, biology, physics, chemistry, genomics and the fossil record. Yet that is the conclusion that many Americans prefer.

There are a lot of forces trying to encourage that view. If you’ve been to the Creation Museum — I haven’t, but I gather some of you have — it will show you this perspective of humans and dinosaurs frolicking together in a way that’s consistent with the 6,000-year-old Earth. Again, many children going to see this are probably walking away thinking, yeah, that makes sense.
I get e-mails practically every week from people who were raised in this tradition — many of them home schooled or schooled in a Christian high school where young Earth creationism is the only view that they’re exposed to. Then they get to university and they see the actual data that supports the age of the Earth as 4.5, 5 billion years old, and they see the data that supports evolution as being correct, and they go into an intense personal crisis.

We’ve set those folks up for a terrible struggle by what we’re doing right now in this country.
It seems to me that atheism is, of all of the choices, the least rational because it assumes that you know enough to exclude the possibility of God. And which of us could claim we know enough to make such a grand statement? G.K. Chesterton says this quite nicely: “Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, the assertion of a universal negative.”

So how, then, do we put this synthesis together? I’ll give you the view that I’ve arrived at, which in my experience is also the view that about 40 percent of working scientists who believe in a personal God have arrived at. So here it is — God, who is not limited in space or time, created this universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time. That plan included the mechanism of evolution to create this marvelous diversity of living things on our planet and to include ourselves, human beings. Evolution, in the fullness of time, prepared these big-brained creatures, but that’s probably not all we are from the perspective of a believer.

Some would say, evolution just doesn’t seem like a very efficient method. Why would God spend so much time getting to the point? Remember, a few steps back there, we said the only way you’ve really solved the creator problem without ending up in an infinite regress is to have God be outside of time. So, basically, it might be a long time to us, but it might be a blink of an eye to God.

The intelligent design perspective, which is so prominent now in the evangelical church and, of course, is a flashpoint for debates about the teaching of science in schools, is basically that evolution might be OK in some ways, but it can’t account for the complexity of things like the bacterial flagellum, which are considered to be irreducibly complex because they have so many working parts and they don’t work with any of the parts dropping out, so you can’t imagine how evolution could have produced them.

This is showing severe cracks scientifically in that the supposedly irreducibly complex structures are, increasingly, yielding up their secrets, and we can see how they have been arrived at by a stepwise mechanism that’s quite comfortable from an evolutionary perspective. So intelligent design is turning out to be — and probably could have been predicted to be — a God-of-the-gaps theory, which inserts God into places that science hasn’t quite yet explained, and then science comes along and explains them.

I think I would also say intelligent design is not only bad science; it’s questionable theology. It implies that God was an underachiever and started this evolutionary process and then realized it wasn’t going to quite work and had to keep stepping in all along the way to fix it. That seems like a limitation of God’s omniscience.

I think we need only go back before Darwin and see what theologians thought about Genesis to have a better conversation about this. Go back all the way to Augustine in 400 A.D. Augustine is writing here specifically about Genesis: “In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.” And is that not what is happening in the current climate with, in fact, insistence that the only acceptable interpretation for a serious Christian now is a literal acceptance of the six days of creation, which, again, Augustine would have argued is not required by the language?

BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: I’ve thought a lot about the evidence for or against God, or kind of an intelligence that stitches together the universe, over the last few years in terms of writing my book [The Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality].

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

For the past century, materialism had reigned triumphant. But the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has done extensive polling on people who have spiritual experiences — not just believe in God, but a spiritual experience. It turns out that 51 percent of people have had a spiritual experience that absolutely transformed their lives. That’s a lot of people.So now I think there is a move afoot among scientists to, if not embrace, then at least study this thing called spiritual experience. They can do that because they have the technology to do that or at least to start to make inroads. They have brain scanners and EEGs, which allow them to peer into the brain.

Back in 2006, I took a year off from NPR to just study, to look at what I think of as the emerging science of spirituality. My litmus test in doing my research was this: Basically, if a prominent scientist or if prominent scientists were investigating some aspect of spiritual experience, then it was fair game for me to report on it. So I encountered questions like, is there a “God spot” in the brain? Is there a God chemical? Is God all in your head?

First I attacked the question of the “God spot” in the brain: Is there an area of the brain that handles or mediates spiritual experience — by spiritual experience I mean that notion, that transcendent moment that you have, that sense that there’s another being in the room or around you. The question is, if you can locate the place that mediates spiritual experience, does that mean that God is nothing more than brain tissue?

People have long suspected that the temporal lobe has something to do with religious experience. The temporal lobe runs along the side of your head, and it handles things like hearing and smell and memory and emotion. The first concrete evidence that there was a connection between the temporal lobe and spiritual experience was made by a Canadian neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, he began mucking around in the brains of patients as he operated on them. There aren’t any pain receptors in the brain, so he’d go in and he could take an electrode and prod a part of the brain — keep them awake — prod a part of the brain and see what part of the body corresponded with that part of the brain. Well, when he prodded the temporal lobe, something very strange happened. People reported having out-of-body experiences and hearing voices and seeing apparitions. He hypothesized that he might have found the physical seat of religious experience.

So science figured out that one way to try to explore spiritual experience and look at the brain mechanics of religious experience is to look at people with temporal lobe epilepsy on the theory that the extreme elucidates the normal. Temporal lobe epilepsy is basically an electrical storm in the brain where all the cells fire together. Usually seizures are really horrible things. I went to a Henry Ford hospital to the epilepsy clinic and it was just — it’s a horrifying experience to watch a seizure. But in a few rare cases, people have ecstatic seizures, and they believe that they are having a religious experience. They may hear snatches of music or words, presumably from their memory bank, and they interpret it as a message from God or the music from the heavenly spheres. They may see a snatch of light and think that that’s an angel.

Today a lot of neuroscientists have kind of retrofitted a lot of major religious leaders with temporal lobe epilepsy. Like Saul on the road to Damascus — was he blinded by God and heard Jesus’ voice or did he suffer, as one neurologist said, “visual and auditory hallucinations with photism and transient blindness”? Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, did he see a pillar of light and two angels or did he suffer a complex partial seizure? What about Moses and the burning bush, hearing God’s voice?

Now I’ve got to say, I have a little trouble with this kind of retrofitting, because it’s hard to imagine something as debilitating as epilepsy being helpful in writing, say, the bulk of Christian doctrine, as did Paul; guiding a nation through the wilderness for 40 years, as did Moses; or founding one of the three monotheistic religions, as did Mohammed. But I do think that scientists are onto something. I think the temporal lobe may in fact be the place that mediates spiritual experience.

One of the people who convinced me of this is a guy named Jeff Schimmel. Jeff is a writer in Hollywood. He was raised Jewish, never believed in God, had no interest in spirituality. Then a few years ago, nine years ago, when he was 40 years old, he had a benign tumor in his left temporal lobe removed. The surgery was a snap, but a couple of years later, unknown to him, he began to suffer from mini-seizures. He began hearing things and having visions. He remembers twice lying in bed when he looked up at the ceiling and saw a kind of swirl of blue and gold and green all settle into a shape, a pattern. He said, then it dawned on me, it was the Virgin Mary. Then he thinks, why would the Virgin Mary appear to a Jewish guy? But a few other things began to happen to Jeff. He became fascinated with spirituality. He found himself weeping at the drop of a hat when he saw pain in other people. He became fairly obsessed with Buddhism.

But he began to wonder, could his newfound spirituality have anything to do with his brain? So the next time he visited his neurologist, he asked to see a picture of his brain scan, the most recent one. And, in fact, the temporal lobe was very different before and after the surgery. It had kind of pulled away from the skull. His temporal lobe was smaller, a different shape, it was covered with scar tissue, and those changes had begun to spark electrical firings in his brain. He essentially developed temporal lobe epilepsy. But there was no question in his mind that his faith, his newfound love for his fellow man, all of that, came from his brain.

Are transcendent experiences — not just Jeff Schimmel’s, but Teresa of Avila’s — are they merely a physiological event or could it possibly reflect an encounter with another dimension?
I want to propose that how you come down on that issue depends on whether you think of the brain as a CD player or a radio. Most scientists who think that everything is explainable through material processes think that the brain is like a CD player: The content, the CD with the song on it, for example, is playing in a closed system, and if you take a hammer to the machine, you know, destroy it, the song is not going to play. All spiritual experience is inside the brain, and when you alter the brain, God and spirituality disappear.

Now there is some scientific support for this line of thinking. These days scientists can make transcendent realities, or God, disappear or appear at will. It’s kind of a party trick. Recently a group of Swiss researchers found out that when they electrically stimulated a certain part of the brain in a woman, she suddenly felt a sensed presence, that there was another being in the room enveloping her. A lot of people describe God that way: a sensed presence, a being nearby enveloping them. So they could conjure up God just by poking part of the brain.

Making spiritual experiences disappear is, of course, far more common. It’s what epilepsy specialists are trained to do: You remove part of the temporal lobe or you medicate the brain and tamp down the electrical spikes and, voila, God disappears, all spiritual experience goes away. But suppose the brain isn’t a CD player. Suppose it’s a radio. Now in this analogy, everyone possesses the neural equipment to receive the radio program in varying degrees. So some have the volume turned low. Other people hear their favorite programs every now and again, maybe some of you all, like me, who have had brief transcendent moments. Some people have the volume way too high or they’re caught between stations and they hear a cacophony, and those people actually need medical help.

But in this analogy, the sender is separate from the receiver, and the content of the transmission doesn’t originate in the brain anymore than, say, the hosts of “All Things Considered” are sitting in your radio when they’re broadcasting. If the brain is a receiver, then it’s picking up God’s communications, which never stop, even when the brain has been altered by surgery or medication or death. [P]erhaps people who have vivid or frequent transcendent moments are able to tune into another dimension of reality that many of us ignore. Maybe St. Paul and Joan of Arc weren’t crazy; maybe they just had better antennae.

So that’s one debate about the brain and whether spiritual experience is just something within the brain or something that may transcend the brain. Another argument that God is all in your head comes from neuropharmacologists. They propose that God is nothing more than chemical reactions in your brain.

Peyote like other psychedelic drugs, including LSD and magic mushrooms seem to prompt mystical experience. Scientists have discovered recently that these psychedelic drugs have a couple of interesting things in common. Chemically, they all look a lot like serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter that affects parts of the brain that relate to emotions and perception. Now scientists at Johns Hopkins University have discovered that they all target the same serotonin receptor, serotonin HT2A. So what that receptor does is, it allows the serotonin or the psilocybin or the active ingredient of these psychedelics to create a cascade of chemical reactions, which then create the sounds and sights and smells and perceptions of a mystical experience. Essentially, they’ve discovered a “God neurotransmitter,” in a way.

[D]oes that mean that God is just a chemical reaction? Roland Griffiths, who’s the researcher at Johns Hopkins, doesn’t think so for a couple of reasons. One is that people who have spiritual experiences can do this without help from their chemical friends. They can do it through meditation and prayer and chanting and fasting. Second, he says it’s just as plausible that the chemical reactions and the electrical firings in the brain are reflecting an interaction with God or the spiritual realm. He uses this analogy: When you eat a piece of apple pie, all sorts of things happen in your brain. The part of the brain that mediates smell will light up or taste will light up. Probably the part of the brain that handles memory will light up as you think about the last time that you had a piece of apple pie. But does the fact that there is this predictable and measurable brain activity mean that the apple pie doesn’t exist? So maybe, Griffiths says, this brain activity is chronicling an interaction with the divine.

He raises a third issue, which Francis alluded to, which is, why? Why are we wired to have mystical experiences in the first place? Is it possible that there is a God or an intelligence who’s created this way? I mean, if there is a God who wants to communicate with us, he probably wouldn’t use the big toe; he’d probably use the brain. Doesn’t it make sense that this is how God would communicate?

Now in the end, I don’t think science will be able to prove or disprove God, but I do think there’s a really fascinating debate that’s circling around spiritual issues. We may actually make some headway about it. There may be a way to tackle this issue in a definitive way. It’s the mind-brain debate, or can consciousness operate when the brain is stilled?

Read the full transcript including discussion at pewforum.org.

_{Data from a Pew Research Center survey conducted April 23-27, 2008, among 1,502 American adults. Results for other religious groups are not reported due to small sample sizes.}

_{Question wording: From what you’ve read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, or not? [If "yes," ask]: Do you believe that the earth is getting warmer… 1 – Mostly because of human activity, such as burning fossil fuels, OR 2 – Mostly because of natural patterns in the earth’s environment? [options rotated]}

For more on religion and science see Science in America: Religious Belief and Public Attitudes.

February 12 will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the British naturalist who developed the theory of evolution through natural selection. Darwin published his treatise on evolution, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, nearly 150 years ago. Darwin’s theory was controversial from the outset, and remains so among the public in his home country as well as in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Opinion polls over the past two decades have found the American public deeply divided in its beliefs about the origins and development of life on earth. Surveys are fairly consistent in their estimates of how many Americans believe in evolution or creationism. Approximately 40%-50% of the public accepts a biblical creationist account of the origins of life, while comparable or slightly larger numbers accept the idea that humans evolved over time. The wording of survey questions generally makes little systematic difference in this division of opinion, and there has been little change in the percentage of the public who reject the idea of evolution.

Opinions on the theory of “intelligent design,” however, are far more complex, making it difficult to determine how many Americans subscribe to this view of life’s origins. In part, this reflects the public’s lack of familiarity with the concept of intelligent design, which holds that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is inadequate in explaining the development of complex life forms. A Gallup survey in August of 2005 found that fewer than half of Americans were familiar with the term. Moreover, because the concept involves sensitive matters of faith and science, questions that attempt to indirectly measure support for intelligent design produce divergent results.

Consider for example the approaches taken by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and Gallup (see table below). The two organizations find similar numbers in favor of a creationist position — 42% for Pew Research, 44% for Gallup — although each describes the concept in decidedly different terms. But Pew Research finds far more people believing in natural selection (26% vs. 14% for Gallup) while Gallup finds more subscribing to the view that God or a supreme being guided the evolutionary process (36% vs. 21% for Pew Research).

These differences result from the way the options are presented. Gallup asks respondents to choose among three views, two of which suggest a belief in God (“God created human beings pretty much in the present form” and “God guided [the evolutionary] process”), and one that rejects God’s involvement altogether (“God had no part in this process”). It seems likely that for many respondents, agreeing with this last statement could imply a denial of belief in God.

Pew Research, on the other hand, asks people initially if they believe life “evolved over time” or existed in its “present form since the beginning of time”; the question makes no mention of God. Those who said that life evolved over time were then asked if life “evolved due to natural processes such as natural selection” or whether “a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today.” Pew Research’s formulation provides a significantly more positive description of the scientific position by characterizing natural selection as “a natural process” rather than something “God had no part in.” This implicitly allows people who believe that God or a supreme being set the evolutionary process in motion, or even shaped it in some way, to still opt for “natural selection” as the main engine of evolution.

Confusing Concepts

Most Americans say they are familiar with creationism and evolution, but recent polling suggests that there is some confusion about the meaning of these terms. In an August 2005 Gallup poll, 58% of the public said that creationism was definitely or probably true as an explanation for the origin and development of life, but about the same number also said the same about evolution. Since creationism and evolution are incompatible as explanations, some portion of the public is clearly confused about the meaning of the terms.

A 1999 Fox News poll of registered voters offered respondents the explicit option to say that both Darwin’s theory of evolution and the biblical account of creation were true: 26% said both were. More recently, a July 2005 Pew Research Center poll found that a substantial 35% minority of those who accept creationist accounts of life’s origins nonetheless oppose removing the teaching of evolution in public schools in favor of teaching creationism; 14% of those who accepted natural selection favored teaching creationism instead of evolution.

The term “intelligent design” is still unknown to much of the public. In the August 2005 Gallup survey, 52% said they were either “not too familiar” or “not at all familiar” with the phrase. By comparison, far fewer were not familiar with “evolution” and “creationism.” Given the low level of public awareness of the term, “intelligent design” is rarely mentioned in polling on the origins of life.

Scientists and Evolution

A majority of the public (62% in a July 2006 Pew Research poll) believes that scientists are generally in agreement about evolution. But fewer believe there is strong scientific evidence in support of evolution. A March 2007 Newsweek survey found just 48% saying evolution was both widely accepted in the scientific community and well supported by evidence. A 2004 Gallup poll registered fewer (35%) saying Darwin’s theory of evolution has been “well-supported by evidence.” This question also offered respondents the choice of saying they don’t know enough about the issue, an option that 30% selected.

Teach Evolution, Other Approaches

In recent years, decisions by school boards to teach alternative accounts of the origins of life have generated much controversy. In 2005, a federal district court struck down a Dover, Pa. school board requirement that teachers include the teaching of “intelligent design” in science classes. However, polling finds that a solid majority of Americans over the past 20 years has supported the teaching of both evolution and creationist accounts of the origins of life. A June 1999 Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll found that 68% of the public favored teaching creationism along with evolution in public schools. A more recent Pew Research poll conducted in July 2006 found that a 58% majority held that view. There is far less support for removing evolution from the curriculum. In July 2005, a Pew Research poll found that a substantial 38% minority favored teaching creationism instead of evolution.

Relatively few questions have asked if respondents believe that evolution should be taught, perhaps because it is the status quo today. A Gallup poll found 61% favoring the teaching of evolution in public school science classes, while 54% said creationism should be taught and 43% said that intelligent design should be taught.

A survey conducted by Fox News in 1999 found nearly identical majorities of people favoring the teaching of evolution and opposing its removal from the curriculum. In one version of the question, respondents were told that the Kansas State Board of Education adopted new standards that would remove evolution from the mandatory curriculum; a 57% majority of registered voters disagreed with the board’s actions, while 33% agreed with the removal. The other version stated that “the National Academy of Sciences recommended that evolution be taught to all public school students as the most convincing theory for how human beings developed” and then asked if respondents agreed or disagreed that evolution should be taught in all public schools: 56% agreed with teaching evolution and 35% disagreed with it. Thus, despite the invocation of two very different kinds of authority on opposite sides of the issue, the public opinion result was the same.

None of the polls probes deeply into what respondents are thinking when they say a particular approach should be taught. Should standardized science tests now include sections on both evolution and creationism? Does support for teaching evolution (or creationism) mean mandatory or optional instruction? Unfortunately there is little public opinion research to shed light on these questions.

Revised and updated from a Pollwatch published September 28, 2005. For an analysis of the relationship between religious beliefs and opinions about evolution, see “Many Americans Uneasy with Mix of Religion and Politics” (Aug. 24, 2006) and “Religion A Strength And Weakness For Both Parties” (Aug. 30, 2005).

Almost 150 years after Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Americans are still fighting over evolution. If anything, the controversy has recently grown in both size and intensity. In the last five years alone, for example, debates over how evolution should be taught in public schools have been heard in school boards, town councils and legislatures in more than half the states.

Throughout much of the 20th century, opponents of evolution (many of them theologically conservative Protestants) either tried to eliminate the teaching of Darwin’s theory from public school science curricula or urged science instructors also to teach a version of the creation story found in the biblical book of Genesis. The famous 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial, for instance, involved a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the state’s schools. (See The Social and Legal Dimensions of the Evolution Debate in the U.S.)

But beginning in the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a number of decisions that imposed severe restrictions on those state governments that opposed the teaching of evolution. As a result of these rulings, school boards, legislatures and government bodies are now barred from prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Teaching creation science, either along with evolutionary theory or in place of it, is also banned.

Partly in response to these court decisions, opposition to teaching evolution has itself evolved, with opponents changing their goals and tactics. In the last decade, some local and state school boards in Kansas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere have considered teaching what they contend are scientific alternatives to evolution — notably the concept of intelligent design, which posits that life is too complex to have developed without the intervention of an outside, possibly divine force. Other education officials have tried to require schools to teach critiques of evolution or to mandate that students listen to or read evolution disclaimers, such as one proposed a number of years ago in Cobb County, Ga. It read, in part, that evolution is “a theory, not a fact [and] … should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.” The Cobb County disclaimer and a number of other efforts have been withdrawn following successful court challenges by proponents of teaching evolution.

Recent public opinion polls indicate that challenges to Darwinian evolution have substantial support among the American people. According to an August 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 63% of Americans believe that humans and other animals have either always existed in their present form or have evolved over time under the guidance of a supreme being. Only 26% say that life evolved solely through processes such as natural selection. A similar Pew Research Center poll, released in August 2005, found that 64% of Americans support teaching creationism alongside evolution in the classroom.

This view is not shared by the nation’s scientists, most of whom contend that evolution is a well-established scientific theory that convincingly explains the origins and development of life on earth. Moreover, they say, a scientific theory is not a hunch or a guess but is instead an established explanation for a natural phenomenon, like gravity, that has repeatedly been tested through observation and experimentation. Indeed, most scientists argue that, for all practical purposes, evolution through natural selection is a fact. (See Darwin and His Theory of Evolution.) These scientists and others dismiss creation science as religion, not science, and describe intelligent design as little more than creationism dressed up in scientific jargon.

So if evolution is as established as the theory of gravity, why are people still arguing about it a century and a half after it was first proposed? (See Evolution: A Timeline.) The answer lies, in part, in the possible theological implications of evolutionary thinking. For many, the Darwinian view of life — a panorama of brutal struggle and constant change – goes beyond contradicting the biblical creation story and conflicts with the Judeo-Christian concept of an active and loving God who cares for his creation. (See Religious Groups’ Views on Evolution.) In addition, some evolution opponents argue that Darwin’s ideas have proven socially and politically dangerous. In particular, they say, the notion that more resilient animals survive and thrive (“survival of the fittest”) has been used by social thinkers, dictators and others to justify heinous crimes, from forced sterilization to mass genocide.

But while theologians, historians and others argue over evolution’s broader social impact, the larger and more intense debate still centers on what children in public schools learn about life’s origins and development. Indeed, the teaching of evolution has become a part of the nation’s culture wars, manifest most recently in the 2008 presidential campaign, particularly in the attention paid to Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s statements in favor of public schools teaching creation science or intelligent design along with evolution. And while evolution may not attain the same importance as such culture war issues as abortion or same-sex marriage, the topic is likely to have a place in national debates on values for many years to come.

Go to pewforum.org for the full package on evolution and religion including:

• The Social and Legal Dimensions of the Evolution Debate
• Darwin and His Theory of Evolution
• Religious Groups’ Views on Evolution
• Graphic: Religious Differences on Evolution
• Fighting Over Darwin, State by State
• Evolution: A Timeline

Go to the resource page on evolution

Embryonic stem cell research, which uses special cells found in three- to five-day-old human embryos to seek cures for a host of chronic diseases, has sparked a major moral and political debate in the United States. In the 10 years since University of Wisconsin scientists announced they had harvested potentially life-saving cells from surplus embryos donated by fertility clinics, the ethical dilemma presented by the studies has absorbed activists on both sides of the issue and has risen to the top of state and federal political agendas.

For patients and their families, embryonic stem cell research offers the hope of cures for chronic and debilitating conditions, such as juvenile diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injuries and blindness. For scientists, it represents a revolutionary path to discovering the causes and cures for many more human maladies. Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, that is, they have the unique ability to develop into any of the 220 cell types in the human body. In addition to their versatility, embryonic stem cells are easier to grow in the laboratory than adult stem cells. (See The Science Behind Stem Cell Research.¹ )

But many opponents, including some religious leaders, believe that stem cell research raises the same moral issues as abortion. Furthermore, opponents maintain that scientists have other promising ways of reaching the same goals, including non-controversial adult stem cell research. (See The Case Against Embryonic Stem Cell Research: An Interview with Yuval Levin.² ) But proponents (see The Case For Embryonic Stem Cell Research: An Interview with Jonathan Moreno.³) of the research point out that there is no substitute at this time for research using embryos. In addition, they say, the research has resulted in the destruction of only a few hundred embryos, making it fundamentally different from abortion, which results in the destruction of millions of human embryos every year.

Different religious groups hold a wide variety of opinions on embryonic stem cell research. (See Religious Groups’ Official Positions on Stem Cell Research.⁴ ) For the Catholic Church and many other Christian groups, life begins at conception, making the research tantamount to homicide because it results in the destruction of human embryos. “Human embryos obtained in vitro are human beings and are subjects with rights; their dignity and right to life must be respected from the first moment of their existence,” the late Pope John Paul II wrote in his 1995 encyclical, The Gospel of Life. Other religious groups do not take a position on the issue, and some, including many Jewish and more-liberal Christian groups, support embryonic stem cell research.

National polls indicate that a slim majority of Americans support the research. According to a 2007 national poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 51 percent say it is more important to conduct stem cell research that could result in new medical cures than to avoid destroying the potential life of human embryos. The same poll found that 35 percent say it is more important not to destroy embryos.⁵

As the pace of the cutting-edge research quickens and the prospect for cures moves closer to reality, advocates on both sides of the debate see the possibility that, within a few years, scientists will find a way to harvest stem cells without destroying embryos. In late 2007, researchers in Wisconsin and Tokyo announced they had transformed ordinary human skin cells into those that appeared to have the same properties as embryonic stem cells. Religious leaders hailed the discovery as proof that the destruction of embryos is unnecessary. President George W. Bush, in his 2008 State of the Union address, said the groundbreaking new research “has the potential to move us beyond the divisive debates of the past.”

But far from resolving the moral quandary, the highly publicized breakthrough has only intensified the discussion. Scientists around the world quickly cautioned that, although promising, the new research did not guarantee that adult stem cells could successfully be transformed into pluripotent cells. Many, including James Thomson, the researcher who led the team at the University of Wisconsin, publicly argued that embryonic stem cell research should continue.

In Europe, only the United Kingdom, Sweden and Belgium allow all forms of embryonic stem cell studies. On the other end of the spectrum, Austria, Ireland, Poland and Lithuania have outlawed all forms of stem cell research. Germany and Italy have criminalized the extraction of stem cells from human embryos, but scientists are permitted to conduct research on stem cells created elsewhere. Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands restrict scientists to producing stem cell lines from surplus embryos that fertility clinics plan to destroy. (See Stem Cell Research Around the World.⁶ )

Political Debate in the U.S.

In the United States, the primary question is whether the federal government should fund embryonic stem cell research. Unlike Japan and most European countries, no federal laws actually limit the research, although six states – Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota and South Dakota – prohibit the creation or destruction of human embryos for medical research.

At the national level, most Democratic politicians favor federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, including Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. In 2005, Obama voted for legislation that would have allowed federal funding for stem cell research using embryos slated to be discarded from fertility clinics. Bush vetoed the bill.

The issue has split Republican lawmakers. Some oppose any research that involves the destruction of human embryos. Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, for example, are vocal opponents of the research. Others, including Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona, favor certain aspects of the research. For example, McCain supports federal funding not only for adult stem cell research but also for research using embryos slated for destruction by fertility clinics. Still other high-profile Republicans are vocal supporters. Former first lady Nancy Reagan, who watched her husband, President Ronald Reagan, succumb to the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s disease, has joined other patient advocates in seeking federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Even staunch abortion opponent Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah has proposed legislation to support this research.

Still, powerful forces on both sides of the issue have created a deadlock in Washington, D.C., over the funding issue. In 2006 and 2007, for instance, Bush vetoed bipartisan bills that would have unlocked federal funding for the research. Meanwhile, attempts in the U.S. Congress to ban any research involving human embryos have repeatedly failed.

With a stalemate in Washington, much of the debate has shifted to state capitals. At least seven states saw the shortage of federal funding as an opportunity: By investing in the nascent science, they hoped to attract top scientists and incubate what experts predict will be a new multi-billion-dollar biotechnology industry.

In early 2004, New Jersey became the first state to invest in stem cell research. California followed in November of the same year, when voters approved a $3 billion bond measure to fund the research. Over the next two years, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New York and Wisconsin joined the list of states making a commitment to fund stem cell research. Three states – Iowa, Massachusetts and Missouri – made the research legal but did not offer state funding; Massachusetts lawmakers are currently considering an investment in the science.

While these states have taken action to move forward on stem cell research, the issue is unsettled in much of the country. Because the U.S. government allows the research as long as no federal money is spent, state universities and private, nonprofit and corporate laboratories are free to pursue it, except in states that prohibit it.

History of the Debate

Embryonic stem cell research first drew widespread media attention in 2001 when Bush, under pressure from both opponents and supporters, attempted to forge a compromise. That compromise entailed allowing the nation’s medical research underwriters, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to begin funding these studies using stem cells harvested from surplus embryos before Aug. 9, 2001, the date of his decision.

Religious opponents, who had argued for a federal ban, were disappointed, while scientists complained that most existing stem cell lines (cultured embryonic stem cells grown in a Petri dish) were either contaminated or dying.

Although most Americans became aware of the issue once Bush made his controversial funding decision, the ethical debate over research involving human embryos began much earlier. In the mid-1970s, for example, federal policymakers prohibited funding for so-called test tube babies, laying the groundwork for future discussions of whether the U.S. government should fund research that many people consider immoral.

Around the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. That historic decision mobilized abortion opponents, many of whom would later oppose stem cell research because of what they consider to be the destruction of human life.

Some two decades later, President Bill Clinton approved, for the first time, funding of stem cell research involving surplus embryos from fertility clinics. At the same time, he placed a moratorium on support for research involving human cloning, a restriction Bush extended in 2000.

In 1995, Congress overrode Clinton’s decision to fund some types of stem cell research, enacting an appropriations rider, still on the books today, that prevents NIH from funding any research that harms or destroys human embryos. Bush sidestepped this law in 2001 when he allowed funding for stem cell lines that already had been created, also assuring many of his supporters that no new embryos would be destroyed.

Opponents of embryonic stem cell research object to two basic techniques: harvesting stem cells from human embryos, and creating cloned human embryos from a human egg and an adult donor cell – a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer. In both cases, the embryo is ultimately destroyed.

Although many abortion opponents oppose both techniques, some supporters say harvesting potentially life-saving cells from embryos that otherwise would be destroyed is justified. But some supporters of the research also argue against the creation of embryos for the sole purpose of harvesting cells and then destroying them.

Bioethics experts say the stem cell debate marks the first time in U.S. history that medical science has played such a prominent role in electoral politics. Indeed, the issue had a significant impact on the 2006 U.S. Senate election in Missouri, where voters debated and ultimately approved a proposed state constitutional amendment ensuring the legality of embryonic stem cell research. Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill, who supports the research, ousted Republican incumbent and stem cell research opponent Jim Talent in part because of their differences over this issue. McCaskill backed the first-in-the-nation amendment; Talent opposed it.

If the next president decides to drop Bush’s restrictions on stem cell funding, Congress could press again for federal money. But with an economic downturn and a growing budget deficit, competition for NIH funding is expected to be stiff. Even without federal money, however, state and private investment in stem cell studies is expected to continue.

Notes

¹ The Science Behind Stem Cell Research

² The Case Against Embryonic Stem Cell Research: An Interview with Yuval Levin

³ The Case For Embryonic Stem Cell Research: An Interview with Jonathan Moreno

⁴ Religious Groups’ Official Positions on Stem Cell Research

⁵ Declining Majority of Americans Favor Embryonic Stem Cell Research

⁶ Stem Cell Research Around the World

What does brain science add to age-old debates about the existence of God and the value of religion? Can political parties and religious groups use scientific insights to influence the beliefs of others? Are scientists as a group becoming more open to ideas of religion and spirituality? Recent advances in neuroscience and brain-imaging technology have offered researchers a look into the physiology of religious experiences. In observing Buddhist monks as they meditate, Franciscan nuns as they pray and Pentecostals as they speak in tongues, Dr. Andrew Newberg, a radiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has found that measurable brain activity matches up with the religious experiences described by worshippers. The social, political and religious implications of these and other findings are just beginning to permeate the broader culture, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks, who has been tracking new developments in the field.

Speakers:

David Brooks, Columnist, The New York Times

Andrew Newberg, Assistant Professor, Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania

Moderator:

Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

In the following excerpted transcript, ellipses have been omitted to improve readability.

Andrew Newberg, Michael Cromartie and David Brooks

Andrew Newberg: How does the brain tell us when we are free? What goes on within us that the brain says to us “Yes, you’re okay, you can do whatever you want to do,” or “No, this is not okay?” How does our brain actually change or transform? This is a critical issue if we’re going to change the views of a voter, if we’re going to change a person’s religion. If one of these things happens to a person, something’s got to be changing in the brain as well. How do we understand what the brain can do?

I wrote, with my colleague, a paper on forgiveness and revenge several years ago, about what would be the neuropsychological correlates of that. It becomes very interesting: how we think about ourselves, how we have a construction of ourselves, and how that self relates to other individuals, and how we reconcile when somebody has injured or harmed us. This is part of how I can tie in some of the topics I’ll be covering with some of the topics that have been more broadly discussed here at Key West.

Liberal and conservative brains

There have been some studies that have looked at political perspectives, trying to understand what happens in the brain of people who are Republicans and the brains of people who are Democrats. We talked about some of this, and I’d just highlight a couple of interesting studies. One was an fMRI study, which is a magnetic resonance imaging that looks at blood flow and activity in the brain, and it showed that people who scored higher on liberalism tended to be associated with stronger what they called conflict-related anterior cingulate activity. Now, what that means is, you have a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate, which helps you mediate when things are in conflict with the way you already believe.

The researchers then interpreted this, and we can go into all the questions about how should we interpret these studies. People who had greater liberalism seemed to do better or were more sensitive to altering some habitual response pattern, implying that they were more open to change, more open to other ideas, more open to conflict, than people who scored lower on liberalism. Does that mean something about people who consider themselves to be liberals versus conservatives, Republicans versus Democrats?

Of course all people, regardless of what their particular perspectives are, when they’re viewing their own candidate, that has a different effect in their brain than when they are viewing a candidate from the opposite party. When you’re looking at somebody from the opposite party, or thinking about them, it tends to activate the amygdala, the limbic areas, again, that tend to trigger more of an emotional response, whereas when you’re looking at people who are concordant with your views and beliefs, that tends to activate some of the areas of the frontal lobe and also that anterior cingulate that helps you mediate your conflict-resolution powers.

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of this whole area is more philosophical, more theological, and thinking about what does this mean in terms of how we believe in religion, and the religious beliefs that people hold. Does this tell us something about those beliefs and experiences? When somebody has the experience of being in God’s presence, and we can get a brain scan of that, what does that mean, what does that say, and how can we interpret that either for religion, against religion, or in some other alternative perspective of simply just trying to understand it better?

Now, beliefs themselves have a tremendous power over us, and I look at this all the time in the context of the placebo effect. Unfortunately, I think the healthcare system severely overlooks how beliefs have power over what happens to somebody. I’m sure probably all of you know somebody who’s dealt with a severe medical problem, maybe cancer or heart disease. We have always noted, at least anecdotally, that when people have that spirit and drive to get better, they seem to have a much higher likelihood of doing that, whereas those who are ready to give up tend not to do that well. That also goes to the importance of how beliefs affect our whole body, not just the brain itself.

Of course, we can also look at religious and spiritual beliefs, which is what I will try to focus my talk on throughout the day here. I always try to come at this from a philosophical perspective. Why do we believe anything at all? It is an infinite universe for all intents and purposes. We are able to be subjected to only a very, very small amount of that information [and] an even smaller amount of that information is ultimately put into your consciousness. If you talk to somebody for 45 minutes, they are going to remember maybe three or four things. So our brain is trying to put together a construction of our reality, a perspective on that reality, which we rely on heavily for our survival, for figuring out how to behave and how to act and how to vote.

So what are beliefs? Again, I apologize, but I always come at this from a scientific perspective. I am defining beliefs biologically and psychologically as any perception, cognition, emotion, or memory that a person consciously or unconsciously assumes to be true. The reasons I define beliefs in this way are several-fold. One is that we can begin to look at the various components that make up our beliefs. We can talk about our perceptions. We can talk about our cognitive processes. We can talk about how our emotions affect our beliefs. And we can also look at how they ultimately affect us. Are we aware of the beliefs we hold? Or are they unconscious? And which ones are unconscious and which ones are conscious?

Several interesting studies have shown that when you show faces of a person of a different race to people, it activates the amygdala, the area that lights up when something of motivational importance happens to us. But if you show pictures of people of a different race that are people they know, and maybe it is a famous person or a friend, then the amygdala doesn’t light up. So they tend to have this ability to culturally, cognitively overcome what might be their initial response.

We can look at all these different forces on our beliefs. We can look at our perceptual processes, our cognitive processes, the emotions we have, the social interactions we have, to see how beliefs are so heavily influenced. One of the take-home points I always hope to get across is that as much as we hold onto our own beliefs very strongly — and I think it is appropriate for us to do so — we also have to keep in mind they are far more tenuous than we often like to believe.

Let me go through some of these processes in a bit more detail. Let’s talk about our perceptions. The brain is out there trying to take in a huge amount of information and make some coherent picture of the world for us. But, unfortunately, the brain makes lots of mistakes along the way. The most important problem with that is it doesn’t bother to tell us when it does make a mistake.

If we are listening to a speech, if we are thinking about an idea, if a friend is telling us something, how well are we really doing at gathering that information out there? How easy is it for us to be manipulated in terms of the beliefs we hold?

Now we move over to the cognitive functions of the brain. We talk about the parietal lobe, which is very involved in abstract reasoning and quantization. Parts of the parietal lobe are involved in helping us orient our self in the world and establishing a relationship between our self and the rest of the world. The temporal lobe, which is along the side of the brain; the cortex areas help us to understand language; and the inner parts of the temporal lobe are where our limbic system is — I’ll talk about that in just a second — that helps us with understanding our emotional responses to whatever stimuli are out there in the world.

The frontal lobe helps us with our behaviors and executive functions, the functions of deciding what we need to do: what we’re going to do tomorrow, keeping our schedule, keeping our checkbook, and so forth, while also mediating our emotional responses. There is a push-pull between our frontal lobe and limbic system that can get out of whack sometimes. If we get overly emotional, our frontal lobes shut down, and if we become over-logical, our emotional areas shut down. There is a lot of push and pull that goes on in these different parts of the brain.

Emotions are also important for placing value on beliefs. So it’s not just that we feel we should do something for the environment, it’s not just that we feel we should be a Republican or a Democrat, but we start to imbue those choices with emotions. We feel strongly about the ways in which we believe, and of course this can help us form beliefs. The downside of our emotions can be in how they help us defend our beliefs. There has been a lot of research looking at when people start to feel combative and antagonistic toward people who disagree with them. This can be how we start to see religious conflicts occur throughout the world: It is not just that people disagree with each other, but that they get emotional about it. They start to feel hatred.

The emotional areas of the brain are in part of the brain called the limbic system, which is embedded in the more interior parts of the brain. Here is that amygdala, which tends to light up whenever something of motivational importance happens to us. The hippocampus, which is right behind that, helps to regulate our beliefs, but also helps to regulate our emotions and write into our memories the ideas that come about from emotionally salient events. That is why we all remember exactly what was happening to us on September 11, 2001.

As we were talking earlier today, the social milieu we are in becomes very important in influencing our beliefs. We are continuously influenced by those around us. This goes all the way back to when we are a child and the influence of our parents helps us form our initial beliefs, which write into our brain at a very early age the beliefs we carry with us throughout our lives. That is why it is difficult to change your religious beliefs. It is difficult to even change your political beliefs as time goes on. If you look at the large population, very few people ultimately do change their beliefs in any very dramatic way because those are written very deeply into our brain at very early ages. But ultimately, as we do grow up, we can be influenced, and we can change those beliefs, and that is part of what we have to look at: exactly how and why this happens.

The physiology of beliefs

So how do these beliefs form physiologically, and what does this tell us about religious and spiritual ideas, and why religion and spirituality are so ingrained in so many individuals and have been in every culture and every time? There are a couple of statements I like to use. One is that neurons that fire together, wire together. There is physiological support for that, that the more you use a particular pathway of neurons, the more strongly they become connected to each other. We prune back a lot of the neural connections we have as a child, so we ultimately go forward in our lives with a set of parameters through which we look at the world.

The other idea about neurons is the old use-it-or-lose-it concept, that when you stop thinking about certain things, when you stop focusing on something, then those connections go away. We all probably took courses in college we remembered a lot of at the time, but if we are not doing it anymore, then we don’t remember it anymore.

How do we begin to invoke that? The practices and rituals that exist within both religious and non-religious groups become a strong and powerful way to write these ideas into our brain. The more you focus on a particular idea, whether it is political or religious or athletic, the more that gets written down into your brain and the more that becomes your reality. So that is why when you go to a church or a synagogue or a mosque, and they repeat the same stories, and you celebrate the same holidays that reinforce that, you do the prayers, and you say these things over and over again, those are the neural connections that get stimulated and strengthened. That is a strong part of why religion and spirituality make use of various practices valuable for writing those beliefs strongly into who you are.

Brains in meditation, prayer and worship

We have looked at a number of different religious and spiritual practices over the last decade or so. [These] SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) look at blood flow in the brain. We capture a picture of a person’s brain when they are at rest or when they are in some kind of comparison state, and then when they are engaged in the practice, a practice like meditation, for example.

This is actually a slice through the brain. You are slicing through the brain, popping the top of the head off, and looking at what areas of the brain are the most active. The red areas are more active than what you see in the yellow, and then ultimately in the purple and the black areas. In this part of the brain called the frontal lobes, which I have labeled as an “attention area,” because it helps focus our attention, we see a lot more of this red activity while the person is actively engaged in meditation than when the person is in the baseline state.

In the normal waking state, which was the baseline state, there is still a fair amount of activity in the frontal lobes because you have to be ready to attend to whatever is going on around you. But it is activated that much more when the person does this particular practice. I mentioned earlier the parietal lobe, which often functions as the orienting part of the brain. We have argued in some of our hypotheses that when people engage in these practices in a very deep way, they do two things. First, you are focusing on something, usually it is a sacred object or an image or something like that, but, second, you also screen out irrelevant information. As you do this, more and more information that normally goes to the orienting parts of your brain doesn’t go there. So it keeps trying to give you a sense of yourself, an orientation of that self in the world, but it no longer has the information upon which to do that.

And if you look at the orientation area, it goes dramatically down in its activity during the meditation practice. It is mostly yellow and just a little bit of red, compared to what you see in the normal waking state. So this area of the brain becomes much less active. We think this is part of what is associated with somebody losing that sense of self. They feel at one with God, at one with their spiritual mantra, whatever it is they are looking at. This was a group of Tibetan Buddhist meditators.

We also looked Franciscan nuns in prayer. We saw some interesting similarities and differences. The nuns were doing a prayer called centering prayer, which is kind of meditation. They were focusing on a particular phrase or prayer. It is much more verbally based, I guess, than the meditation of the Tibetans. Again, one of the similarities we saw was a fair amount of increase in this red activity in the frontal lobes. So they activated their frontal lobes as they were focusing on this particular prayer or phrase from the Bible.

They also activated the IPL or parietal lobe area. There is a much bigger glob of red in the prayer scan than what you see in the baseline scan. This is part of that verbal conceptual area in the temporal lobes, in the parietal lobes, that helps us think about abstract ideas and language. We didn’t see this in the Buddhist meditators, who had a more visual practice. But we did see a similarity of decreases of activity in this orienting part of the brain; again, it’s all more yellow with just a little bit of red, compared to what we saw in the original baseline state.

One of the more recent studies we did, which was very interesting, was a study of Pentecostals speaking in tongues. This was a much more exciting study for me because when you’re looking at people who are meditating or in deep prayer, they’re just sitting there and all the exciting stuff is going on inside, whereas when people are speaking in tongues all the exciting part is on the outside.

We had to come up with a different baseline because obviously if I showed you a person’s scan while he or she was simply resting quietly, versus up and about and dancing and singing in tongues, of course you would see all kinds of changes in the brain. So the comparison state here was doing gospel-singing worship. They were up and about, dancing around, singing in English, compared to up and about, dancing around, singing but singing in tongues. One of the most interesting findings we saw in this particular study –these are four slices of the brain while they were singing, so these are just different levels through the brain.

The next slide is going to be the same person, now speaking in tongues. If you look in the frontal lobe area, where the arrows are pointing, as I toggle back and forth, you can see there’s a lot less activity in the frontal lobes when the person is speaking in tongues. So when they started to speak in tongues, and we see this in all the people we studied, their frontal lobe activity goes down.

This actually makes a lot of sense because in contrast to the meditators and nuns, who are focusing on doing something, the way the Pentecostals describe speaking in tongues is they are not focusing on doing it; they let it happen. They just let their own will go away and allow this whole thing to take place. They don’t feel like they’re in control of this process. And the findings on the scan at least support the phenomenological experience they have.

I’m sure we’ll get into a lot of interesting philosophical discussions on, “What is the reality here?” Obviously, for the Pentecostals speaking in tongues, they say this is God or the Holy Spirit who is speaking through them. What one might argue in that context is, “Your brain shuts down so you can allow the Holy Spirit to speak through you; this is how it works.” On the other hand, if you don’t believe speaking in tongues is really a spiritual event, then you might say, “Perhaps there’s some other part of the brain that is taking over, that is causing this thing to happen. It’s not the normal parts of the brain doing it, but it’s some other part of the brain.”

At this point we don’t have that answer and this is, again, the big epistemological question about how we understand what reality is, how we begin to think about our beliefs about reality and what we can say, ultimately, about what these scans mean in the context of what’s really going on. But I think there’s still some very valuable information in at least understanding what’s going on inside the person who is having this particular experience.

So if we’re talking about religion as affecting our brain and our beliefs, we have to acknowledge that it must have some pretty profound effect on our brain if it is going to be something that has such a profound effect on us as people.

I have argued in the past that the brain’s role in our overall life is to help us make some sense out of the world, and in so doing, to help maintain us. That’s how it helps us to survive. We have to know not to cross the street when there’s a red light, and what’s okay to eat, and what’s not okay to eat. It helps to make sure we do all the right things in the world.

It also helps us transcend ourselves, and by that I don’t necessarily mean a religious transcendence, although that may be the ultimate expression of this, but we always grow and develop over time. There is this continual struggle, if you will, between wanting to maintain the status quo within ourselves and also knowing that we need to adapt and change as we go through our life, and our brain is capable of doing both. It holds onto beliefs very strongly to helps us figure out what we need to do in our world, but it can also change over time. All of us are still the same person we were when we were three years old, but we’ve learned a lot, and we’ve changed a lot over time. As we’ve gone through our lives, our brain has changed with us to adapt and help us survive.

Let me pause for a second and ask what we talk about when we’re talking about people who are not religious. There is some evidence to suggest there are differences. Some of you may have read a book called The God Gene. It was an interesting study that showed there was a significant, although relatively mild, correlation between a gene that coded for what’s called the VMAT-2 receptor, which has to do with serotonin and dopamine, two very important neurotransmitters in the brain, and feelings of self-transcendence. The fact that there’s a correlation between the neurotransmitters and some feeling that’s related to spirituality is interesting. Maybe there is something physiologically to this.

In our studies, we found — going back to the thalamus that we talked about earlier — that people who were long-term practitioners and meditators tended to have a lot more asymmetry: One side of their thalamus was much more active than the other, compared to the normal population of people who are not long-term meditators. I don’t know what that means per se, but it seems to suggest that the ways in which we process information about the world might be fundamentally different.

One of the questions we have to ask is, if you are a non-believer or an atheist, is that the result of a lack of having such experiences, or are you having these experiences and then ultimately rejecting them? One of the examples we talked about in our last book was a woman who had a near-death experience. She described it as the full-blown near-death experience, with the light and all this kind of stuff, but said, “That was my brain dying.” That was her interpretation of it, whereas other people have that experience, and they say, “That was me transcending into the next realm; that was my spiritual experience, and it was transformative; it changed who I was.”

Here are a couple of websites if any of you are interested. We have a Center for Spirituality and the Mind [http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/radiology/csm/] that we’ve started at Penn, which is helping us consolidate a lot of the research. If any of you are interested in that survey I was mentioning you can go to the website, neurotheology.net. https://somapps.med.upenn.edu/neuro_t/

Read the full transcript and see the full set of slides at pewforum.org.

In October 2007, the state of Illinois passed a law requiring its public schools to lead students each morning in a moment of silence for “reflection and student prayer.”¹ Illinois already had a law on the books permitting schools to lead such moments of silence. But the Illinois General Assembly, overriding Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s veto, decided to strengthen the law by making moments of silence a requirement. Atheist Rob Sherman and his daughter, Dawn, a freshman at Buffalo Grove High School in Buffalo Grove, Ill., sued her school district, claiming that the new state requirement violated the U.S. Constitution.

Shortly thereafter, the Illinois House of Representatives voted to repeal the law so that a moment of silence would once again be permitted rather than mandated; the Illinois Senate, however, has not yet voted on the bill. Meanwhile, the U.S. District Court hearing Sherman’s claim has found that the Illinois law is probably unconstitutional and thus has blocked not only her school district but all Illinois school districts from requiring a moment of silence. The order, however, is only a temporary one; it will likely be several months before the court decides whether to invalidate the law. This will depend on whether it finds that the law is actually, not just probably, unconstitutional.

Sherman’s suit is not unique. Indeed, it is one in a long line of constitutional cases over the past several years involving moment-of-silence statutes. Many states enacted this type of statute after two Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s. One of the decisions, Engel v. Vitale (1962), prohibited school-sponsored prayer in public schools; the other, Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), prohibited Bible reading in public schools. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 36 states currently have moment-of-silence statutes — 23 permit teachers to lead a moment of silence, and 13 require a moment of silence.

Polls find that a majority of Americans favor the idea of a moment of silence in public schools. According to a 2005 Gallup poll,² for example, American adults much prefer allowing a moment of silence for contemplation or silent prayer in public schools over a spoken prayer in public schools (69% vs. 23%). According to a separate 2005 Gallup poll,³ an even higher percentage (84%) of teenagers ages 13-17 favor allowing a “moment of silence to allow students to pray if they want to” in public schools.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly stressed that government actions in such matters must have a clearly secular purpose. In its only ruling on moment-of-silence statutes, Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), the court, by a 6-3 vote, invalidated an Alabama moment-of-silence law largely because its sponsor admitted that the statute’s sole purpose was “to return voluntary prayer to our public schools.” But in a concurring opinion that has influenced subsequent lower court decisions, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that she would have upheld the Alabama law if the legislature had shown a genuine secular purpose in passing it. Indeed, she explained, school-led moments of silence, unlike school-led prayers, are often permissible because they are not inherently religious and do not coerce participation in a religious act.

The majority opinion in Wallace along with Justice O’Connor’s concurrence had the Janus-like effect of striking down the Alabama moment-of-silence statute while simultaneously suggesting to lower courts that they may uphold such laws in certain circumstances — namely, when the laws have a secular purpose. And, indeed, lower courts have responded to the high court’s signals. Before the Wallace ruling, almost all courts that heard challenges to moment-of-silence statutes found such laws to be unconstitutional; since 1985, however, almost all court decisions have upheld moment-of-silence laws.

In the most recent lower court ruling on the issue, Croft v. Perry (2008), a U.S. District Court upheld a Texas law that mandates teachers to lead students in a moment of silence during which students may pray or engage in any other silent activity. The district court acknowledged that the case “present[ed] a close question because the Texas legislature was less than clear in articulating the [statute's] secular purpose.” Nevertheless, the court upheld the law because it said the various committee meetings and floor debates on the bill indicated that the Texas legislature genuinely sought to accomplish the secular purpose of promoting “contemplation, seriousness and reverence.” This decision is currently on appeal before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Some legal experts have predicted that the Supreme Court ultimately may decide to hear another moment-of-silence case in order to eliminate lingering ambiguities in this area of the law. After Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the court in late 2005 and early 2006, some court watchers speculated that the court may be more likely to overrule its decision in Wallace. They reason that since Roberts and Alito expressed a preference for deferring to legislative judgment on church-state issues in Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation (2007)⁴ , they might be likely to tip the court toward holding that all moment-of-silence statutes, regardless of legislative intent, are constitutional. But until then, courts, like the one addressing Sherman’s claim, will have to continue to scrutinize each statute’s legislative history for evidence of a secular purpose.

Notes

¹ See “Prayer Optional, Silence Required, Lawmakers Say,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Oct. 12, 2007.

¹ “Public Favors Voluntary Prayer for Public Schools,” Gallup News Service, Aug. 26, 2005.

¹ “School Prayer: Teen Support Hinges on Type,” Gallup News Service, July 26, 2005.

¹ Find an analysis of the Hein decision at the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy.

The Glory Window by Gabriel Loire, Chapel of Thanksgiving,
Dallas, Texas. (Photo Credit: Randy Faris/Corbis)

Is there an inherent conflict between science and religious belief? Some scientists, including famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, argue that an understanding of the natural world logically leads to atheism. But for Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, scientific knowledge complements rather than contradicts belief in God. In his 2006 bestselling book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins argues that advances in science present “an opportunity for worship,” rather than a catalyst for doubt. Recently, the Pew Forum interviewed Dr. Collins about his views on science and religion.

Featuring:

Francis Collins, Director, National Human Genome Research Institute

Interviewer:

David Masci, Senior Research Fellow, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

You write in your book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, that God can be worshipped in a cathedral or in a laboratory. Elaborate a little bit, if you will, on that statement.

If you see God as the creator of the universe — in all of its amazing complexity, diversity and awesome beauty — then science, which is, of course, a means of exploring nature, also becomes a means of exploring God’s creative abilities. And so, for me, as a scientist who is also a religious believer, research activities that look like science can also be thought of as opportunities to worship.

We have all of these famous stories in our history that pit science against faith — Galileo’s trial before the Inquisition¹, the Anglican Church’s strong public condemnation of Charles Darwin and the debates that followed the publication of his On the Origin of Species, the Scopes trial². And they have created this impression that there is an inherent conflict between religion and science. Do you believe there is such an inherent conflict? And if there isn’t, why is this impression false?

I don’t believe there is an inherent conflict, but I believe that humans, in our imperfect nature, sometimes imagine conflicts where there are none. We see something that threatens our own personal view, and we figure that there must be some reason why that alternative view has to be wrong, or even why it has to be evil.

First of all, let’s look carefully at the history of conflicts between science and the church and be sure that those are adequately represented. The story of Galileo is an interesting one. But I think it might be fair to say that Galileo’s greatest mistake was being a bit arrogant in the way he presented his own views and insulting the pope who, prior to that, had been fairly sympathetic with Galileo’s conclusions. Basically the pope couldn’t let Galileo get away with this kind of insult.

Francis Collins

Similarly, I think when On the Origin of Species was published, while there were objections coming from the church, there was also a large segment of the church, including some conservative theologians like Presbyterian Minister Benjamin Warfield, who embraced this new view of how living things were related to each other as a wonderful insight into the method by which God must have carried out creation.

Perhaps today’s conflict, which seems particularly intense, is so difficult to understand because, after all, evolution has been very much on the scene for 150 years, and the science that supports Darwin’s theory has gotten stronger and stronger over those decades. That evidence is particularly strong today given the ability to study DNA and to see the way in which it undergirds Darwin’s theory in a marvelously digital fashion. And yet, we have seen an increasing polarization between the scientific and spiritual worldviews, much of it, I think, driven by those who are threatened by the alternatives and who are unwilling to consider the possibility that there might be harmony here.

Let’s talk a little more about the current controversy over evolution. Some Christians will say: “Look, you can’t pick and choose the parts of the Holy Scripture that you want to take literally. And so, if you’re going to call into question the literalness of some parts, you inherently call into question the literal truth of it all.” So how do you, as a scientist and a Christian, respond to that line of reasoning?

It’s a good question. And certainly, as a believer, I would be the last one to argue that we can basically dilute and water down the Bible any old way we want to, to make ourselves feel better. That’s certainly not a good approach to faith, lest one end up with something that doesn’t resemble the great truths of the faith at all. But let’s admit that down through the centuries, serious believers — long before there was any On the Origin of Species to threaten their perspective — had a great deal of difficulty understanding what some parts of the Old Testament, particularly Genesis, were really all about. The whole area of hermeneutics — the effort to try to read Scripture in a way that represents, as best one can, what the real meaning was intended to be — requires more sophistication than simply saying the most literal interpretation of every verse has to be correct.

One can look at Genesis 1-2, for instance, and see that there is not just one but two stories of the creation of humanity, and those stories do not quite agree with each other. That alone ought to be reason enough to argue that the literal interpretation of every verse, in isolation from the rest of the Bible, can’t really be correct. Otherwise, the Bible is contradicting itself.

I take great comfort looking back through time, particularly at the writings of Augustine³, who was obsessed by trying to understand Genesis and wrote no less than five books about it. Augustine ultimately concluded that no human being really was going to be able to interpret the meaning of the creation story. Certainly Augustine would have argued that the current ultra-literal interpretations that lead to young earth creationism are not required by the text, and would have warned that such a rigid interpretation, regardless of what other evidence comes to the scene, could potentially be quite dangerous to the faith, in that it would make believers out to be narrow-minded and potentially subject to ridicule. And in a certain way, that warning has come true with the battles we’re having right now.

If Augustine, who was one of the most thoughtful, original thinkers about biblical interpretation that we’ve ever had, was unable to figure out what Genesis meant 1,600 years ago, why should we today insist that we know what it means, particularly when the interpretation chosen contradicts a wide variety of data that God has given us the chance to discover through science.

So what you’re saying is that when people use religion or religious texts to explain natural phenomena, especially gaps in our understanding of the natural world, they’re asking for trouble?

Absolutely. We have to recognize that our understanding of nature is something that grows decade by decade, century by century. But we’re still a long way from understanding the details of much of the universe around us. To focus on a particular area of nature where our understanding remains incomplete and say, well, God must have done something miraculous in that spot, is actually, I think, to make God much too small. If God had a plan for creating a universe that was capable of resulting in creatures with intelligence, free will, the knowledge of right and wrong and the hunger to find God Almighty, I think it would be unfortunate for us to imagine that we can precisely figure out, with our tiny amount of information right now, exactly how God did it.

Despite the evidence presented and accepted by the vast majority of the scientific community that evolution through natural selection is the mechanism by which life developed on earth, an August 2006 poll⁴ by the Pew Research Center found that only about a quarter of the American public actually accepts evolution through natural selection. Why have scientists not been able to convince the vast majority of the American people on this particular issue?

I think there are at least three problems that have led to the pickle we’re in. One is that, by its very nature, evolution is counterintuitive. The idea that a process over hundreds of millions of years could give rise to something as complicated as the vertebrate eye, for example, is not something that seems natural, normal or believable to one who has not worked through the details. That is because our minds are very poor at contemplating something that happened so slowly over such a long period of time. And so, the alternative arguments for supernatural design appeal to a lot of people. That’s one problem that has nothing to do with religion; it has to do with the nature of evolution as having occurred in a timeframe that is just not familiar to the human mind and therefore is difficult to accept.

Secondly, we have made, I’m afraid, fairly lousy efforts over the last 150 years in our educational system to convey these concepts in school settings effectively to a large number of people in this country. And so, many people have never really seen the evidence to support evolution. So when you put that together with the natural incredulity one has upon hearing this kind of explanation of the diversity of living things, it’s no wonder that those folks don’t immediately rush to embrace Darwin.

And the third problem, of course, is that in some faith traditions, evolution seems to be a threat to the idea that God did it. I don’t actually see it as a threat at all; I see this as answering the question of how God did it. But certainly, some conservative Christian churches have had trouble embracing that conclusion, as it does seem to contradict a number of their views about how humanity came to be. Thus, people who have natural skepticism about the overall process, who have not had a decent science education to teach them why evolution actually makes sense and who have heard in Sunday school or from the pulpit that this theory is actually a threat to their faith, have a very hard time accepting, even after 150 years, that evolution is true.

How can scientists — especially scientists who are religious believers, like yourself — do a better job of reaching out to these people and convincing them that these findings are not a threat to their faith?

That’s a very difficult challenge. And I don’t think we should underestimate just how threatening it is to someone who has been raised in a creationist environment to give that up. They have heard many times since they first came to church as a child that the creationist view is part and parcel of belief in God. And, they’ve been told, if you even for a moment begin to allow the possibility that evolution is true, you are on a certain path toward loss of your faith and probably worse, eternal damnation. So we have to recognize that in that circumstance, a simple logical argument and presentation of the data is not going to be sufficient in one sitting to change somebody’s mind. And in fact, there will be strong resistance to even looking closely at that information because of the fear of what it might lead to.

I also think that those of us who are interested in seeking harmony here have to make it clear that the current crowd of seemingly angry atheists, who are using science as part of their argument that faith is irrelevant, do not speak for us. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens do not necessarily represent the consensus of science; 40% of scientists are believers in a personal God⁵. A lot more are rather uncomfortable about the topic but certainly would not align themselves with a strong atheistic perspective. To the extent that it can be made clear that the assault on faith, which has been pretty shrill in the last couple of years, is coming from a fringe — a minority — and is not representative of what most scientists believe, that would help defuse the incendiary rhetoric and perhaps allow a real conversation about creation.

What about people like Richard Dawkins, who is a scientist like yourself, and the arguments that they have made — not just that they can’t find any proof for the existence of God but, quite to the contrary, that they think they find proof for God’s non-existence. Have they come up with anything in your view that supports those arguments?

I think strong atheism, of the kind that says, “I know there is no God,” suffers from two major logical flaws. And the awareness of those flaws might be reassuring to believers who are somehow afraid that these guys may actually have a point.

The first of those is the idea that anyone could use science at all as a conversation-stopper, as an argument-ender in terms of the question of God. If God has any meaning at all, God is at least in part outside of nature (unless you’re a pantheist). Science is limited in that its tools are only appropriate for the exploration of nature. Science can therefore certainly never discount the possibility of something outside of nature. To do so is a category error, basically using the wrong tools to ask the question.

Secondly, I think the logical error that atheists of the strong variety commit is what English writer G.K. Chesterton calls the most daring dogma of the universal negative. I often use a visual analogy to explain this. Suppose you were asked to draw a circle that contains all the information, all the knowledge that exists or ever will exist, inside or outside the universe — all knowledge. Well, that would be a pretty enormous circle. Now, suppose on that same scale, you were asked to draw what you know at the present time. Even the most assertive person will draw a rather tiny circle. Now, suppose that the knowledge that demonstrates that God exists is outside your little circle today. That seems pretty plausible, doesn’t it, considering the relative scale? How then — given that argument — would it be reasonable for any person to say, “I know there is no God”? That is clearly going outside of the evidence.

Do you foresee this conflict fading any time soon, or do you think that it will continue at least for the foreseeable future to be a real conflict?

Well, it won’t fade quickly. But I’m an optimist. Just as very few people now insist that the sun has to go around the earth in order to fulfill their expectations of what the Bible says, I would like to believe that in a few more decades, this battle will be seen as just as unnecessary and just as readily resolved in favor of saying that evolution is true and God is true. That’s basically what I’ve tried to argue in my book — that this whole battle has been created by a good deal of misunderstanding and unfortunately has been whipped up by those who occupy extreme positions. Many people are puzzled about this tumult and wish to understand how we might find a happy harmony between these worldviews.

I have a dream — and this is something that some of us are actually trying to put together — to bring together leading scientists with open minds, leading theologians with open minds and leading pastors who have a significant influence on their flocks. The goal would be to step back from the current unproductive battle and develop a new theology, a celebration of what God has created and how God did it. I think that’s possible. But even such an outcome will not be easily received by those who have dug themselves into hardened positions that do not allow much in the way of dialogue.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about evolution because that does seem to be a focal point — at least in terms of conflicts between some people of faith and science. Do you see any other areas where such a conflict may be coming?

I think evolution is probably the most significant potential area of conflict. But I do think some of the things that are happening in neuroscience may have a parallel. I think, actually, the parallel extends pretty nicely to a response though. Some have argued that spirituality is simply a function of neurotransmitters, and this can now be demonstrated by imaging experiments on the brain. But the fact that the brain has the functional capability to support a spiritual experience, which seems to be the case, does not seem to me in any way to negate the meaning of that spiritual experience.

Again, if spirituality was part of God’s plan for us, these remarkable creatures created in God’s image — and by that I mean creatures of mind, I don’t think God has a physical body — then wouldn’t God need to have made a plan to have those experiences of spirituality supported anatomically in some way, so that they could be a real possibility for those who were seeking God?

It seems to me that once again, science is doing what science does really well, which is telling us something about how and very little about why. How spiritual experiences are mediated by the various neurons and neurotransmitters is a scientific question. But why they happen in the first place? That’s a pretty tough one for science.

This transcript has been edited for clarity, spelling and grammar.

Find more about religion in America and around the world at pewforum.org.

¹The Times of London reports on recent happenings in the relationship between the Vatican and Galileo.

²For more on the Scopes trial and the larger debate over evolution see The Biology Wars: The Religion, Science and Education Controversy.

³More about the writings of Aurelius Augustinus can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/

⁴David Masci, An Evolving Debate about Evolution.

⁵As cited in an Aug.23, 2005 article in the New York Times, “in a much-discussed survey reported in the journal Nature in 1997, 40 percent of biologists, physicists and mathematicians said they believed in God — and not just a nonspecific transcendental presence but, as the survey put it, a God to whom one may pray “in expectation of receiving an answer.”