[Skybird]

Boston University's Catherine Caldwell-Harris is researching the differences between the secular and religious minds. "Humans have two cognitive styles," the psychologist says. "One type finds deeper meaning in everything; even bad weather can be framed as fate. The other type is neurologically predisposed to be skeptical, and they don't put much weight in beliefs and agency detection."



Caldwell-Harris is currently testing her hypothesis through simple experiments. Test subjects watch a film in which triangles move about. One group experiences the film as a humanized drama, in which the larger triangles are attacking the smaller ones. The other group describes the scene mechanically, simply stating the manner in which the geometric shapes are moving. Those who do not anthropomorphize the triangles, she suspects, are unlikely to ascribe much importance to beliefs. "There have always been two cognitive comfort zones," she says, "but skeptics used to keep quiet in order to stay out of trouble."

Compare to this study:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:...l.pone.0007272

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjects fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief (judgments of ;true; vs judgments of false was associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation [3], [4], [5], [6], emotional associations [7], reward [8], [9], [10], and goal-driven behavior [11]. This region showed greater signal whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about ordinary facts. 1A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.
Conclusions/Significance

While religious and nonreligious thinking differentially engage broad regions of the frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobes, the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent. Our study compares religious thinking with ordinary cognition and, as such, constitutes a step toward developing a neuropsychology of religion. However, these findings may also further our understanding of how the brain accepts statements of all kinds to be valid descriptions of the world.

And this, about man as a homo religio, and the need to learn more about the neural substrates of religious experience:
http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/reprint/9/3/498

As I see it, man is not so much finding the ultimate reality "out there" when he sets to search for it and to examine it, but it is man himself adding all meaning to the things he perceives, according to his history of interpretation and sorting before. Thus, we do not so much find but invent "reality" as what what we perceive it.

It cannot be denied that nevertheless many people feel a deep-rooting need to believe in claims typically made by religious dogmas. And my strong impression also is that this need is not the result of an intellectual insight or a decision made by reason, but is as if something really triggers some people to believe, as if it were an inbuilt natural drive. Since two or three years, you can occasionally fetch up reports in the press that neuroscientists make progress in tracking down a relation between the desire to believe in religious stuff, and neural constellations and activation patterns in the brain. There seem to be indices for that the relation is causal and can be marked to be neural factors deciding the religious belief (the act itself, not the special nature of the ideology in question) - not the other way around.

This raises the question why nature maybe has designed man's genes to make him feel religious yearnings and make him occupying himself with questions religion claims to be focussing on. And what these questions differentiates from the existential questions arelgious and secularist and atheist people also deal with: the Why, the Where-from and Where-to, and the How-long. Only some secularists claim to not caring for these questions at all - most atheists I know are not evading them at all, but admit that while they adress such questions sometimes, for example by reading a book on philosophy, they just do not accept the answers religions claim to be able to give, especially those answers basing on theistic tales.

So, if the desire of religious believing or non-believing is "hardwired" in our brains, this has some consequences.

First, the nature of the debate needs to be reconsidered, with putting emphasis on that an argument, a fight over these issues is meaningless from beginning on, because people indeed do not have any choice to believe or not - they are somewhat geneticall programmed, at least are genetically equipped with a certain span of mental freedom that defines on what options they can decide "freely", and what not. This is the classical explanation model of degrees of freedom. How many do we have? On our religious believing or scepticism, we maybe are more limited in our free choices, than we imagine.

Second, the claims for validity of both camps - religions as well as areligious/secularists/atheists, needs to be relativised. In the end we need to see that any claims for valdity of content and for communal power, are as valid as the claim to be superior because of one's skin power.

Good, and responsible science will never claim to have given the ultimate, the final answer on something - the assumption that science could do that simply is totally contradictory to the elemental basics of scientific methodology. But this does not mean that what science finds out, is all relative by nature and can be ignored whenever it seems to be opportune, because it contradicsts long-held convictions and emotional sympathies. To change a scientific argument or theory or paradigm, just picking some idea out of the blue is not enough - you need to show up with better observations, better theories, where "better" is qualified by scientific methodologic measures and means that the new idea explains easier or more completely (or both) the phenomenon observed, and allows to make better predictions.

Believing people, however, fall into two groups, those confessing to a socially institutionalised dogma with a communal organisational framework (for example the church), and those who believe "freely", unbound by any community's dogma, and keeping it to themselves whatever they believe in. But the first group is extremely prone to wanting to put it'S beliefs onto all others, because they claim what they often - wrongly - accuse science of - that they have the final and ultimate and really really really true answers. And different to science, they see no need to ever try to proove it, test it, re-test it.

As private person as well as former psychologist I have seen that we humans want to see meaning in life. We maybe even need to see it, as a way to give order and structure, predictability and the illusion of control to a world and a cosmos that in reality probably aree chaotic, unporedictablel, danegerous - and not interested at all into our racial, civilisational and individual fates. To be marginalised to such a degree is a pill that human psyche seems to have big and painful troubles to swallow. We want our place in thew whole cosmic show, don't we? Our meaning? Our important role to play? the more religious we are, in that we follow one of the big dogmas, the more we really mean by that: the whole cosmos has to revolve around me, my soul, my afterlife. And all too often we expect the laws of logic and nature to bend in our belief's favour.

That is a transition from
an unavoidable vulnerability for despair that we necessarily are equipped with, since we are reflecting, self-aware creatures that know about their own mortality,
to
a demand of not only being part of the greater scheme of reason and explanation, but to be in control of it, and defining the conditions and rules by which such a scheme has to be formed up, and forms up the cosmos around us.

In the end, it is all just inside our brain, and maybe even the brain is just the image of an idea that in final and last and ultimate reality - if there is something like that! - just rests inside itself. We may want to consider in our sometimes bitter fights about religions that when we do these religious fights in all the world out there, we maybe just function the way we genetically are designed. The problem is that by this design some of us may be more and others may be less well-equipped to understand just that.

It seems to be an existential dilemma then that mankind cannot escape as long as evolution has not changed parts of our genetic heritage.

The mind is free to travel inside the space it can form by its imagination. And maybe our imagination is the only limit to what ultimately is possible, for better or worse.

Space travel.