Can Science Deliver the Benefits of Religion?

[Alex]

Can Science Deliver the Benefits of Religion?
Tania Lombrozo
August 07, 2013
Boston Review
http://www.bostonreview.net/arts-culture/can-science-deliver-benefits-religion

...Having seen that belief in science and scientific progress can have existential benefits that parallel those of religion, we can return to where we began and consider what this means for belief in evolution. Recall a study mentioned already, in which secular university students were primed to feel powerful or powerless and subsequently asked to choose between two accounts of life on earth. When the two options were the theory of evolution and intelligent design, the majority of students opted for the former. However, they were less likely to do so when they had been primed to feel powerless as opposed to powerful. This suggests that intelligent design—the idea of a supervised, goal-directed process of change—was comforting in a way that compensated for the unease induced by the prime to feel powerless.

However, the researchers also considered a third option: a version of evolution inspired by the paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, which downplays the role of “random processes” and instead describes evolution as highly deterministic. When researchers asked participants to choose between the theory of evolution and this modified variant, the results were similar to those involving intelligent design: participants preferred the theory of evolution overall, but they were more likely to choose the variant when they were primed to feel powerless than when they were primed to feel powerful. This suggests that, like intelligent design, the idea of a non-random, deterministic evolutionary process helped relieve the discomfort of feeling powerless. In fact the prime to feel powerless had no effect on the proportion of participants choosing intelligent design over the deterministic variant of evolution—the two appeared to be equivalent in their ability to compensate for low personal control.

So perhaps belief in a designer—be it the well-known Judeo-Christian version or the unspecified mover of intelligent design—isn’t unique in its ability to compensate for feelings of low personal control. When it comes to evolution, that leaves room for naturalistic accounts of human origins that offer at least some of the psychological benefits of religious belief.

Research on the existential and emotional aspects of particular scientific beliefs or of a scientific worldview is in its infancy, but the findings so far suggest we’ve been asking the wrong questions when it comes to understanding the widespread rejection of human evolution in favor of divine creation. The relevant contrast might not be between science and religion but between beliefs that promise an orderly universe—one in which individual humans or some external forces, be they natural or divine, impose structure and corral uncertainty—and those that do not.

Perhaps it is no surprise that religious beliefs have tended to fit the more psychologically attractive profile. Religion isn’t tethered to empirical facts the way scientific theories are; it is free to shift, to fit the contours of the human mind. When it comes to science, however, the empirical world offers hard constraints. We can hope for scientific theories that offer an orderly and predictable view of the natural world, but we can’t enforce them.

What we can do is rethink the way evolutionary ideas are presented, and work to improve people’s understanding of the ways in which natural selection is—and is not—a random and unpredictable process. While humanity may be an evolutionary accident in some sense, our place in the tree of life can be characterized in highly systematic ways that highlight the exquisite dynamics of evolutionary change. There are patterns in the natural world, and grasping them can be revelatory.

These new strands of research can’t promise a scientifically grounded account of human origins that rivals creationism in its psychological appeal, but they can help to explain how some people find beauty and fulfillment in a naturalistic worldview. There is something deeply satisfying in broadening the scope of what we understand. And that is part of the seductive grandeur of science.