Hi SII-mailing list folks,

I heard an interesting talk this weekend by Robert N. McCauley, a professor of philosphy at Emory University. The talk was entitled "Examining the cognitive foundations of the conflicts between religion and science."

He was arguing that religion (not theology, just religion) comes "naturally" to humans, in terms of our innate cognitive functioning, and that science, in particular the scientific method, is "unnatural" and hard to learn. He was careful to say he doesn't attach values to either of these facts, although after the talk he told me that he personally feels that "science" is the most important human creation, period.

His argument for religion is that humans inherently look for agents who are causing things to happen, apparently this is observable even in 1-yr-olds. So, supernatural agents are just an extension of this built-in agent-finding part of us. Further, once we assume an agent is causing something to happen, that brings along a whole bunch of assumptions and knowlege, making it easy to construct explanations of stuff. He also pointed out that religious behavior is universal, that is, particular religions do come and go but that no human population has ever really been without religion. If you include burying the dead as religious behavior, then even the Neanderthals would be counted as having religious behavior. One conclusion he drew from this is that science is no threat to religion, that science will never stamp out religion.

The more interesting argument was about the unnatural-ness of the scientific method. He says that the scientific method is all about having theories and then looking hard for concrete evidence to refute or support them. Further, scientists do share the innate human tendencies to fool themselves, so as a whole you see things like peer-review that are mechanisms to help us do the unnatural, that is, really strenuously test the theories. He pointed out that it is hard to learn science and that people have to train for years and years to really become good scientists. Also, whereas religious behavior started as far back as we can tell, the scientific method is relatively new in human history. The basic point is that being curious, wanting answers, may be innate, natural behavior, but the scientific method as a way to produce answers is hard, unnatural stuff for humans. One quick point -- he does put theology in a similar category of unnaturalness, as opposed to "religion".

His conclusion is that we *do* have to fear science dying out some day, because it's not something innate, and thus would be easy to lose somehow. At least, possible to lose, as opposed to religion which seems built-in.

One last minor point -- in his talk he did not attempt to answer the question about nature -vs- nuture for these topics.

Anyway, I thought y'all might be interested.

--Eric