Brain freeze of the day
I just came up with that title for certain blog posts. The criterion? If the teaser title or abstract makes me utter, “Whaaaaaaaaat?!” it qualifies as a brain freeze. (By the way, I’m open to other suggestions instead of “brain freeze”, but I trust you get my point.)
The original post I came across cited an article in Psychology Today. I haven’t read either article yet, but this abstract is, er, interesting:
It has been presumed that religiosity has an influence on mating behavior, but here we experimentally investigate the possibility that mating behavior might also influence religiosity. In Experiment 1, people reported higher religiosity after looking at mating pools consisting of attractive people of their own sex compared to attractive opposite sex targets. Experiment 2 replicated the effect with an added control group, and suggested that both men and women become more religious when seeing same-sex competitors. We discuss several possible explanations for these effects. Most broadly, the findings contribute to an emerging literature on how cultural phenomena such as religiosity respond to ecological cues in potentially functional ways.
Citation:
“Mating competitors increase religious beliefs”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2009
Yexin Jessica Li, Adam B. Cohen, Jason Weeden, Douglas T. Kenrick
(Fortunately it is only 4 pages long.)
The religion gene
I suppose we can’t have it both ways. This from the NY Times:
For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.
For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.
E.T. phone the Vatican
OK. Here’s more on the Vatican and space. This time a search for alien life.
In the interview last year, Funes told Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that believing the universe may host aliens, even intelligent ones, does not contradict a faith in God.
“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said in that interview.
“Just as there is a multitude of creatures on Earth, there could be other beings, even intelligent ones, created by God. This does not contradict our faith, because we cannot put limits on God’s creative freedom.”
Funes maintained that if intelligent beings were discovered, they would also be considered “part of creation.”
Islam and creationism
The discovery of “Ardi” supports a creationist perspective? This isn’t what I’d have thought but apparently there is a rise of creationism in some Muslim communities.
But there is another creationist movement whose influence is growing, and which is fueling challenges to science in countries where Christianity has little sway: Islamic creationism. Campaigners in countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and Indonesia have fought the teaching of evolution in schools there, sometimes with great success. Creationist conferences have been held in Pakistan, and moderate Islamic clerics are on record publicly condemning Darwin’s ideas. A recent study of Muslim university students in the Netherlands showed that most rejected evolution. And driven in part by a mysterious Turkish publishing organization, Islamic creationism books are hot sellers at bookstores throughout the Muslim world.
The Vatican’s astronomer
This is a long way from Galileo!
There have been some bizarre guesses, often involving little green men. Consolmagno recalls that a British group calling itself the Catholic Truth Society once asked him if he would write a book about the official Church teaching on aliens. “But we’ve never found any,” he says. “How could we have any teaching about them?” (He did eventually write a forty-eight-page pamphlet for the society, in which he tackled the question “Is Jesus Christ’s redemptive sacrifice sufficient for the whole Universe?”) Another time, the Chicago Tribune referred to the Mount Graham astronomers as “Vatican astrologers.” Consolmagno jokes that he still isn’t sure if that was a typo, or if they really thought he and his colleagues were casting horoscopes for the Pope.
The continuing battle between faith and reason
Richard Wolin has weighed in on the debate in this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. He gives a balanced overview of the history of the debate and its past and current interlocutors. In this short article Wolin takes us through Hegel, Adorno, Habermas, Berger, Dennett, Dawkins, Taylor, and more.
I agree with Wolin when he says that:
A genuine and fruitful dialogue between believers and nonbelievers is impossible unless one takes the standpoint of one’s interlocutor seriously.
Darwin’s birthday and Anglican Church
Caught sight of this on the online British newspaper Times Online.
It links over to the website, Theos where there are a few more links about Darwin and faith.
Prominent scientists and leading religious figures have joined forces
to call for an end to the fighting over Charles Darwin’s legacy.
Falsifying the unfalsifiable
Mark Thompson writes:
…science demeans itself when it used as a proof of the non-existence of god. Science is not meant to provide unfalsifiable answers, nor is it intended to answer questions that can only admit of unfalsifiable answers. To do so is to turn the scientific method on its head. And in so doing, science demeans itself because it loses part of its very essence.
(Hat tip: The Daily Dish)