On Monday I attended a talk by Robert McCauley, Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture at Emory University. The title of the talk was, “The Role of Maturationally Natural Cognition in Science and Religion,” which doesn’t really mean anything unless you already know what these terms mean.

Basically, McCauley’s conclusion is that religious thinking is cognitively ‘natural’ while scientific thinking is cognitively ‘unnatural’.

What does that mean, exactly? Well, natural cognition involves those thinking processes which naturally develop as our brains develop and mature and are not dependent on education or other culturally distinctive support. In other words, these are all a part of normal human cognitive development. Our basic understanding of simple physics. Our capacity to acquire and master language. Facial recognition and other reflexive actions that do not require much, if any, deep thought on our part.

Unnatural cognition, therefore, are thinking processes that require deep levels of concentration, logical deduction, go against intuitions, and/or require at least a limited amount of training to effectively implement. For example, doing a calculus problem.

McCauley made a few basic observations to make the point of why this matters or why the issue of why the cognitive processes underlying science and religion are important:

First, religion of some kind is ubiquitous. All cultures in all parts of the world extending down to the beginning of our species have developed religion. The existence of religion within human society is not dependent on literacy. Illiterate and literate people alike both have an easy time acquiring and passing on religion. Science, on the other hand (as opposed to technology), is not ubiquitous. Not all cultures have developed science and science does not extend nearly as far back into civilization as religion does. Scientific thinking and some amount of literacy go hand in hand.

Science relies on extensive institutional and educational support to develop, flourish, and continue from one generation to another. Scientists are specially trained to think in ways which defy conventional ways of thinking and often involve concepts and conclusions that are counter-intuitive. For example, science has largely banished the role of agency in causal explanations. This means that we do not seek explanations that appeal to the wants, desires, goals, or purposes of some conscious, thinking agent that resembles ourselves.

Religion, on the other hand, only relies on minimal variations of our naturally developed knowledge systems and does not restrict the role of agency in causal explanations (something that we find easy to comprehend). A ghost that walks through a wall only requires a minimal modification of our basic intuitions about the solidity of objects, etc. More importantly, however, is that such beliefs not only grab our attention but are also memorable and therefore lend themselves to cultural transmission. Science, while often attention grabbing, is not especially memorable, hence the ever-present problem of scientists attempting to explain their findings to the general public. It takes great effort to generate and transmit scientific explanations.

All of this actually sounded quite familiar to me while I listened to it, and I realized that I had read similar, if not nearly identical, arguments in Pascal Boyer’s book Religion Explained. Here is how Boyer explains this argument near the end of the book with, fittingly, a reference to McCauley:

What makes scientific knowledge-gathering special is not just its departure from our spontaneous intuitions but also the special kind of communication it requires, not just the way one mind works but also how other minds react to the information communicated. Scientific progress is brought about by a very odd form of social interaction, in which some of our motivational systems (a desire to reduce uncertainty, to impress other people, to gain status, as well as the aesthetic appeal of ingenuity) are required for purposes quite different from their evolutionary background. In other words, scientific activity is both cognitively and socially very unlikely, which is why it has only been developed by a very small number of people, in a small number of places, for what is only a minuscule part of our evolutionary history. As philosopher Robert McCauley concludes, on the basis of similar arguments, science is every bit as ‘unnatural’ to the human mind as religion is ‘natural.’

Given this, McCauley proposes the following consequence: Wherever there are human beings there will be religion, but there is no guarantee that science or the institutions that support it will endure. Scientific thinking, therefore, will never replace religious thinking no matter how strong of an effort we mount, despite the possible wishes of Richard Dawkins and others.

Of course, this does not explain the existence or persistence of non-believers. But ask yourself this: how likely is it that you could find a truly non-religious person in a backwater village? And that’s the point. Science requires a monumental effort on the part of society to maintain a foothold into our brains.

What do you think? Are we really doomed to always have to live with religion or do you see a candle in all of this darkness?

(By the way, I am making this my new poll question. Check it out on the right sidebar)