Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

It’s official. Scientists really are less religious than most folks are. In fact, close to 52 percent of American scientists claim no religious affiliation at all, as opposed to 14 percent of the general population. Should we be surprised?

Probably not. But a new study conducted by University of Buffalo sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund at least sheds some helpful light on why so many scientists got to be that way.

The biggest revelation, it turns out, is that it wasn’t all those hours in the lab that led white-frocked chemists and biologists down the road to godlessness. Nor was it because they read Darwin or Einstein and concluded that the whole grand scheme of things required no supreme creator. It wasn’t even, in the case of the social scientists, that they converted to those ideologies of disenchantment formulated by Marx or Weber.

With roughly 9 in 10 of its citizens claiming to believe in God or a Supreme Being, America is widely acknowledged to be the most religious of modern industrial nations. Yet when it comes to knowledge about religion, it ranks among the most ill-informed. While close to two thirds of all Americans regard the Bible as a source of answers to life’s questions, only half can name even one of the New Testament Gospels. Similarly, in a land of growing religious diversity, only 10 percent of U.S. teenagers can name the world’s five major religions. Stephen Prothero, the head of the department of religion at Boston University, calls this condition a “major civic problem.” His new book, Religious Literacy, tells how we got here—and how we might do better.

Atheism is unknown there; Infidelity rare and secret; so that persons may live to a great Age in that Country, without having their Piety shocked by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel.

Little seems to have changed since Benjamin Franklin penned those words of advice to would-be immigrants in 1782. Most polling data suggest that some 90 percent of Americans believe in God or a supreme spirit. And a recent University of Minnesota study finds that atheists—or at least that lonely 1 percent of the national mix that dares to identify itself as such—are the least trusted group in America.

So why in this land of the God-fearing have the gloves-off arguments of a few God-denying intellectuals been garnering such wide popular attention? Consider book sales alone: Richard Dawkins’s well-stocked arsenal of antireligious thought, The God Delusion, currently claims the No. 7 spot on Amazon and No. 10 on the New York Times list, while Sam Harris’s polemical Letter to a Christian Nation bids fair to equal the sales of his 2004 bestseller, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. Meanwhile, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, though published last winter, continues to spark controversy with its Darwinian take on the all-too-human urge to believe. Beyond the world of books, magician Penn Jillette’s paean to godlessness, first broadcast a year ago on NPR’s This I Believe, continues to be among the most frequently visited stories on the NPR website

Rising skepticism?

Do the polls simply have it wrong when it comes to Americans and religion? British-born pundit Christopher Hitchens, author of the forthcoming God Is Not Great, thinks so. “People lie about their beliefs all the time,” says Hitchens, who adds that he never gets more praise for his talk-show appearances than when he goes after religion. Anecdotage may not trump polling, but surveys exploring religious convictions in more nuanced terms lend some credence to Hitchens’s skepticism. One recent Harris Poll study found that 42 percent of adult Americans were not “absolutely certain” about the existence of God, up from 34 percent three years ago.

If doubt is on the rise, Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, thinks he knows why: “Six years of Bush, which seems to be a step in the direction of theocracy, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism seem to suggest that the world is moving toward two extreme religious views.” Confessing to surprise at the size of his audiences on his current U.S. book tour, Dawkins suggests that even moderate and liberal believers are beginning to see that the slide into extremism may not be an aberration but a recurrent tendency within religion.

Possibly. But do Dawkins and the other atheists add anything to a vigorous tradition of skepticism and unbelief that includes the witty satire of Voltaire and the brilliant cultural and psychological probings of Friedrich Nietzsche? What is so new about “The New Atheism,” as the November cover story of Wired magazine dubbed the phenomenon?

A mind is a tough thing to think about. Consciousness is the defining feature of the human species. But is it possible that it is also no more than an extravagant biological add-on, something not really essential to our survival? That intriguing possibility plays on my mind as I cross the plaza of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a breathtaking temple of science perched on a high bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, Calif. I have just visited the office of Terry Sejnowski, the director of Salk’s Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, whose recent research suggests that our conscious minds play less of a role in making decisions than many people have long assumed. “The dopamine neurons are responsible for telling the rest of the brain what stimuli to pay attention to,” Sejnowski says, referring to the cluster of brain cells that produce one of the many chemical elixirs that activate, deactivate, or otherwise alter our mental state. In a deeper way, he explains, evolutionary factors—the need for individual organisms to survive, find food or a mate, and avoid predators—are at work behind the mechanisms of unconscious decision making. “Consciousness explains things that have already been decided for you,” Sejnowski says. Asked whether that means that consciousness is only a bit player in the overarching drama of our lives, he admits that it’s hard to separate rationalizing from decision making. “But,” he adds, “we might overrate the role of our consciousness in making decisions.”

Overrated or underrated, consciousness is not being ignored these days. Indeed, during the past 20 years or so it has become the focus of an expanding intellectual industry involving the combined, but not always harmonious, efforts of neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, artificial intelligence specialists, physicists, and philosophers.

But what, exactly, has this effort accomplished? Has it brought us any closer to understanding how the physical brain is related to the

A mind is a tough thing to think about. Consciousness is the defining feature of the human species. But is it possible that it is also no more than an extravagant biological add-on, something not really essential to our survival? That intriguing possibility plays on my mind as I cross the plaza of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a breathtaking temple of science perched on a high bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, Calif. I have just visited the office of Terry Sejnowski, the director of Salk's Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, whose recent research suggests that our conscious minds play less of a role in making decisions than many people have long assumed. "The dopamine neurons are responsible for telling the rest of the brain what stimuli to pay attention to," Sejnowski says, referring to the cluster of brain cells that produce one of the many chemical elixirs that activate, deactivate, or otherwise alter our mental state. In a deeper way, he explains, evolutionary factors-the need for individual organisms to survive, find food or a mate, and avoid predators-are at work behind the mechanisms of unconscious decision making. "Consciousness explains things that have already been decided for you," Sejnowski says. Asked whether that means that consciousness is only a bit player in the overarching drama of our lives, he admits that it's hard to separate rationalizing from decision making. "But," he adds, "we might overrate the role of our consciousness in making decisions."

Overrated or underrated, consciousness is not being ignored these days. Indeed, during the past 20 years or so it has become the focus of an expanding intellectual industry involving the combined, but not always harmonious, efforts of neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, artificial intelligence specialists, physicists, and philosophers.

But what, exactly, has this effort accomplished? Has it brought us any closer to understanding how the physical brain is related to the thinking, experiencing, self-aware mind? Is the scientific study of consciousness approaching its own Copernican moment, when the fruits of experimental work yield a compelling, comprehensive theory?

Will the sum and substance of that evanescent phenomenon we call mind one day be completely understood in terms of the physical structure and functioning of the brain? Some philosophers and scientists think so. They believe that even the deepest puzzlements of the human psyche—awareness, the sense of self, and consciousness itself—will yield to the scientific investigations of neuronal circuitry and chemistry. Thanks to a host of new and ever-improving brain-monitoring and imaging technologies, we will come to see not only how brain architecture and activity correlate with consciousness but how they cause it—and even, if we agree with the philosopher Daniel Dennett, how they are it. If successful, this dazzling feat of reductionism will close the Cartesian mind-body divide and bring the intractable mind fully into the Darwinian paradigm, making the seat of the soul no less a mystery than any other highly evolved product of natural selection.

Or will it? As one might expect, dissenters and doubters abound. Among them, there is possibly no more interesting or qualified a skeptic than psychologist Jerome Kagan, a professor emeritus at Harvard University and the former director of its Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. In a career marked by works that have helped define and shape his still relatively young field—Change and Continuity in Infancy, The Nature of the Child, Galen’s Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature, and Three Seductive Ideas are just a few of his titles—Kagan has been at the forefront of what is called the cognitive revolution in psychology. More to the point, he has been party to a major paradigm shift within his discipline. Simply put (and granting the existence of widely divergent schools within each broad paradigm), that shift has moved the field from an emphasis on nurture to one on nature, from Freudianism and behaviorism at one end to evolutionary psychology and neuroscience at the other.