here’s been a lot of rhetoric lately about how we can just do away with religion, it’s some kind of virus that needs to be killed off—a new resurrecting of the secularization thesis,” says Justin Barrett. “It just doesn’t square with the scientific evidence.” He is discussing the aims of his program, “Empirical Expansion in Cognitive Science and Religion,” which he hopes will improve professionalism and scientific methodology in this field.
Barrett is senior researcher at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind and The Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at University of Oxford. He has put together a project team, hiring three post-doctoral fellows on the program. “The primary impetus for the project was a growing concern I’ve had for the last couple of years that a lot of my colleagues in the field and some popularizers of science and religion issues have been making too much of too little data. And maybe,” he adds, “I should be counted in that number.”
The problem is that, in a young discipline with no text books or training courses, a lot of people are coming from the humanities, without any scientific background, who are not used to hypothesis testing or marshalling systematic data to substantiate claims—they want to go straight to the argument. “Part of the reason for the project,” explains Barrett, “is to shore up the evidential foundation of this field and that’s why it’s called empirical expansion.”
The team is approaching this task in two ways. “One is a small grant competition where we’re trying to fund pithy projects that do just what I’ve described,” says Barrett. “This summer we anticipate making 15 awards, saving the bulk of them for the following year: four two-year awards, six one-year awards, and five junior awards.”
The second approach is through retooling exercises—methodological expansion—to help either junior scholars, doctoral or post-doctoral students, or even more senior scholars who want to retool, to acquire hypothesis testing skills. This methodological expansion program will conduct a workshop in the summer of 2009. As a preliminary, team members are carrying out an empirical assessment of the field, going meticulously through all existing theories and looking for evidential gaps to be addressed. By putting the results on a website, interested scholars will be afforded an opportunity to fine-tune project proposals.
Barrett admits that basically he is trying to tighten the discipline within his field. He estimates that four-fifths of scholars who are currently calling themselves cognitive scientists in religion are from the humanities. Their enthusiasm is welcome and the prospects for this field of investigation are potentially very rich, but only if it is conducted under rigorous, scientific methodology. Retooling of scholars is the solution. He cites the example of Pascal Boyer, one of the founders of the field, who was a cultural anthropologist and retooled himself as an experimental psychologist.
Barrett personally is most specifically associated with the concept of the naturalness of religious belief, which he expounded in his book, published in 2004, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? That thesis remains central to his thinking. “I would like to see a more sophisticated understanding of just how deeply rooted in human nature different kinds of religious and spiritual impulses are, including thought and action.”
This he sees as posing the biggest questions in the field of cognitive science and religion. “I suppose if there’s an over-arching theme it’s the naturalness of religion. How natural is religion? How much is it a part of naturally developing human cognitive systems? How does relatively natural human cognition inform and constrain religious expression? and Can it help us to understand cross-cultural recurrences? That’s the general theme.”
Barrett believes the scientific information being quarried in academic disciplines such as his contradicts the secularist thesis. “It looks as if the evidence points in the opposite direction, that there’s something about humans that makes them intrinsically religious and that, rather than naturalism or atheism being a default stance, I think it’s actually being religious that’s a default stance. It takes very special conditions for atheism to spread as a worldview.”