In contrast, modern scientific thinking is radically unnatural. It is difficult to acquire as a skill, and researchers find that even people trained in science can easily revert to nonscientific thinking.
McCauley’s best-known work, the 1990 book “Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture,” written with E. Thomas Lawson, helped start the scientific study of religious cognition, influencing or foreshadowing well-known thinkers on religion and culture such as Pascal Boyer, Daniel Dennett, and Scott Atran.
Those thinkers have tended to use evolutionary explanations of religion as a means to dismiss it, part of an increasingly fractious war over whether belief has any place in a rationalist world. McCauley himself considers the whole debate over science and religion overblown--it’s like comparing apples and sofas, he says. Even in places that seem to have abandoned religion, like Northern Europe, he questions whether there hasn’t simply been a shift toward a less-organized form of spiritual expression.
As for the unnatural world of science, he’s worried. He spoke to Ideas twice by phone; this interview was edited and condensed from those conversations.
IDEAS: Back in 1990, you and Tom Lawson pioneered the scientific study of religion, by trying to trace the cognitive basis for religion. What’s changed in the field in the last two decades?
MCCAULEY: The changes are huge! Things like social neuroscience didn’t exist in the 1980s much. There are both new tools and new findings. The most prominent tools have been those for neuroimaging. We’re seeing lots of interesting findings. Emma Cohen studied Oxford’s rowing teams. One finding she got is the guys who were rowing in synchrony have far, far higher pain thresholds, by virtue, it looks like, of their joint effort. That seems to resonate fairly closely with what we know about religion.
IDEAS: What popular ideas have emerged that are wrong?
