Science and God: An automatic opposition between ultimate explanations:
Science and religion have come into conflict repeatedly throughout history, and one simple reason for this is the two offer competing explanations for many of the same phenomena. We present evidence that the conflict between these two concepts can occur automatically, such that increasing the perceived value of one decreases the automatic evaluation of the other. In Experiment 1, scientific theories described as poor explanations decreased automatic evaluations of science, but simultaneously increased automatic evaluations of God. In Experiment 2, using God as an explanation increased automatic evaluations of God, but decreased automatic evaluations of science. Religion and science both have the potential to be ultimate explanations, and these findings suggest that this competition for explanatory space can create an automatic opposition in evaluations.
The authors used the same priming strategies utilized in Project Implicit. So the ScienceDaily summary claims, ” A person’s unconscious attitudes toward science and God may be fundamentally opposed, researchers report, depending on how religion and science are used to answer “ultimate” questions such as how the universe began or the origin of life.” The shift in outcome contingent upon inputs was pretty stark, as evident in these two figures:
The argument then seems to go that there are a finite set of explanatory elements we have mental “slots” for; priming in favor of science tends to edge God out of the picture, while priming against makes God more prominent as a plausible explanation. But there’s a major issue I have with this study. The first figure is based on an experiment done on “One hundred twenty-nine six volunteers from The University of Chicago, The University of Western Ontario, and Harvard University agreed to participate in exchange for $5 or for partial course credit.” The participants in the second were “Twenty-seven undergraduates from Harvard University volunteered to participate for partial course credit…” The evidence that young children are Creationists suggests that when these children develop in an environment which sanctions the likelihood that evolutionary biology is a valid science, they discard their Creationist intuitions. Conversely, in social contexts where their intuitions are reinforced, they hold on to their naive intuitions as adults.
I don’t know about University of Western Ontario, but Harvard and University of Chicago students aren’t typical subjects in terms of how plausible they might find the claims of science vs. religion. I would be interested to see how the results would have shaken out if the participants were from conservative Christian backgrounds which had a more skeptical stance as to the validity of a range of sciences. Most people I know personally are religious skeptics, and argue that the ultimate causal origin of religion is as an explanation of deep questions about the existence of the universe. These sorts of experiments strike at that root, but there are many other dimensions of religion, not least of which is the communitarian and ritual aspects. How encapsulated in the implicit mind from these inputs? That would be an interesting question to query, but I’m skeptical that elite university student bodies are representative in this regard….
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