Some people state that there is no conflict between science and religion. Yes there is. The latest research in neuro-science through neuro-imagining by Dimitrios Kapogiannis, National Institutes of Health USA, Neuroradiology, shows a definite neural foundation of religious beliefs in the brain www.pnas.org/content/106/12/4876.short
Social cognition is the “encoding, storage, retrieval and processing of information in the Brain. The experiments regarding the beliefs systems indicate that religion is a product of the brain that evolved to help humans cope with the little understood environment. Fear of the unknown was a powerful survival instinct. We also have an innate sense of morality as found in studies (Just Babies: the origin of good and evil by Paul Bloom) that babies who do are to young to have been indoctrinated by religion have a sense of right and wrong, an interesting read. That brings into question the assertion that we need religion to be moral. An interesting quote I ran into (I wish I could remember the source) was:
Morality is what is right in spite of what we are told.
Religious Morality is doing what we are told regardless whether it is right.
I leave you with one more “bon mot”: It takes religion to make good people do bad things! That sums up very well, doesn’t it?
Social cognition is the “encoding, storage, retrieval and processing of information in the Brain. The experiments regarding the beliefs systems indicate that religion is a product of the brain that evolved to help humans cope with the little understood environment. Fear of the unknown was a powerful survival instinct. We also have an innate sense of morality as found in studies (Just Babies: the origin of good and evil by Paul Bloom) that babies who do are to young to have been indoctrinated by religion have a sense of right and wrong, an interesting read. That brings into question the assertion that we need religion to be moral. An interesting quote I ran into (I wish I could remember the source) was:
Morality is what is right in spite of what we are told.
Religious Morality is doing what we are told regardless whether it is right.
I leave you with one more “bon mot”: It takes religion to make good people do bad things! That sums up very well, doesn’t it?
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