Category: CCL
Seeking meaning seems a basic urge
Most scientists carefully avoid the idea that nature has a purpose, at least in their professional lives. But humans are also natural storytellers, and stories often have reasons.
Psychologists at Boston University decided to examine just how deep-seated the impulse to find meaning in nature is. In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, they found that professional scientists from top universities became more likely to rate statements that found purpose in nature as true when they were put under time pressure, compared with when they were not racing the clock. Deborah Kelemen, a BU associate professor of psychology, reflected on the research, which suggests that even the most reasonable among us may have a default tendency to look for purpose.
Even scientists susceptible to human bias to find purpose in nature
Scientists pride themselves on being rational. They seek to describe the world as it is, and stay up late looking for new insights. Most scientists carefully avoid the idea that nature has a purpose, at least in their professional lives. But human beings are also natural storytellers, and stories often have reasons. It can be irresistible to think that if something in nature does something—the Earth has an ozone layer that protects it from ultraviolet light, for example—that its function might be the reason it exists.
A team of psychologists at Boston University decided to examine just how deep-seated the impulse to find meaning in nature is, by recruiting professional scientists—chemists, geoscientists, and physicists at BU, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, and Yale—to participate in an experiment.
Even Scientists Unwittingly See Purpose in Nature
As Hurricane Sandy batters the East Coast, some might be looking for a purpose or greater meaning behind Mother Nature's wrath. But perhaps no platitude irks scientists more than "Everything happens for a reason."
A new study, however, suggests this might be our default way of thinking. The research shows that humans may have a bias for purpose-based reasoning that even scientists can't escape.
Is It Silly To Seek Purpose In The Natural World?
Science and religion alike grapple with some of our deepest questions: What is the purpose of life? Why is the natural world just so? Why does the biological world strike us as so exquisitely designed?
But do all questions deserve an answer? In a 2008 lecture, Richard Dawkins argued that they don't (you can hear his lecture on "The Purpose of Purpose" here). In particular, we can't always answer purpose-seeking "why" questions. Sure, science can explain why birds have wings in evolutionary terms, or how mountains form by appeal to geological processes. But can science answer a question like, "What is the purpose of a mountain?" According to Dawkins, this is a silly question that doesn't deserve an answer.
But not everyone finds questions about the purpose of mountains so silly. In a 1999 paper, developmental psychologist Deborah Kelemen asked 4- and 5-year-old children a variety of questions about the living and nonliving natural world, including "What's the mountain [in this picture] for?" Over half the children provided purpose-based answers, suggesting, for example, that the mountain was "to climb" or "to drive around." When asked to agree with a character who claimed that "mountains are made for something," or another who claimed, like Dawkins, that "this is silly," the majority of children judged the call for purpose sensible, not silly.
The Religious Brain: A Default Setting?
...Now there's new research on this front—and once again, it's bad news for those who hope that we'll someday elevate ourselves into an Enlightenment state where critical thinking becomes a default tendency. In a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, a team of scientists at Boston University find that even professional physicists are susceptible to one of the key mental defaults associated with religion—namely, teleological or purpose-oriented thinking.
The experiment involved a group of 80 physical scientists, who were compared to control groups of (1) college undergraduates; (2) college graduates who were the same age as the scientists, but did not have advanced degrees; and (3) scholars from the humanities (in a second study). All experimental participants were asked to judge the truth of a variety of short statements that contained false teleological explanations: e.g., "Trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe," and "Germs mutate in order to become drug resistant." Critically, sometimes the participants were required to evaluate the statements very quickly, but at other times they were allowed to take their time and think it through...
Even Professional Scientists Are Compelled to See Purpose in Nature, Psychologists Find
A team of researchers in Boston University's Department of Psychology has found that, despite years of scientific training, even professional chemists, geologists, and physicists from major universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale cannot escape a deep-seated belief that natural phenomena exist for a purpose.
Does Studying Why People Believe in God Challenge God’s Existence?
In my essay on the origin of religion earlier this month, I describe new research tackling the question of how belief in unseen deities arose. One leading model from cognitive science suggests that religion is a natural consequence of human social cognition and that we are primed to see the work of another thinking being—an agent—in the natural world and our lives. But a person of faith might give a different kind of answer: Religion arose because divinity exists, and belief in deities represents the human response to it.
Does the cognitive science model conflict with that religious perspective? Some creationists find the research an attack on faith. But the scientists I interviewed said that the question of whether God exists is distinct from their research. For example, Deborah Kelemen of Boston University, whose psychological studies have found that children and adults have a natural penchant for creationist explanations, says that her work “does not speak to the existence of God; it speaks to why and how we might believe. Whether God exists is a separate question, one we can’t scientifically test.” Those who are upset by the idea that human minds are likely to construct gods, or that evolution has shaped religion, “are misreading the message of this work,” she says.
On the Origin of Religion
To Charles Darwin, the origin of religious belief was no mystery. “As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence,” he wrote in The Descent of Man.
But our propensity to believe in unseen deities has long puzzled Darwin’s scientific descendants. Every human society has had
its gods, whether worshipped from Gothic cathedrals or Mayan pyramids. In all cultures, humans pour resources into elaborate religious buildings and rituals, with no obvious boost to survival and reproduction. So how and when did religion arise?
