This week, Christopher Hitchens and Bill Maher, two of North America's most prominent atheists, sat around on Mr. Maher's television show “gloating,” as they put it themselves, about the latest revelations of child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.
While one can imagine better ways to talk about such life-destroying tragedies, it seems nearly anything can be fodder for the ongoing, vitriolic war between believers and non-believers.
For the most part, the battleground has been book sales on Amazon.com, but the conflict does reach into other spheres: This week, a U.S. appeals court rejected a lawsuit claiming that the use of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance discriminated against atheists, while a vandal in Detroit this week destroyed bus ads that said, “Don't believe in God? You're not alone.”
And now, the brain scientists who have famously sought the wellspring of faith in the grey matter of nuns and monks are turning their attention to the other side. In the past two years, an international scientific network has been formed to collect research on atheism. Pitzer College in Los Angeles is expected to announce the first secular studies department in the world this spring. Last December, social scientists gathered at the University of Oxford for a conference on atheism – a rare academic event, according to one of the organizers, Stephen Bullivant.
They were looking at the natural next challenge in neurotheology: If religion or spiritual belief is the human default position, how does atheism happen?
No clear conclusions were reached, says Dr. Bullivant, a research fellow in theology at Oxford. But here are some of the questions researchers are asking.
Do atheists' brains work differently?
The widespread idea that human brains have a special area that governs spiritual belief – a “God Spot” – has been disputed by scientists such as Jordan Grafman, a neuropsychologist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md.
Doing brain imagining on believers while they prayed and meditated, he found that the areas of the brain involved were the expected areas of memory and feeling; no special section was suddenly activated.
“Maybe we are special in the eyes of God, but God didn't place anything special in our brains – at least as far as we can see,” Dr. Grafman says.
Other studies have shown that beliefs about God, for or against, originate in the same part of the brain. Only the interpretation of information is different.
In Rorschach ink-blot studies, for instance, believers tended to see images that weren't there and non-believers tended to miss images that were present.
At the same time, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College who studies atheists, points to people in his research who report growing up in heavily Christian background, but always feeling that they were atheists – with the same conflicted emotions, he suggests, as gay people have growing up.
He also points out gender differences in religious belief, which may suggest something biological is at play. “Men always tend to be more secular than women. And that's in every study, in every country, in every race, for every known measure of religiosity,” he says.
Are atheists smarter than people who believe in God?
Historically, atheism has been a position open mainly to educated, upper-class people – a segment of society with the resources and leisure time to ponder life's larger questions, as well as the freedom to break with social norms.
A study released in February using survey data and IQ tests from British teenagers found that the teens with higher intelligence scores were more likely to be atheists.
Todd Shackelford, an evolutionary psychologist at Florida Atlantic University, has reviewed 40 studies on religious and intelligence going back 100 years. He says all but two of them suggested that more educated people tended to be less religious.
