Brown Symposium, Science and Religion

The topic of this year’s Brown Symposium intrigued me greatly as both a scientist and a Christian. Science and Religion has been discussed for as long as I can remember. In grade school evolution was touched on and then revoked and then again mentioned but then scold. I was confused as a mere 5th grader as to why such a controversy would exist. So as any good scientist would do, I researched. I could see a slight conflict when comparing my little understanding of both subject fields but I didn’t understand why it was a big deal, I always thought people should be allowed to believe in what or whoever they wanted. As I grew up and experienced life more, I created my own perceptions of God and used scientific evidence to back up my ideas. Still there are gaps in my understanding of the two fields but nothing is perfect including science and religion. I was very excited about the series of lectures that were given so I attended a good majority of them. My two favorite were Andrew Newberg’s “How God Changes Your Brain” and Christopher Bader and Paul Froese “Images of God and Views on Science: Findings from the Baylor Religion Survey”.

I enjoyed particularly Bader and Froese’s presentation because they engaged the audience to such a great extent. Bader and Froese created a survey for there study which categories people’s perception of God into four different categories. The study found that perception of God is related to the person’s view of science. The most interesting fact that was presented was that “non believers are more likely to see conflict in science and religion”. I think this makes total sense but total non sense at the same time. I see that a person can become a non believer because of the conflict, some people stop believing if they can’t understand. But at the same time, just because they don’t understand does not give them permission to criticize what someone else believes. Overall, Bader and Froese’s presentation was a clearly straight forward sociology study; however, I don’t think some of the audience members understood you can’t draw causation from a relationship.

Andrew Newberg’s “How God Changes Your Brain” was also very straight forward. His study examined the fMRI images of the brain of those who believed in God, in this case a nun, and an atheist. He found greater activity levels in the frontal lobe of the nun when she was told to think of God but no difference was found in the atheist when the perception of God was though of. I found this interesting because I recently have read a few articles about how meditation changes the brain. I wonder if praying would be considered a type of meditation and how that would affect the brain. I think I need to do more research on Andrew Newberg. I did not understand everything he was talking about but it was very interesting.

I feel like most of the presentations I went to did not present much controversial information. There were a few details that bothered me like when Simon Conway Morris said he believed conciseness does not entirely lay inside the brain, I just don’t see that. The other was David Williams’ belief that religion is a 100% social construct, as a scientist he should know better (nothing is 100%). I can’t wait to discuss the lectures further with my peers.