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On the Intersection of Science and Religion

Over the centuries, the relationship between science and religion has ranged from conflict and hostility to harmony and collaboration, while various thinkers have argued that the two concepts are inherently at odds and entirely separate .

But much recent research and discussion on these issues has taken place in a Western context, primarily through a Christian lens. To better understand the ways in which science relates to religion around the world, Pew Research Center engaged a small group of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists to talk about their perspectives. These one-on-one, in-depth interviews took place in Malaysia and Singapore – two Southeast Asian nations that have made sizable investments in scientific research and development in recent years and that are home to religiously diverse populations.

The discussions reinforced the conclusion that there is no single, universally held view of the relationship between science and religion, but they also identified some common patterns and themes within each of the three religious groups. For example, many Muslims expressed the view that Islam and science are basically compatible, while, at the same time, acknowledging some areas of friction – such as the theory of evolution conflicting with religious beliefs about the origins and development of human life on Earth. Evolution also has been a point of discord between religion and science in the West .

Hindu interviewees generally took a different tack, describing science and religion as overlapping spheres. As was the case with Muslim interviewees, many Hindus maintained that their religion contains elements of science, and that Hinduism long ago identified concepts that were later illuminated by science – mentioning, for example, the antimicrobial properties of copper or the health benefits of turmeric. In contrast with Muslims, many Hindus said the theory of evolution is encompassed in their religious teachings.

Buddhist interviewees generally described religion and science as two separate and unrelated spheres. Several of the Buddhists talked about their religion as offering guidance on how to live a moral life, while describing science as observable phenomena. Often, they could not name any areas of scientific research that concerned them for religious reasons. Nor did Buddhist interviewees see the theory of evolution as a point of conflict with their religion. Some said they didn’t think their religion addressed the origins of life on Earth.

Some members of all three religious groups, however, did express religious concerns when asked to consider specific kinds of biotechnology research, such as gene editing to change a baby’s genetic characteristics and efforts to clone animals. For example, Muslim interviewees said cloning would tamper with the power of God, and God should be the only one to create living things. When Hindus and Buddhists discussed gene editing and cloning, some, though not all, voiced concern that these scientific developments might interfere with karma or reincarnation.

But religion was not always the foremost topic that came to mind when people thought about science. In response to questions about government investment in scientific research, interviewees generally spoke of the role of scientific achievements in national prestige and economic development; religious differences faded into the background.

These are some of the key findings from a qualitative analysis of 72 individual interviews with Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists conducted in Malaysia and Singapore between June 17 and Aug. 8, 2019.

The study included 24 people in each of three religious groups (Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists), with an equal number in each country. All interviewees said their religion was “very” or “somewhat” important to their lives, but they otherwise varied in terms of age, gender, profession and education level.

A majority of Malaysians are Muslim, and the country has experienced natural migration patterns over the years. As a result, Buddhist interviewees in Malaysia were typically of Chinese descent, Hindus were of Indian descent and Muslim interviewees were Malay. Singapore is known for its religious diversity; a 2014 Pew Research Center analysis found the city-state to have the highest level of religious diversity in the world.

Insights from these qualitative interviews are inherently limited in that they are based on small convenience samples of individuals and are not representative of religious groups either in their country or globally. Instead, in-depth interviews provide insight into how individuals describe their beliefs, in their own words, and the connections they see (or don’t see) with science. To help guard against putting too much weight on any single individual’s comments, all interviews were coded into themes, following a systematic procedure. Where possible throughout the rest of this report, these findings are shown in comparison with quantitative surveys conducted with representative samples of adults in global publics to help address questions about the extent to which certain viewpoints are widely held among members of each religious group. This also shows how Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists as well as Christians around the world compare with each other.

The goal of this project was to better understand how people think about science in connection with their religious beliefs. Past research on this topic has often focused on the views of Christians living in the U.S. or other economically advanced nations. This study sought to fill that gap by talking, one-on-one, with Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists living in two growing economies in Southeast Asia: Malaysia and Singapore. Pew Research Center conducted qualitative interviews with 72 people, including 24 in each of the three religious groups (12 in each country).

To be eligible for the study, interviewees had to identify their religious affiliation as Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, and describe religion as either “very” or “somewhat” important in their lives. They varied in other demographic characteristics, including age, gender, ethnicity, profession, employment status and educational attainment.

Interviews were conducted by Ipsos Qualitative with a local, professional interviewer, using a guide developed by Pew Research Center. Interviews lasted about one hour and were conducted in English in Singapore, and in English or Malay in Malaysia. The Singaporean interviews were conducted June 17 to July 26, 2019, and the Malaysian interviews were done July 31 to Aug. 8, 2019.

Center researchers listened to audio recordings of the interviews and systematically coded transcripts for thematic responses, using qualitative data analysis software. Themes were revised and integrated throughout the coding process, until researchers agreed upon a consistent set of categories. The qualitative interviews are based on small, convenience samples of individuals and are not representative of religious groups in either country. Whenever possible, these findings are shown in comparison with quantitative data from global surveys using representative samples of adults who identify as Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Christian. You can find the interview guide here .

Interviewees paint three distinct portraits of the science-religion relationship

One of the most striking takeaways from interviews conducted with Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists stems from the different ways that people in each group described their perspectives on the relationship between science and religion. The Muslims interviewed tended to speak of an overlap between their religion and science, and some raised areas of tension between the two. Hindu interviewees, by and large, described science and religion as overlapping but compatible spheres. By contrast, Buddhist interviewees described science and religion as parallel concepts, with no particular touchpoints between the two.

A similar pattern emerged when interviewees were asked about possible topics that should be off limits to scientific research for religious reasons. Many Muslim interviewees readily named research areas that concerned them, such as studies using non-halal substances or some applications of assisted reproductive technology (for example, in vitro fertilization using genetic material from someone other than a married couple). By contrast, the Hindus and Buddhists in the study did not regularly name any research topics that they felt should be off limits to scientists.

Muslim interviewees say science and religion are related, but they vary in how they see the nature of that relationship

On the relationship between science and islam.

“I don’t see any conflicts [between science and religion]. From what I know in the Quran, they say that there is science in Islam. They talk about the sun, the moon, the stars. They talk about how the water can go up to the sky and become the clouds. When it’s heavy, it goes down to the Earth where it’s taken by the plants when it evaporates up again. It’s part of science.” – Muslim man, age 35, Singapore

“I know that sometimes science and religion don’t tally. … As a person of religion, we tend to believe what our book says. Yeah, I believe what the Quran says, [rather] than scientific proof.” – Muslim woman, age 40, Singapore

Muslims frequently described science and their religion as related, rather than separate, concepts. They often said that their holy text, the Quran, contains many elements of science. The Muslims interviewed also said that Islam and science are often trying to describe similar things. “The research in science are related to the Quran. There are similarities between religion and what is explained by science,” said one Muslim woman (age 25, Malaysia).

The Muslims interviewed offered a wide variety of opinions about the nature of the relationship between science and religion, and whether the two are harmonious or conflicting. Some described science and Islam as compatible overall. For example, one Muslim man said that both science and his religion explain the same things, just from different perspectives: “I think there is not any conflict between them. … In my opinion, I still believe that it happens because of God, just that the science will help to explain the details about why it is happening” (age 24, Malaysia). Others qualified their statement by saying that science is compatible with religion, but the actions of individual scientists can be problematic. “Actually, science and religion don’t conflict with each other – it’s humans’ opinions that conflict,” said one interviewee (Muslim man, age 36, Malaysia).

Still others described the relationship as conflictual. “I feel like, sometimes, or most of the time, they are against each other. … Science is about experimenting, researching, finding new things, or exploring different possibilities. But then, religion is very fixed, to me,” said one Muslim woman (age 20, Singapore). Another interviewee said scientists typically do not consider the views of religious people when conducting their research. “Scientists, whatever they do, they don’t ask for opinions from people well-versed in religious matters,” said another Muslim woman (age 39, Malaysia).

When asked, many of the Muslims interviewed identified specific areas of scientific research that bothered them on religious grounds. Some of the areas mentioned by multiple interviewees included research that uses non-halal substances (such as marijuana, alcohol or pigs), some pregnancy technologies that they considered unnatural (for example, “test tube babies” or procedures that use genetic material not taken from a husband and wife) or cloning.

Similarly, a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2011 and 2012 that examined the views of Muslims found that, in most regions, half or more said there was no conflict between religion and science, including 54% in Malaysia (Muslims in Singapore were not surveyed). Three-in-ten Malaysian Muslims said there is a conflict between science and religion; the share of Muslims around the world who took this position ranged from a high of 57% in Albania to a low of 14% in the Palestinian territories.

Hindu interviewees generally see science and religion as compatibly overlapping spheres

The predominant view among Hindus interviewed in Malaysia and Singapore is that science and Hinduism are related and compatible. Many of the Hindu interviewees offered – without prompting– the assertion that their religion contains many ancient insights that have been upheld by modern science. For instance, multiple interviewees described the use of turmeric in cleansing solutions, or the use of copper in drinking mugs. They said Hindus have known for thousands of years that these materials provide health benefits, but that scientists have only confirmed relatively recently that it’s because turmeric and copper have antimicrobial properties. “When you question certain rituals or rites in Hinduism, there’s also a relatively scientific explanation to it,” said a Hindu woman (age 29, Singapore).

On the relationship between science and Hinduism

“I believe that whatever science says, the purpose has already been told in my religion. For example, it is said that drinking water from a copper container is very good. This has been proven by the ancestors many years ago. But now only these scientific people come out and say that it is good to use it.” – Hindu woman, age 29, Malaysia

“No, feel free to go ahead and [research] everything. Why would you need to restrict yourself from information or knowledge? Because Hinduism is based on knowledge. It’s called ‘Nyaya.’ That’s ‘knowledge,’ literally translated.” – Hindu man, age 38, Singapore

While many of the Hindu interviewees said science and religion overlap, others described the two as separate realms. “Religion doesn’t really govern science, and it shouldn’t. Science should just be science. … Today, the researchers, even if they are religious, the research is your duty. The duty and religion are different,” said one Hindu man (age 42, Singapore).

Asked to think about areas of scientific research that might raise concerns or that should not be pursued for religious reasons, Hindu interviewees generally came up blank, saying they couldn’t think of any such areas. A few mentioned areas of research that concerned them, but no topic area came up consistently.

Buddhist interviewees see science and religion as operating in parallel domains

Buddhist interviewees described science and religion in distinctly different ways than either Muslims or Hindus. For the most part, Buddhists said that science and religion are two unrelated domains. Some have long held that Buddhism and its practice are aligned with the empirically driven observations in the scientific method ; connections between Buddhism and science have been bolstered by neuroscience research into the effects of Buddhist meditation at the core of the mindfulness movement.

On the relationship between science and Buddhism

“Science is something more modern, but Buddhism is something like a mindset. And science is more practical, but Buddhism is theoretical. It is not conflicting.” – Buddhist man, age 40, Malaysia

“I would say that the two [science and religion] are running parallel. It’s difficult to merge the two.” – Buddhist man, age 64, Singapore

One Buddhist woman (age 39, Malaysia) said science is something that relates to “facts and figures,” while religion helps her live a good and moral life. Another Singaporean Buddhist woman (age 26) explained that, “Science to me is statistics, numbers, texts – something you can see, you can touch, you can hear. Religion is more of something you cannot see, you cannot touch, you cannot hear. I feel like they are different faculties.”

To many of the Buddhist interviewees, science and religion cannot be in conflict, because they are different or parallel realms. Therefore, the Malaysian and Singaporean Buddhists largely described the relationship between science and religion as one of compatibility.

Indeed, even when prompted to think about potential areas of scientific research that raised concerns for religious reasons, relatively few of the Buddhists mentioned any. Among those who did cite a concern, a common response involved animal testing. Buddhist interviewees talked about the importance of not killing living things in the practice of their religion, so some felt that research that causes harm or death to animals is worrisome.

The tenor of these comments is consistent with survey findings from the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor. Majorities of Buddhists in all 10 countries with large enough samples for analysis said that science has “never disagreed” with the teachings of their religion. 3 This includes 59% of Buddhists in Singapore. (In Malaysia, 55% of Buddhists said the same. However, these results should be interpreted with extra caution because there were just 129 Malaysian Buddhists in the survey sample.) Far smaller shares of Buddhists in these countries see a conflict between science and their religion’s teachings.

Surveys among Christians find wide variation in perceptions of conflict between religion and science though more see at least some conflict than do not

For comparison, representative surveys of Christians around the world also find widely ranging views about whether religion and science have ever disagreed or are generally in conflict. The 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor survey finds wide variation in Christians’ views on this issue. 4 The U.S. stands out, along with several southern European nations, for its relatively high share of Christians reporting that science has disagreed with the teachings of their religion (61%). By contrast, 22% in Singapore, 18% in Sweden and 12% in the Czech Republic say the same.

Pew Research Center surveys asked a similar question in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in Latin America . Christians in these regions tilt toward saying that “there is generally a conflict between science and religion.” A median of 49% of Christians in Central and Eastern Europe say there is generally a conflict, and a median of 39% say there is not. The median view on this question in Latin American was similar (50% to 40%).

In a U.S.-based Pew Research Center survey , a majority of Christians (55%) said that science and religion are “often in conflict” when thinking in general terms about religion. When thinking about their own religious beliefs, however, fewer Christians (35%) said their personal religious beliefs sometimes conflict with science; a majority of U.S. Christians (63%) said the two do not conflict.

Such findings broadly align with Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher P. Scheitle’s analysis in “Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think,” which finds that many U.S. Christians see little conflict between science and their faith.

This survey also provides a window into the kinds of things that Christians see as a conflict between science and religion. In an open-ended question included on the Center’s survey, respondents who said science conflicted with their personal religious beliefs were asked to identify up to three areas of conflict. Christians most commonly mentioned the creation of the universe, including evolution and the “Big Bang” (cited by 38% of U.S. Christians who saw a conflict between science and their religious beliefs). Respondents also mentioned broad tensions including the idea that man (rather than God) is “in charge,” beliefs in miracles, or a belief in the events of the Bible (26%). Others cited conflict over the beginning of life, abortion, and scientific technologies involving human embryos (12%) or other medical practices (7%).

Evolution is a more frequent point of conflict for those in Abrahamic faiths such as Islam and Christianity

Evolution raised areas of disagreement for many Muslim interviewees, who often said the theory of evolution is incompatible with the Islamic tenet that humans were created by Allah. Evolution is also a common, though by no means universal, friction point for Christians. By contrast, neither Buddhist interviewees, followers of a religion with no creator figure, nor Hindu interviewees, followers of a polytheistic faith, described discord with evolution either in their personal beliefs or in their views of how evolution comports with their religion.

Some Muslims interviewees see origination of humans from the prophet Nabi Adam as at odds with evolution

When asked about the theory of evolution, Muslim interviewees generally talked about conflict between the theory of evolution and their religious beliefs about the origins of human life – specifically, the belief that God created humans in their present form, and that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve. “This is one of the conflicts between religion and Western theory. Based on Western theory, they said we came from monkeys. For me, if we evolved from monkeys, where could we get the stories of [the prophet] Nabi? Was Nabi Muhammad like a monkey in the past? For me, he was human. Allah had created perfect humans, not from monkey to human,” said one Muslim man (age 21, Malaysia).

Islamic views on evolution

“Nonsense. I believe that Nabi Adam is the first human in the world. Before Nabi Adam was created, other living things such as dinosaurs and so on were also created. The theory of human evolution from apes to human is very different from the teaching in Islam.” – Muslim man, age 24, Malaysia

“That theory to me is absurd. People might be saying that during time of Mesopotamia, the people there hunch and bow, with appearance looking like an ape. Maybe that is why one says we come from apes. But, for me, I believe that we come from Adam and Adam came from heaven.” – Muslim woman, age 36, Malaysia

“Our ancestors are not monkeys. Maybe there’s similarity in the DNA, but in Islam the first human is Adam. He’s not a monkey.” – Muslim man, age 35, Singapore

Others emphasized that evolution is only a theory and has not been proven true. “It’s just a theory, because there is no specific evidence or justification. … Just because the DNA [of humans and primates] has a difference of a few percent, that doesn’t mean we are similar,” said a 29-year-old Singaporean Muslim man. Still others said that Charles Darwin developed this theory in order to get famous and did not put adequate thought or research into his theory.

However, a handful of Muslims said they personally believed that humans were descended from primates via the evolutionary process, even though they believed that this deviated from Islamic teaching. “Monkeys can crawl. After that, stand, stand, stand, then become human, right? Yes, I think so. I think, yeah, that one I believe. … [But] religion says all humans in the world come from God. A bit of conflict,” said a 44-year-old Muslim woman from Singapore. Another Muslim woman (age 39, Singapore) said she was open to the concept of evolution, even though her religion tells a different story. “According to religion, we don’t originate from monkeys. But being that we may be related, the possibility is there,” she said.

A Pew Research Center survey of Muslims worldwide conducted in 2011 and 2012 found a 22-public median of 53% said they believed humans and other living things evolved over time. However, levels of acceptance of evolution varied by region and country, with Muslims in South and Southeast Asian countries reporting lower levels of belief in evolution by this measure than Muslims in other regions. In Malaysia, for instance, 37% of Muslim adults said they believed humans and other living things evolved over time.

In the U.S. context, a 2011 Pew Research Center survey found that views of evolution among American Muslims were roughly split: 45% said they believed humans and other living things have evolved over time, while 44% said they have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.

Hindu and Buddhist interviewees emphasize the absence of conflict with the theory of evolution

Evolution posed no conflict to the Hindus interviewed. In keeping with thematic comments that Hinduism contains elements of science, many interviewees said the concept of evolution was encompassed in their religious teachings. “In Hinduism we have something like this as well, that tells us we originated from different species, which is why we also believe in reincarnation, and how certain deities take different forms. This is why certain animals are seen as sacred animals, because it’s one of the forms that this particular deity had taken,” said a 29-year-old Hindu woman in Singapore. When asked about the origins of human life, many Hindu interviewees just quickly replied that humans came from primates.

The Buddhists interviewed also tended to say there was no conflict between their religion and evolution, and that they personally believed in the theory. Some added that they didn’t think their religion addressed humans’ origins at all. “I don’t think Buddhism has any theory on the first human being or anything. For Buddhism, we don’t really have a strong sense of how the first human came along,” said a Buddhist man in Singapore (age 22).

Hindu views on evolution

“I don’t think evolution has anything to do with religion, nothing to do with Hinduism. That was just adaptation. For example, apes to men. It was just adaptation that people eventually changed over time.” – Hindu man, age 26, Singapore

“The concept (of evolution) is the same. The Hindus say it in a different way, and modern science says it in a scientific way.” – Hindu woman, age 27, Malaysia

Buddhist views on evolution

“[Buddhism says] we are all made out of the atoms and molecules, not that we are created by God. Like Christians believe that we are created by God, but no, I as a practicing Buddhist do not believe in that.” – Buddhist woman, age 60, Malaysia

There is limited global survey data on this issue. However, Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study found that 86% of Buddhists and 80% of Hindus in the U.S. said that humans and other living things have evolved over time, with majorities also saying this was due to natural processes.

Surveys of Christians globally find that majorities in most publics surveyed accept the idea that humans and other living things have evolved over time

Pew Research Center surveys conducted in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America find that a majority of Christians in most countries in these regions say humans and other living things have evolved over time. An 18-country median of 61% of Christians say this in Central and Eastern Europe, while a median of 30% say instead that humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. The median views on this issue are similar in Latin America (59% and 35%, respectively).

Views of American Christians are about the same as those global medians: 58% in a 2018 Pew Research Center survey said that humans and other living things have evolved over time, while 42% said they have always existed in their current form.

People’s responses to questions about evolution can vary depending on how the question is asked , however. Specifically, a 2018 Pew Research Center survey focusing on beliefs about the origins of humans found more white evangelical Protestants, Black Protestants and Catholics expressed a belief in evolution when given the option to say that humans evolved with guidance from God or a higher power .

Such differences in how Christians see the issue of evolution are broadly consistent with an analysis by Fern Elsdon-Baker and her research completed with colleagues in the UK and Canada, which suggest that people’s views on evolution can be nuanced, depending on the exact questions asked.

Interviewees across Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist groups cite tension with research that “goes against nature” or involves harm to animals

Two areas of potential conflict with science cut across religious groups. Interviewees from all three groups raised concerns about scientific research that interferes with nature in some way or that causes harm to animals.

Views on animal welfare and scientific research

“When we do scientific research, we just have to ensure we did not endanger other living things, including animals and humans. We don’t bring harm to any of the people, that is the basic moral value.” – Hindu man, age 22, Malaysia

“In Islam, for example, you shouldn’t subject any human or animals to cruelty. So, I believe if you want to do any testing on rats, you need to ask yourself: “Will the rats suffer?’” – Muslim man, age 59, Singapore

In discussing scientific research using gene editing, cloning and reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist interviewees raised the idea that such practices may go against the natural order or interfere with nature. As one Buddhist man simply put it: “If you have anything that interferes with the law of nature, you will have conflict. If you leave nature alone, you will have no conflict” (age 64, Singapore). Similarly, a Muslim woman said “anything that disrupts or changes the natural state” goes against religious beliefs (age 20, Singapore).

When probed about potential areas of scientific research that should be “off limits” from a religious perspective, individuals from all three religious groups talked about the need to consider animal welfare (and sometimes human welfare) in scientific research. This idea occasionally came up when interviewees were asked for their thoughts about cloning and gene editing; others mentioned animal welfare concerns at other points of the interview, along with the need for ethical treatment of living things in general. Buddhists and Hindus in particular emphasized the need to “do no harm” when probed about characteristics that make someone a good follower of their religions.

A few interviewees thought one other topic should be off limits to scientific exploration: research aimed at core beliefs such as the existence of God, the heavens or holy scripture.

Touchpoints between religion and biotechnology research areas

Interviewees were asked to talk about their awareness of and views about each of three specific research areas in biotechnology – new technologies to help women get pregnant, gene editing for babies, and animal cloning. People had generally positive views of pregnancy technology such as in vitro fertilization, although Muslim interviewees pointed out potential objections depending on how these techniques are used. Views of gene editing and cloning were more wide-ranging, with no particular patterns associated with the religious affiliation of the interviewees.

Individuals from all three religions generally approved of pregnancy technology and in vitro fertilization

The first scientific development raised for discussion involved technologies to help women get pregnant. Interviewees often volunteered that they were familiar with in vitro fertilization, commonly referred to as IVF, which is an assisted reproductive technology. Individuals who expressed positive views about IVF mentioned things pertaining to the help it brings to people trying to conceive in modern times. Some even surmised that IVF itself or the knowledge to develop it was a gift from God.

Buddhists and Hindus on IVF

“I don’t think my religion would have any comments on [IVF and surrogacy]. I think Christians would have more comments on it. Like the very staunch Christians, they think that they can’t do this and that. They are very specific.” – Buddhist woman, age 26, Singapore

“It’s a good thing. Some couples don’t have the chance to get babies. With these technologies, people are finding happiness.” – Hindu man, age 24, Malaysia

Muslims accept pregnancy technologies, with conditions

“You cannot use another person to carry your baby, but people want their own flesh-and-blood baby. So, [IVF] is a really good opportunity. Because otherwise people usually just adopt, and it’s not their flesh and blood. They don’t want that.” – Muslim woman, age 24, Singapore

“In my opinion, IVF does not have any conflict with the religion because it helps to continue the descendants and it involves the correct and qualified person. … The man should be the person who is qualified and marry the woman, and the wife should be the person who is qualified to receive the fetus from the man.” – Muslim man, age 24, Malaysia

“For that particular woman to perform this scientific procedure, the company that executes this procedure must make sure that the woman has a certificate of marriage, meaning legitimately married. I think it is that simple. If she is not married, but she wants (to perform this procedure), I don’t think the company should do it. It is immoral.” – Muslim man, age 36, Malaysia

Even among supporters of these technologies, one common sentiment was that people were either unsure of where their religion stood on this issue or thought that other people – those who were older, more conservative or more religious – might be against it. “I think the old-timers are having a bit of a difficult time with being OK with [IVF]. The young generation, my generation, and the ones younger are OK with this,” said one Hindu man (age 26, Singapore).

Some Hindus and Buddhists noted that they were comfortable with pregnancy technologies themselves, but said that there is pushback from other religions, particularly Islam and Christianity. For instance, when asked about IVF, one Buddhist man said, “Oh, wow, that’s a very good question. Controversy, right? I heard about such before, I think, especially coming from Christianity. But, my personal take, I feel it is fine. It’s still trying to get the balance of being a believer of a religion vs. overly superstitious or believing too much in that religion that you forgo the reality of life going on” (Singapore, age 37). Another noted that Buddhism and Hinduism don’t have the same staunch views on IVF as Muslims. “In Buddhism, we don’t have this type of restriction. It’s totally different from other [religions], if I’m not wrong. If you talk about Muslims, there is. If you talk about Hindus, I think also they don’t,” he said (age 43, Singapore).

Muslim interviewees tended to accept technologies to facilitate pregnancy. However, some Muslims emphasized that they would only be OK with these technologies if certain criteria were met – specifically, if the technologies were used by married couples, and with the couples’ own genetic material. “IVF is fine with me because it uses the couple’s egg and sperm and the mother’s body. You need help inseminating the egg, that’s all,” said one Muslim man (age 59, Singapore). Some Muslims also expressed concern about surrogacy in particular; they said Islam prohibits bringing outside parties into a marriage, and that surrogacy is effectively having a third person enter the marriage. A few other Muslims in the study mentioned the need to consult edicts or talk with leaders in the religious community before they would be able to be fully supportive, a common practice for many controversial issues in Islam.

Opinions varied widely on gene editing and animal cloning

Interviewees, regardless of their religion, said the idea of curing a baby of disease before birth or preventing a disease that a child could develop later in life would be a helpful, acceptable use of gene editing. But they often viewed gene editing for cosmetic reasons much more negatively.

Views on gene editing vary depending on how it is used

“I think science and technology aims to help the people. If you modify the baby, it is not good for them. The baby might also not want what the parents edited. In terms of the treatment of diseases, I think is good, as you can cure the baby.” – Buddhist man, age 23, Malaysia

“I like one half of it, the other half I don’t like. The half that I like was eliminating the diseases. The part where you can make the eye color and all that? I wouldn’t say I’m against it, but I’m definitely not up for it.” – Hindu woman, age 40, Singapore

Muslims’ concerns with “playing God”

“Cloning, to put it simply, you’re delving into an area where you’re playing God. It is concerning because if it’s taken as something that’s normal, it means that humans can do things that previously no one could do. That means we could create ourselves. That goes against the beliefs that I have, because as a Muslim, while we have the ability to do certain things, it does not mean that we should do those things.” – Muslim man, age 29, Singapore

Several interviewees brought up the idea of not agreeing with gene editing out of fear that people might want to Westernize their children. For example, some repeated the concern that gene editing would be used to create babies with blond hair and blue eyes. “In terms of the diseases, I think it is acceptable. If they want to change the hair or eyes color? We are not European people,” said one Muslim woman (age 47, Malaysia).

Views of cloning were similarly conditional. Individuals from all three religions remarked on their disapproval of cloning for humans. But interviewees generally found animal cloning to be a much more acceptable practice. Many people interviewed envisioned useful outcomes for society from animal cloning, such as providing meat to feed more people, or to help preserve nearly extinct animals. For example, a Hindu woman said, cloning “is a good idea because some of the animals, like tigers, are on the brink of extinction, so I think it is good to clone before they are extinct” (age 27, Malaysia).

Many of the issues raised about gene editing and cloning mirrored each other. Some of the concerns were based on religious traditions and values. For example, primarily Muslim interviewees mentioned that cloning could interfere with the power of God, who should be the only one who can create.

To the extent Hindus and Buddhists in the study expressed religious concerns pertaining to gene editing and cloning, they generally brought up the idea that these scientific methods might interfere with karma or reincarnation. (Some interviewees also mentioned the potential of IVF to interfere with karma, but they were generally less concerned about this.) One Buddhist woman, talking about gene editing, said: “Sometimes the person is born with sufferings, and it is because maybe previously he had been doing some evil things” (age 45, Singapore). When asked about cloning, a Hindu man expressed similar views. “For Hinduism, we believe that how we look like, how we are, our hands and our legs, it’s because of our past life. So, for example, they will always say that if I am handsome and I’m smart, it’s because in my past life I actually was a nicer person to people. Because of karma, because of reincarnation, I was born back into the better person” (Hindu man, age 25, Singapore).

Religious differences fade as interviewees think about the value of government investments in scientific research

Not all aspects of science are seen through a religious lens. Regardless of their religion, the people we spoke with overwhelmingly described investment in scientific research, including medicine, engineering and technology, as worthwhile. Malaysians and Singaporeans alike broadly shared this feeling.

Support for investment in scientific research

“I think it is very, very worth investing because the research is not just gathering information and data, but indirectly it creates job opportunities for the future. These would be very useful for the future and it can directly help a country to develop.” – Muslim man, age 33, Malaysia

“For me, engineering and technology investment is worthwhile because we want to be comparable to other advanced countries.” – Muslim man, age 21, Malaysia

“It’s never enough [investment], because the more we do, the better results we’ll get. … Maybe one day there would be a cure for cancer in a very easy way. Maybe they will be able to detect mental illnesses through scans. If that is possible through research, it will be a breakthrough for a lot of people.” – Hindu man, age 38, Singapore

On scientific research and national prestige

“If we do something that no other countries have been doing, we can make good money out of it and we can be a pioneer in that field. A lot of Malaysians have been contributing their ideas to other countries, but not to their own country. … So why not we do it for our own country, and get a name for Malaysia, and get famous.” – Hindu woman, age 29, Malaysia

In both countries, interviewees described government investment in science as a way to encourage economic development while also improving the lives of everyday people. People often were particularly enthusiastic about government investment in medicine and spoke of its potential to improve their country’s medical infrastructure and care for an aging population.

But others expressed some hesitation about government investment because they felt their government wasn’t doing a good job of ensuring that the research produced meaningful results, or because they thought the research didn’t benefit the public directly. “If there’s results, then it will be worthwhile. … I don’t think [there are results] because I’ve never heard anybody say ‘Wow, Singapore has discovered a new drug,’” said one Buddhist woman (Singapore, 26). Some interviewees also said they supported government investment in medical research, but that they thought the private sector could take care of investment in engineering or technology.

Malaysians also mentioned that a sense of national pride or prestige could come from government investment in science and the subsequent achievements. For example, one Buddhist woman (age 29) said research on medicine and technology could help Malaysia “become famous compared with other countries.” A Hindu man, 24, said he hoped the government would increase its spending on engineering and technology, because it would provide more jobs and show that Malaysia is a high-achieving country. He said more investment would “[help] a lot of people to achieve their dreams. You are putting Malaysia in the top table.” Another Malaysian man expressed a similar sentiment, saying: “For me, engineering and technology investment is worthwhile because we want to be comparable to other advanced countries” (Muslim, age 21).

We appreciate the thoughtful comments and guidance from Sharon Suh, Ajay Verghese and Pew Research Center religion experts including Besheer Mohamed, Neha Sahgal and Director of Religion Research Alan Cooperman on an earlier draft of this essay.

We greatly benefited from Mike Lipka’s editorial guidance, graphic design from Bill Webster, and copy editing from Aleksandra Sandstrom.

• Based on Pew Research Center analysis of the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor for all countries with at least 150 Muslim respondents in the survey sample. ↩
• Based on Pew Research Center analysis of the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor for all countries with at least 150 Hindu respondents in the survey sample. ↩
• Based on Pew Research Center analysis of the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor for all countries with at least 150 Buddhist respondents in the survey sample. ↩
• Based on Pew Research Center analysis of the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor for all countries with at least 150 Christian respondents in the survey sample. ↩
• A similar perspective emerged from interviews with religious leaders in a 2016 Pew Research Center study about the possibility of using biotechnological interventions to augment human capabilities. To take one example, Lutheran theologian Ted Peters expected many mainline Protestant churches to see such developments positively because “I think they will see much of this for what it is: an effort to take advantage of these new technologies to help improve human life,” he said. ↩

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About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Religion and Science

The relationship between religion and science is the subject of continued debate in philosophy and theology. To what extent are religion and science compatible? Are religious beliefs sometimes conducive to science, or do they inevitably pose obstacles to scientific inquiry? The interdisciplinary field of “science and religion”, also called “theology and science”, aims to answer these and other questions. It studies historical and contemporary interactions between these fields, and provides philosophical analyses of how they interrelate.

This entry provides an overview of the topics and discussions in science and religion. Section 1 outlines the scope of both fields, and how they are related. Section 2 looks at the relationship between science and religion in five religious traditions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Section 3 discusses contemporary topics of scientific inquiry in which science and religion intersect, focusing on divine action, creation, and human origins.

1.1 A brief history

1.2 what is science, and what is religion, 1.3 taxonomies of the interaction between science and religion, 1.4 the scientific study of religion, 2.1 christianity, 2.3 hinduism, 2.4 buddhism, 2.5 judaism, 3.1 divine action and creation, 3.2 human origins, works cited, other important works, other internet resources, related entries, 1. science, religion, and how they interrelate.

Since the 1960s, scholars in theology, philosophy, history, and the sciences have studied the relationship between science and religion. Science and religion is a recognized field of study with dedicated journals (e.g., Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science ), academic chairs (e.g., the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University), scholarly societies (e.g., the Science and Religion Forum), and recurring conferences (e.g., the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology’s biennial meetings). Most of its authors are theologians (e.g., John Haught, Sarah Coakley), philosophers with an interest in science (e.g., Nancey Murphy), or (former) scientists with long-standing interests in religion, some of whom are also ordained clergy (e.g., the physicist John Polkinghorne, the molecular biophysicist Alister McGrath, and the atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe). Recently, authors in science and religion also have degrees in that interdisciplinary field (e.g., Sarah Lane Ritchie).

The systematic study of science and religion started in the 1960s, with authors such as Ian Barbour (1966) and Thomas F. Torrance (1969) who challenged the prevailing view that science and religion were either at war or indifferent to each other. Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion (1966) set out several enduring themes of the field, including a comparison of methodology and theory in both fields. Zygon, the first specialist journal on science and religion, was also founded in 1966. While the early study of science and religion focused on methodological issues, authors from the late 1980s to the 2000s developed contextual approaches, including detailed historical examinations of the relationship between science and religion (e.g., Brooke 1991). Peter Harrison (1998) challenged the warfare model by arguing that Protestant theological conceptions of nature and humanity helped to give rise to science in the seventeenth century. Peter Bowler (2001, 2009) drew attention to a broad movement of liberal Christians and evolutionists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who aimed to reconcile evolutionary theory with religious belief. In the 1990s, the Vatican Observatory (Castel Gandolfo, Italy) and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (Berkeley, California) co-sponsored a series of conferences on divine action and how it can be understood in the light of various contemporary sciences. This resulted in six edited volumes (see Russell, Murphy, & Stoeger 2008 for a book-length summary of the findings of this project).

The field has presently diversified so much that contemporary discussions on religion and science tend to focus on specific disciplines and questions. Rather than ask if religion and science (broadly speaking) are compatible, productive questions focus on specific topics. For example, Buddhist modernists (see section 2.4 ) have argued that Buddhist theories about the self (the no-self) and Buddhist practices, such as mindfulness meditation, are compatible and are corroborated by neuroscience.

In the contemporary public sphere, a prominent interaction between science and religion concerns evolutionary theory and creationism/Intelligent Design. The legal battles (e.g., the Kitzmiller versus Dover trial in 2005) and lobbying surrounding the teaching of evolution and creationism in American schools suggest there’s a conflict between religion and science. However, even if one were to focus on the reception of evolutionary theory, the relationship between religion and science is complex. For instance, in the United Kingdom, scientists, clergy, and popular writers (the so-called Modernists), sought to reconcile science and religion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whereas the US saw the rise of a fundamentalist opposition to evolutionary thinking, exemplified by the Scopes trial in 1925 (Bowler 2001, 2009).

Another prominent offshoot of the discussion on science and religion is the New Atheist movement, with authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. They argue that public life, including government, education, and policy should be guided by rational argument and scientific evidence, and that any form of supernaturalism (especially religion, but also, e.g., astrology) has no place in public life. They treat religious claims, such as the existence of God, as testable scientific hypotheses (see, e.g., Dawkins 2006).

In recent decades, the leaders of some Christian churches have issued conciliatory public statements on evolutionary theory. Pope John Paul II (1996) affirmed evolutionary theory in his message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, but rejected it for the human soul, which he saw as the result of a separate, special creation. The Church of England publicly endorsed evolutionary theory (e.g., C. M. Brown 2008), including an apology to Charles Darwin for its initial rejection of his theory.

This entry will focus on the relationship between religious and scientific ideas as rather abstract philosophical positions, rather than as practices. However, this relationship has a large practical impact on the lives of religious people and scientists (including those who are both scientists and religious believers). A rich sociological literature indicates the complexity of these interactions, among others, how religious scientists conceive of this relationship (for recent reviews, see Ecklund 2010, 2021; Ecklund & Scheitle 2007; Gross & Simmons 2009).

For the past fifty years, the discussion on science and religion has de facto been on Western science and Christianity: to what extent can the findings of Western sciences be reconciled with Christian beliefs? The field of science and religion has only recently turned to an examination of non-Christian traditions, providing a richer picture of interaction.

In order to understand the scope of science and religion and their interactions, we must at least get a rough sense of what science and religion are. After all, “science” and “religion” are not eternally unchanging terms with unambiguous meanings. Indeed, they are terms that were coined recently, with meanings that vary across contexts. Before the nineteenth century, the term “religion” was rarely used. For a medieval author such as Aquinas, the term religio meant piety or worship, and was not applied to religious systems outside of what he considered orthodoxy (Harrison 2015). The term “religion” obtained its considerably broader current meaning through the works of early anthropologists, such as E.B. Tylor (1871), who systematically used the term for religions across the world. As a result, “religion” became a comparative concept, referring to traits that could be compared and scientifically studied, such as rituals, dietary restrictions, and belief systems (Jonathan Smith 1998).

The term “science” as it is currently used also became common in the nineteenth century. Prior to this, what we call “science” fell under the terminology of “natural philosophy” or, if the experimental part was emphasized, “experimental philosophy”. William Whewell (1834) standardized the term “scientist” to refer to practitioners of diverse natural philosophies. Philosophers of science have attempted to demarcate science from other knowledge-seeking endeavors, in particular religion. For instance, Karl Popper (1959) claimed that scientific hypotheses (unlike religious and philosophical ones) are in principle falsifiable. Many authors (e.g., Taylor 1996) affirm a disparity between science and religion, even if the meanings of both terms are historically contingent. They disagree, however, on how to precisely (and across times and cultures) demarcate the two domains.

One way to distinguish between science and religion is the claim that science concerns the natural world, whereas religion concerns the supernatural world and its relationship to the natural. Scientific explanations do not appeal to supernatural entities such as gods or angels (fallen or not), or to non-natural forces (such as miracles, karma, or qi ). For example, neuroscientists typically explain our thoughts in terms of brain states, not by reference to an immaterial soul or spirit, and legal scholars do not invoke karmic load when discussing why people commit crimes.

Naturalists draw a distinction between methodological naturalism , an epistemological principle that limits scientific inquiry to natural entities and laws, and ontological or philosophical naturalism , a metaphysical principle that rejects the supernatural (Forrest 2000). Since methodological naturalism is concerned with the practice of science (in particular, with the kinds of entities and processes that are invoked), it does not make any statements about whether or not supernatural entities exist. They might exist, but lie outside of the scope of scientific investigation. Some authors (e.g., Rosenberg 2014) hold that taking the results of science seriously entails negative answers to such persistent questions into the existence of free will or moral knowledge. However, these stronger conclusions are controversial.

The view that science can be demarcated from religion in its methodological naturalism is more commonly accepted. For instance, in the Kitzmiller versus Dover trial, the philosopher of science Robert Pennock was called to testify by the plaintiffs on whether Intelligent Design was a form of creationism, and therefore religion. If it were, the Dover school board policy would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Building on earlier work (e.g., Pennock 1998), Pennock argued that Intelligent Design, in its appeal to supernatural mechanisms, was not methodologically naturalistic, and that methodological naturalism is an essential component of science.

Methodological naturalism is a recent development in the history of science, though we can see precursors of it in medieval authors such as Aquinas who attempted to draw a theological distinction between miracles, such as the working of relics, and unusual natural phenomena, such as magnetism and the tides (see Perry & Ritchie 2018). Natural and experimental philosophers such as Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Robert Hooke, and Robert Boyle regularly appealed to supernatural agents in their natural philosophy (which we now call “science”). Still, overall there was a tendency to favor naturalistic explanations in natural philosophy. The X-club was a lobby group for the professionalization of science founded in 1864 by Thomas Huxley and friends. While the X-club may have been in part motivated by the desire to remove competition by amateur-clergymen scientists in the field of science, and thus to open up the field to full-time professionals, its explicit aim was to promote a science that would be free from religious dogma (Garwood 2008, Barton 2018). This preference for naturalistic causes may have been encouraged by past successes of naturalistic explanations, leading authors such as Paul Draper (2005) to argue that the success of methodological naturalism could be evidence for ontological naturalism.

Several typologies probe the interaction between science and religion. For example, Mikael Stenmark (2004) distinguishes between three views: the independence view (no overlap between science and religion), the contact view (some overlap between the fields), and a union of the domains of science and religion; within these views he recognizes further subdivisions, e.g., contact can be in the form of conflict or harmony. The most influential taxonomy of the relationship between science and religion remains Barbour’s (2000): conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. Subsequent authors, as well as Barbour himself, have refined and amended this taxonomy. However, others (e.g., Cantor & Kenny 2001) have argued that this taxonomy is not useful to understand past interactions between both fields. Nevertheless, because of its enduring influence, it is still worthwhile to discuss it in detail.

The conflict model holds that science and religion are in perpetual and principal conflict. It relies heavily on two historical narratives: the trial of Galileo (see Dawes 2016) and the reception of Darwinism (see Bowler 2001). Contrary to common conception, the conflict model did not originate in two seminal publications, namely John Draper’s (1874) History of the Conflict between Religion and Science and Andrew Dickson White’s (1896) two-volume opus A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom . Rather, as James Ungureanu (2019) argues, the project of these early architects of the conflict thesis needs to be contextualized in a liberal Protestant tradition of attempting to separate religion from theology, and thus salvage religion. Their work was later appropriated by skeptics and atheists who used their arguments about the incompatibility of traditional theological views with science to argue for secularization, something Draper and White did not envisage.

The vast majority of authors in the science and religion field is critical of the conflict model and believes it is based on a shallow and partisan reading of the historical record. While the conflict model is at present a minority position, some have used philosophical argumentation (e.g., Philipse 2012) or have carefully re-examined historical evidence such as the Galileo trial (e.g., Dawes 2016) to argue for this model. Alvin Plantinga (2011) has argued that the conflict is not between science and religion, but between science and naturalism. In his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (first formulated in 1993), Plantinga argues that naturalism is epistemically self-defeating: if both naturalism and evolution are true, then it’s unlikely we would have reliable cognitive faculties.

The independence model holds that science and religion explore separate domains that ask distinct questions. Stephen Jay Gould developed an influential independence model with his NOMA principle (“Non-Overlapping Magisteria”):

The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise. (2001: 739)

He identified science’s areas of expertise as empirical questions about the constitution of the universe, and religion’s domain of expertise as ethical values and spiritual meaning. NOMA is both descriptive and normative: religious leaders should refrain from making factual claims about, for instance, evolutionary theory, just as scientists should not claim insight on moral matters. Gould held that there might be interactions at the borders of each magisterium, such as our responsibility toward other living things. One obvious problem with the independence model is that if religion were barred from making any statement of fact, it would be difficult to justify its claims of value and ethics. For example, one could not argue that one should love one’s neighbor because it pleases the creator (Worrall 2004). Moreover, religions do seem to make empirical claims, for example, that Jesus appeared after his death or that the early Hebrews passed through the parted waters of the Red Sea.

The dialogue model proposes a mutualistic relationship between religion and science. Unlike independence, it assumes a common ground between both fields, perhaps in their presuppositions, methods, and concepts. For example, the Christian doctrine of creation may have encouraged science by assuming that creation (being the product of a designer) is both intelligible and orderly, so one can expect there are laws that can be discovered. Creation, as a product of God’s free actions, is also contingent, so the laws of nature cannot be learned through a priori thinking which prompts the need for empirical investigation. According to Barbour (2000), both scientific and theological inquiry are theory-dependent, or at least model-dependent. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity colors how Christian theologians interpret the first chapters of Genesis. Next to this, both rely on metaphors and models. Both fields remain separate but they talk to each other, using common methods, concepts, and presuppositions. Wentzel van Huyssteen (1998) has argued for a dialogue position, proposing that science and religion can be in a graceful duet, based on their epistemological overlaps. The Partially Overlapping Magisteria (POMA) model defended by Alister McGrath (e.g., McGrath and Collicutt McGrath 2007) is also worth mentioning. According to McGrath, science and religion each draw on several different methodologies and approaches. These methods and approaches are different ways of knowing that have been shaped through historical factors. It is beneficial for scientists and theologians to be in dialogue with each other.

The integration model is more extensive in its unification of science and theology. Barbour (2000) identifies three forms of integration. First, natural theology, which formulates arguments for the existence and attributes of God. It uses interpretations of results from the natural sciences as premises in its arguments. For instance, the supposition that the universe has a temporal origin features in contemporary cosmological arguments for the existence of God. Likewise, the fact that the cosmological constants and laws of nature are life-permitting (whereas many other combinations of constants and laws would not permit life) is used in contemporary fine-tuning arguments (see the entry to fine-tuning arguments ). Second, theology of nature starts not from science but from a religious framework, and examines how this can enrich or even revise findings of the sciences. For example, McGrath (2016) developed a Christian theology of nature, examining how nature and scientific findings can be interpreted through a Christian lens. Thirdly, Barbour believed that Whitehead’s process philosophy was a promising way to integrate science and religion.

While integration seems attractive (especially to theologians), it is difficult to do justice to both the scientific and religious aspects of a given domain, especially given their complexities. For example, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1971), who was both knowledgeable in paleoanthropology and theology, ended up with an unconventional view of evolution as teleological (which put him at odds with the scientific establishment) and with an unorthodox theology (which denied original sin and led to a series of condemnations by the Roman Catholic Church). Theological heterodoxy, by itself, is no reason to doubt a model. However, it shows obstacles for the integration model to become a live option in the broader community of theologians and philosophers who want to remain affiliate to a specific religious community without transgressing its boundaries. Moreover, integration seems skewed towards theism: Barbour described arguments based on scientific results that support (but do not demonstrate) theism, but failed to discuss arguments based on scientific results that support (but do not demonstrate) the denial of theism. Hybrid positions like McGrath’s POMA indicate some difficulty for Barbour’s taxonomy: the scope of conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration is not clearly defined and they are not mutually exclusive. For example, if conflict is defined broadly then it is compatible with integration. Take the case of Frederick Tennant (1902), who sought to explain sin as the result of evolutionary pressures on human ancestors. This view led him to reject the Fall as a historical event, as it was not compatible with evolutionary biology. His view has conflict (as he saw Christian doctrine in conflict with evolutionary biology) but also integration (he sought to integrate the theological concept of sin in an evolutionary picture). It is clear that many positions defined by authors in the religion and science literature do not clearly fall within one of Barbour’s four domains.

Science and religion are closely interconnected in the scientific study of religion, which can be traced back to seventeenth-century natural histories of religion. Natural historians attempted to provide naturalistic explanations for human behavior and culture, including religion and morality. For example, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s De l’Origine des Fables (1724) offered a causal account of belief in the supernatural. People often assert supernatural explanations when they lack an understanding of the natural causes underlying extraordinary events: “To the extent that one is more ignorant, or one has less experience, one sees more miracles” (1724 [1824: 295], my translation). Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) is perhaps the best-known philosophical example of a natural historical explanation of religious belief. It traces the origins of polytheism—which Hume thought was the earliest form of religious belief—to ignorance about natural causes combined with fear and apprehension about the environment. By deifying aspects of the environment, early humans tried to persuade or bribe the gods, thereby gaining a sense of control.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors from newly emerging scientific disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology examined the purported naturalistic roots of religious beliefs. They did so with a broad brush, trying to explain what unifies diverse religious beliefs across cultures. Auguste Comte (1841) proposed that all societies, in their attempts to make sense of the world, go through the same stages of development: the theological (religious) stage is the earliest phase, where religious explanations predominate, followed by the metaphysical stage (a non-intervening God), and culminating in the positive or scientific stage, marked by scientific explanations and empirical observations.

In anthropology, this positivist idea influenced cultural evolutionism, a theoretical framework that sought to explain cultural change using universal patterns. The underlying supposition was that all cultures evolve and progress along the same trajectory. Cultures with differing religious views were explained as being in different stages of their development. For example, Tylor (1871) regarded animism as the earliest form of religious belief. James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890) is somewhat unusual within this literature, as he saw commonalities between magic, religion, and science. Though he proposed a linear progression, he also argued that a proto-scientific mindset gave rise to magical practices, including the discovery of regularities in nature. Cultural evolutionist models dealt poorly with religious diversity and with the complex relationships between science and religion across cultures. Many authors proposed that religion was just a stage in human development, which would eventually be superseded. For example, social theorists such as Karl Marx and Max Weber proposed versions of the secularization thesis, the view that religion would decline in the face of modern technology, science, and culture.

Functionalism was another theoretical framework that sought to explain religion. Functionalists did not consider religion to be a stage in human cultural development that would eventually be overcome. They saw it as a set of social institutions that served important functions in the societies they were part of. For example, the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1912 [1915]) argued that religious beliefs are social glue that helps to keep societies together.

Sigmund Freud and other early psychologists aimed to explain religion as the result of cognitive dispositions. For example, Freud (1927) saw religious belief as an illusion, a childlike yearning for a fatherly figure. He also considered “oceanic feeling” (a feeling of limitlessness and of being connected with the world, a concept he derived from the French author Romain Rolland) as one of the origins of religious belief. He thought this feeling was a remnant of an infant’s experience of the self, prior to being weaned off the breast. William James (1902) was interested in the psychological roots and the phenomenology of religious experiences, which he believed were the ultimate source of all institutional religions.

From the 1920s onward, the scientific study of religion became less concerned with grand unifying narratives, and focused more on particular religious traditions and beliefs. Anthropologists such as Edward Evans-Pritchard (1937) and Bronisław Malinowski (1925) no longer relied exclusively on second-hand reports (usually of poor quality and from distorted sources), but engaged in serious fieldwork. Their ethnographies indicated that cultural evolutionism was a defective theoretical framework and that religious beliefs were more diverse than was previously assumed. They argued that religious beliefs were not the result of ignorance of naturalistic mechanisms. For instance, Evans-Pritchard (1937) noted that the Azande were well aware that houses could collapse because termites ate away at their foundations, but they still appealed to witchcraft to explain why a particular house collapsed at a particular time. More recently, Cristine Legare et al. (2012) found that people in various cultures straightforwardly combine supernatural and natural explanations, for instance, South Africans are aware AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, but some also believe that the viral infection is ultimately caused by a witch.

Psychologists and sociologists of religion also began to doubt that religious beliefs were rooted in irrationality, psychopathology, and other atypical psychological states, as James (1902) and other early psychologists had assumed. In the US, in the late 1930s through the 1960s, psychologists developed a renewed interest for religion, fueled by the observation that religion refused to decline and seemed to undergo a substantial revival, thus casting doubt on the secularization thesis (see Stark 1999 for an overview). Psychologists of religion have made increasingly fine-grained distinctions between types of religiosity, including extrinsic religiosity (being religious as means to an end, for instance, getting the benefits of being a member of a social group) and intrinsic religiosity (people who adhere to religions for the sake of their teachings) (Allport & Ross 1967). Psychologists and sociologists now commonly study religiosity as an independent variable, with an impact on, for instance, health, criminality, sexuality, socio-economic profile, and social networks.

A recent development in the scientific study of religion is the cognitive science of religion (CSR). This is a multidisciplinary field, with authors from, among others, developmental psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and cognitive psychology (see C. White 2021 for a comprehensive overview). It differs from other scientific approaches to religion in its presupposition that religion is not a purely cultural phenomenon. Rather, authors in CSR hold that religion is the result of ordinary, early developed, and universal human cognitive processes (e.g., Barrett 2004, Boyer 2002). Some authors regard religion as the byproduct of cognitive processes that are not evolved for religion. For example, according to Paul Bloom (2007), religion emerges as a byproduct of our intuitive distinction between minds and bodies: we can think of minds as continuing, even after the body dies (e.g., by attributing desires to a dead family member), which makes belief in an afterlife and in disembodied spirits natural and spontaneous. Another family of hypotheses regards religion as a biological or cultural adaptive response that helps humans solve cooperative problems (e.g., Bering 2011; Purzycki & Sosis 2022): through their belief in big, powerful gods that can punish, humans behave more cooperatively, which allowed human group sizes to expand beyond small hunter-gatherer communities. Groups with belief in big gods thus out-competed groups without such beliefs for resources during the Neolithic, which would explain the current success of belief in such gods (Norenzayan 2013). However, the question of which came first—big god beliefs or large-scale societies—is a continued matter of debate.

2. Science and religion in various religions

As noted, most studies on the relationship between science and religion have focused on science and Christianity, with only a small number of publications devoted to other religious traditions (e.g., Brooke & Numbers 2011; Lopez 2008). Since science makes universal claims, it is easy to assume that its encounter with other religious traditions would be similar to its interactions with Christianity. However, given different creedal tenets (e.g., in Hindu traditions God is usually not entirely distinct from creation, unlike in Christianity and Judaism), and because science has had distinct historical trajectories in other cultures, one can expect disanalogies in the relationship between science and religion in different religious traditions. To give a sense of this diversity, this section provides a bird’s eye view of science and religion in five major world religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism.

Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion, currently the religion with the most adherents. It developed in the first century CE out of Judaism. Christians adhere to asserted revelations described in a series of canonical texts, which include the Old Testament, which comprises texts inherited from Judaism, and the New Testament, which contains the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (narratives on the life and teachings of Jesus), as well as events and teachings of the early Christian churches (e.g., Acts of the Apostles, letters by Paul), and Revelation, a prophetic book on the end times.

Given the prominence of revealed texts in Christianity, a useful starting point to examine the relationship between Christianity and science is the two books metaphor (see Tanzella-Nitti 2005 for an overview): God revealed Godself through the “Book of Nature”, with its orderly laws, and the “Book of Scripture”, with its historical narratives and accounts of miracles. Augustine (354–430) argued that the book of nature was the more accessible of the two, since scripture requires literacy whereas illiterates and literates alike could read the book of nature. Maximus Confessor (c. 580–662), in his Ambigua (see Louth 1996 for a collection of and critical introduction to these texts) compared scripture and natural law to two clothes that envelop the Incarnated Logos: Jesus’ humanity is revealed by nature, whereas his divinity is revealed by the scriptures. During the Middle Ages, authors such as Hugh of St. Victor (ca. 1096–1141) and Bonaventure (1221–1274) began to realize that the book of nature was not at all straightforward to read. Given that original sin marred our reason and perception, what conclusions could humans legitimately draw about ultimate reality? Bonaventure used the metaphor of the books to the extent that “ liber naturae ” was a synonym for creation, the natural world. He argued that sin has clouded human reason so much that the book of nature has become unreadable, and that scripture is needed as an aid as it contains teachings about the world.

Christian authors in the field of science and religion continue to debate how these two books interrelate. Concordism is the attempt to interpret scripture in the light of modern science. It is a hermeneutical approach to Bible interpretation, where one expects that the Bible foretells scientific theories, such as the Big Bang theory or evolutionary theory. However, as Denis Lamoureux (2008: chapter 5) argues, many scientific-sounding statements in the Bible are false: the mustard seed is not the smallest seed, male reproductive seeds do not contain miniature persons, there is no firmament, and the earth is neither flat nor immovable. Thus, any plausible form of integrating the book of nature and scripture will require more nuance and sophistication. Theologians such as John Wesley (1703–1791) have proposed the addition of other sources of knowledge to scripture and science: the Wesleyan quadrilateral (a term not coined by Wesley himself) is the dynamic interaction of scripture, experience (including the empirical findings of the sciences), tradition, and reason (Outler 1985).

Several Christian authors have attempted to integrate science and religion (e.g., Haught 1995, Lamoureux 2008, Murphy 1995), making integration a highly popular view on the relationship between science and religion. These authors tend to interpret findings from the sciences, such as evolutionary theory or chaos theory, in a theological light, using established theological models such as classical theism or the doctrine of creation. John Haught (1995) argues that the theological view of kenosis (self-emptying of God in creation) anticipates scientific findings such as evolutionary theory: a self-emptying God (i.e., who limits Godself), who creates a distinct and autonomous world, makes a world with internal self-coherence, with a self-organizing universe as the result.

The dominant epistemological outlook in Christian science and religion has been critical realism, a position that applies both to theology (theological realism) and to science (scientific realism). Barbour (1966) introduced this view into the science and religion literature; it has been further developed by theologians such as Arthur Peacocke (1984) and Wentzel van Huyssteen (1999). Critical realism aims to offer a middle way between naïve realism (the world is as we perceive it) and instrumentalism (our perceptions and concepts are purely instrumental). It encourages critical reflection on perception and the world, hence “critical”. Critical realism has distinct flavors in the works of different authors, for instance, van Huyssteen (1998, 1999) develops a weak form of critical realism set within a postfoundationalist notion of rationality, where theological views are shaped by social, cultural, and evolved biological factors. Murphy (1995: 329–330) outlines doctrinal and scientific requirements for approaches in science and religion: ideally, an integrated approach should be broadly in line with Christian doctrine, especially core tenets such as the doctrine of creation, while at the same time it should be in line with empirical observations without undercutting scientific practices.

Several historians (e.g., Hooykaas 1972) have argued that Christianity was instrumental to the development of Western science. Peter Harrison (2007) maintains that the doctrine of original sin played a crucial role in this, arguing there was a widespread belief in the early modern period that Adam, prior to the Fall, had superior senses, intellect, and understanding. As a result of the Fall, human senses became duller, our ability to make correct inferences was diminished, and nature itself became less intelligible. Postlapsarian humans (i.e., humans after the Fall) are no longer able to exclusively rely on their a priori reasoning to understand nature. They must supplement their reasoning and senses with observation through specialized instruments, such as microscopes and telescopes. As the experimental philosopher Robert Hooke wrote in the introduction to his Micrographia :

every man, both from a deriv’d corruption, innate and born with him, and from his breeding and converse with men, is very subject to slip into all sorts of errors … These being the dangers in the process of humane Reason, the remedies of them all can only proceed from the real, the mechanical, the experimental Philosophy [experiment-based science]. (1665, cited in Harrison 2007: 5)

Another theological development that may have facilitated the rise of science was the Condemnation of Paris (1277), which forbade teaching and reading natural philosophical views that were considered heretical, such as Aristotle’s physical treatises. As a result, the Condemnation opened up intellectual space to think beyond ancient Greek natural philosophy. For example, medieval philosophers such as John Buridan (fl. 14th c) held the Aristotelian belief that there could be no vacuum in nature, but once the idea of a vacuum became plausible, natural philosophers such as Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647) and Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) could experiment with air pressure and vacua (see Grant 1996, for discussion).

Some authors claim that Christianity was unique and instrumental in catalyzing the scientific revolution. For example, according to the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark (2004), the scientific revolution was in fact a slow, gradual development from medieval Christian theology. Claims such as Stark’s, however, fail to recognize the legitimate contributions of Islamic and Greek scholars to the development of modern science, and fail to do justice to the importance of practical technological innovations in map-making and star-charting in the emergence of modern science. In spite of these positive readings of the relationship between science and religion in Christianity, there are sources of enduring tension. For example, there is still vocal opposition to the theory of evolution among Christian fundamentalists. In the public sphere, the conflict view between Christianity and science prevails, in stark contrast to the scholarly literature. This is due to an important extent to the outsize influence of a vocal conservative Christian minority in the American public debate, which sidelines more moderate voices (Evans 2016).

Islam is a monotheistic religion that emerged in the seventh century, following a series of purported revelations to the prophet Muḥammad. The term “Islam” also denotes geo-political structures, such as caliphates and empires, which were founded by Muslim rulers from the seventh century onward, including the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Ottoman caliphates. Additionally, it refers to a culture which flourished within this political and religious context, with its own philosophical and scientific traditions (Dhanani 2002). The defining characteristic of Islam is belief in one God (Allāh), who communicates through prophets, including Adam, Abraham, and Muḥammad. Allāh‎’s revelations to Muḥammad are recorded in the Qurʾān, the central religious text for Islam. Next to the Qurʾān, an important source of jurisprudence and theology is the ḥadīth, an oral corpus of attested sayings, actions, and tacit approvals of the prophet Muḥammad. The two major branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia, are based on a dispute over the succession of Muḥammad. As the second largest religion in the world, Islam shows a wide variety of beliefs. Core creedal views include the oneness of God ( tawḥīd ), the view that there is only one undivided God who created and sustains the universe, prophetic revelation (in particular to Muḥammad), and an afterlife. Beyond this, Muslims disagree on a number of doctrinal issues.

The relationship between Islam and science is complex. Today, predominantly Muslim countries, such as the United Arabic Emirates, enjoy high urbanization and technological development, but they still underperform in common metrics of scientific research, such as publications in leading journals and number of citations per scientist, compared to other regions outside of the west such as India and China (see Edis 2007). Some Muslims hold a number of pseudoscientific ideas, some of which it shares with Christianity such as Old Earth creationism, whereas others are specific to Islam such as the recreation of human bodies from the tailbone on the day of resurrection, and the superiority of prayer in treating lower-back pain instead of conventional methods (Guessoum 2011: 4–5).

This contemporary lack of scientific prominence is remarkable given that the Islamic world far exceeded European cultures in the range and quality of its scientific knowledge between approximately the ninth and the fifteenth century, excelling in domains such as mathematics (algebra and geometry, trigonometry in particular), astronomy (seriously considering, but not adopting, heliocentrism), optics, and medicine. These domains of knowledge are commonly referred to as “Arabic science”, to distinguish them from the pursuits of science that arose in the west (Huff 2003). “Arabic science” is an imperfect term, as many of the practitioners were not speakers of Arabic, hence the term “science in the Islamic world” is more accurate. Many scientists in the Islamic world were polymaths, for example, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, 980–1037) is commonly regarded as one of the most significant innovators, not only in philosophy, but also in medicine and astronomy. His Canon of Medicine , a medical encyclopedia, was a standard textbook in universities across Europe for many centuries after his death. Al-Fārābī (ca. 872–ca. 950), a political philosopher from Damascus, also investigated music theory, science, and mathematics. Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) achieved lasting fame in disparate domains such as poetry, astronomy, geography, and mineralogy. The Andalusian Ibn Rušd (Averroes, 1126–1198) wrote on medicine, physics, astronomy, psychology, jurisprudence, music, and geography, next to developing a Greek-inspired philosophical theology.

A major impetus for science in the Islamic world was the patronage of the Abbasid caliphate (758–1258), centered in Baghdad. Early Abbasid rulers, such as Harun al-Rashid (ruled 786–809) and his successor Abū Jaʿfar Abdullāh al-Ma’mūn (ruled 813–833), were significant patrons of science. The former founded the Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), which commissioned translations of major works by Aristotle, Galen, and many Persian and Indian scholars into Arabic. It was cosmopolitan in its outlook, employing astronomers, mathematicians, and physicians from abroad, including Indian mathematicians and Nestorian (Christian) astronomers. Throughout the Islamic world, public libraries attached to mosques provided access to a vast compendium of knowledge, which spread Islam, Greek philosophy, and science. The use of a common language (Arabic), as well as common religious and political institutions and flourishing trade relations encouraged the spread of scientific ideas throughout the Islamic world. Some of this transmission was informal, e.g., correspondence between like-minded people (see Dhanani 2002), some formal, e.g., in hospitals where students learned about medicine in a practical, master-apprentice setting, and in astronomical observatories and academies. The decline and fall of the Abbasid caliphate dealt a blow to science in the Islamic world, but it remains unclear why it ultimately stagnated, and why it did not experience something analogous to the scientific revolution in Western Europe. Note, the decline of science in the Islamic world should not be generalized to other fields, such as philosophy and philosophical theology, which continued to flourish after the Abbasid caliphate fell.

Some liberal Muslim authors, such as Fatima Mernissi (1992), argue that the rise of conservative forms of Islamic philosophical theology stifled more scientifically-minded natural philosophy. In the ninth to the twelfth century, the Mu’tazila (a philosophical theological school) helped the growth of science in the Islamic world thanks to their embrace of Greek natural philosophy. But eventually, the Mu’tazila and their intellectual descendants lost their influence to more conservative brands of theology. Al-Ghazālī’s influential eleventh-century work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers ( Tahāfut al-falāsifa ), was a scathing and sophisticated critique of Greek-inspired Muslim philosophy, arguing that their metaphysical assumptions could not be demonstrated. This book vindicated more orthodox Muslim religious views. As Muslim intellectual life became more orthodox, it became less open to non-Muslim philosophical ideas, which led to the decline of science in the Islamic world, according to this view.

The problem with this narrative is that orthodox worries about non-Islamic knowledge were already present before Al-Ghazālī and continued long after his death (Edis 2007: chapter 2). The study of law ( fiqh ) was more stifling for science in the Islamic world than developments in theology. The eleventh century saw changes in Islamic law that discouraged heterodox thought: lack of orthodoxy could now be regarded as apostasy from Islam ( zandaqa ) which is punishable by death, whereas before, a Muslim could only apostatize by an explicit declaration (Griffel 2009: 105). (Al-Ghazālī himself only regarded the violation of three core doctrines as zandaqa , namely statements that challenged monotheism, the prophecy of Muḥammad, and resurrection after death.) Given that heterodox thoughts could be interpreted as apostasy, this created a stifling climate for science. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as science and technology became firmly entrenched in Western society, Muslim empires were languishing or colonized. Scientific ideas, such as evolutionary theory, became equated with European colonialism, and thus met with distrust. The enduring association between western culture, colonialism, and science led to a more prominent conflict view of the relationship between science and religion in Muslim countries.

In spite of this negative association between science and Western modernity, there is an emerging literature on science and religion by Muslim scholars (mostly scientists). The physicist Nidhal Guessoum (2011) holds that science and religion are not only compatible, but in harmony. He rejects the idea of treating the Qurʾān as a scientific encyclopedia, something other Muslim authors in the debate on science and religion tend to do. Moreover, he adheres to the no-possible-conflict principle, outlined by Ibn Rušd: there can be no conflict between God’s word (properly understood) and God’s work (properly understood). If an apparent conflict arises, the Qurʾān may not have been interpreted correctly.

While the Qurʾān asserts a creation in six days (like the Hebrew Bible), “day” is often interpreted as a very long span of time, rather than a 24-hour period. As a result, Old Earth creationism is more influential in Islam than Young Earth creationism. Adnan Oktar’s Atlas of Creation (published in 2007 under the pseudonym Harun Yahya), a glossy coffee table book that draws heavily on Christian Old Earth creationism, has been distributed worldwide (Hameed 2008). Since the Qurʾān explicitly mentions the special creation of Adam out of clay, most Muslims refuse to accept that humans evolved from hominin ancestors. Nevertheless, Muslim scientists such as Guessoum (2011) and Rana Dajani (2015) have advocated acceptance of evolution.

Hinduism is the world’s third largest religion, though the term “Hinduism” is an awkward catch-all phrase that denotes diverse religious and philosophical traditions that emerged on the Indian subcontinent between 500 BCE and 300 CE. The vast majority of Hindus live in India; most others live in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia, with a significant diaspora in western countries such as the United States (Hackett 2015 [ Other Internet Resources ]). In contrast to the Abrahamic monotheistic religions, Hinduism does not always draw a sharp distinction between God and creation. (While there are pantheistic and panentheistic views in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, these are minority positions.) Many Hindus believe in a personal God, and identify this God as immanent in creation. This view has ramifications for the science and religion debate, in that there is no sharp ontological distinction between creator and creature (Subbarayappa 2011). Religious traditions originating on the Indian subcontinent, including Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, are referred to as dharmic religions. Philosophical points of view are referred to as darśana .

One factor that unites the different strands of Hinduism is the importance of foundational texts composed between ca. 1600 and 700 BCE. These include the Vedas, which contain hymns and prescriptions for performing rituals, Brāhmaṇa, accompanying liturgical texts, and Upaniṣad, metaphysical treatises. The Vedas discuss gods who personify and embody natural phenomena such as fire (Agni) and wind (Vāyu). More gods appear in the following centuries (e.g., Gaṇeśa and Sati-Parvati in the 4th century). Note that there are both polytheistic and monotheistic strands in Hinduism, so it is not the case that individual believers worship or recognize all of these gods. Ancient Vedic rituals encouraged knowledge of diverse sciences, including astronomy, linguistics, and mathematics. Astronomical knowledge was required to determine the timing of rituals and the construction of sacrificial altars. Linguistics developed out of a need to formalize grammatical rules for classical Sanskrit, which was used in rituals. Large public offerings also required the construction of elaborate altars, which posed geometrical problems and thus led to advances in geometry. Classic Vedic texts also frequently used very large numbers, for instance, to denote the age of humanity and the Earth, which required a system to represent numbers parsimoniously, giving rise to a 10-base positional system and a symbolic representation for zero as a placeholder, which would later be imported in other mathematical traditions (Joseph 1991 [2000]). In this way, ancient Indian dharma encouraged the emergence of the sciences.

Around the sixth–fifth century BCE, the northern part of the Indian subcontinent experienced an extensive urbanization. In this context, medicine ( āyurveda ) became standardized. This period also gave rise to a wide range of heterodox philosophical schools, including Buddhism, Jainism, and Cārvāka. The latter defended a form of metaphysical naturalism, denying the existence of gods or karma. The relationship between science and religion on the Indian subcontinent is complex, in part because the dharmic religions and philosophical schools are so diverse. For example, Cārvāka proponents had a strong suspicion of inferential beliefs, and rejected Vedic revelation and supernaturalism in general, instead favoring direct observation as a source of knowledge.

Natural theology also flourished in the pre-colonial period, especially in the Advaita Vedānta, a darśana that identifies the self, ātman , with ultimate reality, Brahman. Advaita Vedāntin philosopher Adi Śaṅkara (fl. first half eighth century) was an author who regarded Brahman as the only reality, both the material and the efficient cause of the cosmos. Śaṅkara formulated design and cosmological arguments, drawing on analogies between the world and artifacts: in ordinary life, we never see non-intelligent agents produce purposive design, yet the universe is suitable for human life, just like benches and pleasure gardens are designed for us. Given that the universe is so complex that even an intelligent craftsman cannot comprehend it, how could it have been created by non-intelligent natural forces? Śaṅkara concluded that it must have been designed by an intelligent creator (C.M. Brown 2008: 108).

From 1757 to 1947, India was under British colonial rule. This had a profound influence on its culture as Hindus came into contact with Western science and technology. For local intellectuals, the contact with Western science presented a challenge: how to assimilate these ideas with Hinduism? Mahendrahal Sircar (1833–1904) was one of the first authors to examine evolutionary theory and its implications for Hindu religious beliefs. Sircar was an evolutionary theist, who believed that God used evolution to create current life forms. Evolutionary theism was not a new hypothesis in Hinduism, but the many lines of empirical evidence Darwin provided for evolution gave it a fresh impetus. While Sircar accepted organic evolution through common descent, he questioned the mechanism of natural selection as it was not teleological, which went against his evolutionary theism. This was a widespread problem for the acceptance of evolutionary theory, one that Christian evolutionary theists also wrestled with (Bowler 2009). He also argued against the British colonists’ beliefs that Hindus were incapable of scientific thought, and encouraged fellow Hindus to engage in science, which he hoped would help regenerate the Indian nation (C.M. Brown 2012: chapter 6).

The assimilation of Western culture prompted various revivalist movements that sought to reaffirm the cultural value of Hinduism. They put forward the idea of a Vedic science, where all scientific findings are already prefigured in the Vedas and other ancient texts (e.g., Vivekananda 1904). This idea is still popular within contemporary Hinduism, and is quite similar to ideas held by contemporary Muslims, who refer to the Qurʾān as a harbinger of scientific theories.

Responses to evolutionary theory were as diverse as Christian views on this subject, ranging from creationism (denial of evolutionary theory based on a perceived incompatibility with Vedic texts) to acceptance (see C.M. Brown 2012 for a thorough overview). Authors such as Dayananda Saraswati (1930–2015) rejected evolutionary theory. By contrast, Vivekananda (1863–1902), a proponent of the monistic Advaita Vedānta enthusiastically endorsed evolutionary theory and argued that it is already prefigured in ancient Vedic texts. His integrative view claimed that Hinduism and science are in harmony: Hinduism is scientific in spirit, as is evident from its long history of scientific discovery (Vivekananda 1904). Sri Aurobindo Ghose, a yogi and Indian nationalist who was educated in the West, formulated a synthesis of evolutionary thought and Hinduism. He interpreted the classic avatara doctrine, according to which God incarnates into the world repeatedly throughout time, in evolutionary terms. God thus appears first as an animal, later as a dwarf, then as a violent man (Rama), and then as Buddha, and as Kṛṣṇa. He proposed a metaphysical picture where both spiritual evolution (reincarnation and avatars) and physical evolution are ultimately a manifestation of God (Brahman). This view of reality as consisting of matter ( prakṛti ) and consciousness ( puruṣa ) goes back to sāṃkhya , one of the orthodox Hindu darśana, but Aurobindo made explicit reference to the divine, calling the process during which the supreme Consciousness dwells in matter involution (Aurobindo, 1914–18 [2005], see C.M. Brown 2007 for discussion).

During the twentieth century, Indian scientists began to gain prominence, including C.V. Raman (1888–1970), a Nobel Prize winner in physics, and Satyendra Nath Bose (1894–1974), a theoretical physicist who described the behavior of photons statistically, and who gave his name to bosons. However, these authors were silent on the relationship between their scientific work and their religious beliefs. By contrast, the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) was open about his religious beliefs and their influence on his mathematical work. He claimed that the goddess Namagiri helped him to intuit solutions to mathematical problems. Likewise, Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937), a theoretical physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist, and archaeologist who worked on radio waves, saw the Hindu idea of unity reflected in the study of nature. He started the Bose institute in Kolkata in 1917, the earliest interdisciplinary scientific institute in India (Subbarayappa 2011).

Buddhism, like the other religious traditions surveyed in this entry, encompasses many views and practices. The principal forms of Buddhism that exist today are Theravāda and Mahāyāna. (Vajrayāna, the tantric tradition of Buddhism, is also sometimes seen as a distinct form.) Theravāda is the dominant form of Buddhism of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. It traditionally refers to monastic and textual lineages associated with the study of the Pāli Buddhist Canon. Mahāyāna refers to a movement that likely began roughly four centuries after the Buddha’s death; it became the dominant form of Buddhism in East and Central Asia. It includes Chan or Zen, and also tantric Buddhism, which today is found mostly in Tibet, though East Asian forms also exist.

Buddhism originated in the historical figure of the Buddha (historically, Gautama Buddha or Siddhārtha Gautama, ca. 5 th –4 th century BCE). His teaching centered on ethics as well as metaphysics, incapsulated in the Four Noble Truths (on suffering and its origin in human desires), and the Noble Eightfold Path (right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration) to end suffering and to break the cycle of rebirths, culminating in reaching Nirvana. Substantive metaphysical teachings include belief in karma, the no-self, and the cycle of rebirth.

As a response to colonialist attitudes, modern Buddhists since the nineteenth century have often presented Buddhism as harmonious with science (Lopez 2008). The argument is roughly that since Buddhism doesn’t require belief in metaphysically substantive entities such as God, the soul, or the self (unlike, for example, Christianity), Buddhism should be easily compatible with the factual claims that scientists make. (Note, however, that historically most Buddhist have believed in various forms of divine abode and divinities.) We could thus expect the dialogue and integration view to prevail in Buddhism. An exemplar for integration is the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who is known for his numerous efforts to lead dialogue between religious people and scientists. He has extensively written on the relationship between Buddhism and various scientific disciplines such as neuroscience and cosmology (e.g., Dalai Lama 2005, see also the Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics series, a four-volume series conceived and compiled by the Dalai Lama, e.g., Jinpa 2017). Donald Lopez Jr (2008) identifies compatibility as an enduring claim in the debate on science and Buddhism, in spite of the fact that what is meant by these concepts has shifted markedly over time. As David McMahan (2009) argues, Buddhism underwent profound shifts in response to modernity in the west as well as globally. In this modern context, Buddhists have often asserted the compatibility of Buddhism with science, favorably contrasting their religion to Christianity in that respect.

The full picture of the relationship between Buddhism and religion is more nuanced than one of wholesale acceptance of scientific claims. I will here focus on East Asia, primarily Japan and China, and the reception of evolutionary theory in the early twentieth century to give a sense of this more complex picture. The earliest translations of evolutionary thought in Japan and China were not drawn from Darwin’s Origin of Species or Descent of Man , but from works by authors who worked in Darwin’s wake, such as Ernst Haeckel and Thomas Huxley. For example, the earliest translated writings on evolutionary theory in China was a compilation by Yan Fu entitled On Natural Evolution ( Tianyan lun ), which incorporated excerpts by Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley. This work drew a close distinction between social Darwinism and biological evolution (Ritzinger 2013). Chinese and Japanese Buddhists received these ideas in the context of western colonialism and imperialism. East Asian intellectuals saw how western colonial powers competed with each other for influence on their territory, and discerned parallels between this and the Darwinian struggle for existence. As a result, some intellectuals such as the Japanese political adviser and academic Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1916) drew on Darwinian thought and popularized notions such as “survival of the fittest” to justify the foreign policies of the Meiji government (Burenina 2020). It is in this context that we can situate Buddhist responses to evolutionary theory.

Buddhists do not distinguish between human beings as possessing a soul and other animals as soulless. As we are all part of the cycle of rebirth, we have all been in previous lives various other beings, including birds, insects, and fish. The problem of the specificity of the human soul does not even arise because of the no-self doctrine. Nevertheless, as Justin Ritzinger (2013) points out, Chinese Buddhists in the 1920s and 1930s who were confronted with early evolutionary theory did not accept Darwin’s theory wholesale. In their view, the central element of Darwinism—the struggle for existence—was incompatible with Buddhism, with its emphasis on compassion with other creatures. They rejected social Darwinism (which sought to engineer societies along Darwinian principles) because it was incompatible with Buddhist ethics and metaphysics. Struggling to survive and to propagate was clinging onto worldly things. Taixu (1890–1947), a Chinese Reformer and Buddhist modernist, instead chose to appropriate Pyotr Kropotkin’s evolutionary views, specifically on mutual aid and altruism. The Russian anarchist argued that cooperation was central to evolutionary change, a view that is currently also more mainstream. However, Kropotkin’s view did not go far enough in Taixu’s opinion because mutual aid still requires a self. Only when one recognizes the no-self doctrine could one dedicate oneself entirely to helping others, as bodhisattvas do (Ritzinger 2013).

Similar dynamics can be seen in the reception of evolutionary theory among Japanese Buddhists. Evolutionary theory was introduced in Japan during the early Meji period (1868–1912) when Japan opened itself to foreign trade and ideas. Foreign experts, such as the American zoologist Edward S. Morse (1838–1925) shared their knowledge of the sciences with Japanese scholars. The latter were interested in the social ramifications of Darwinism, particularly because they had access to translated versions of Spencer’s and Huxley’s work before they could read Darwin’s. Japanese Buddhists of the Nichiren tradition accepted many elements of evolutionary theory, but they rejected other elements, notably the struggle for existence, and randomness and chance, as this contradicts the role of karma in one’s circumstances at birth.

Among the advocates of the modern Nishiren Buddhist movement is Honda Nisshō (1867–1931). Honda emphasized the importance of retrogressions (in addition to progress, which was the main element in evolution that western authors such as Haeckel and Spencer considered). He strongly argued against social Darwinism, the application of evolutionary principles in social engineering, on religious grounds. He argued that we can accept humans are descended from apes without having to posit a pessimistic view of human nature that sees us as engaged in a struggle for survival with fellow human beings. Like Chinese Buddhists, Honda thought Kropotkin’s thesis of mutual aid was more compatible with Buddhism, but he was suspicious of Kropotkin’s anarchism (Burenina 2020). His work, like that of other East Asian Buddhists indicates that historically, Buddhists are not passive recipients of western science but creative interpreters. In some cases, their religious reasons for rejecting some metaphysical assumptions in evolutionary theory led them to anticipate recent developments in biology, such as the recognition of cooperation as an evolutionary principle.

Judaism is one of the three major Abrahamic monotheistic traditions, encompassing a range of beliefs and practices that express a covenant between God and the people of Israel. Central to both Jewish practice and beliefs is the study of texts, including the written Torah (the Tanakh, sometimes called “Hebrew Bible”), and the “Oral Law” of Rabbinic Judaism, compiled in such works like the Talmud. There is also a corpus of esoteric, mystical interpretations of biblical texts, the Kabbalah, which has influenced Jewish works on the relationship between science and religion. The Kabbalah also had an influence on Renaissance and early modern Christian authors such as Pico Della Mirandola, whose work helped to shape the scientific revolution (see the entry on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola ). The theologian Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben-Maimon, 1138–1204, aka Rambam) had an enduring influence on Jewish thought up until today, also in the science and religion literature.

Most contemporary strains of Judaism are Rabbinic, rather than biblical, and this has profound implications for the relationship between religion and science. While both Jews and Evangelical Christians emphasize the reading of sacred texts, the Rabbinic traditions (unlike, for example, the Evangelical Christian tradition) holds that reading and interpreting texts is far from straightforward. Scripture should not be read in a simple literal fashion. This opens up more space for accepting scientific theories (e.g., Big Bang cosmology) that seem at odds with a simple literal reading of the Torah (e.g., the six-day creation in Genesis) (Mitelman 2011 [ Other Internet Resources ]). Moreover, most non-Orthodox Jews in the US identify as politically liberal, so openness to science may also be an identity marker given that politically liberal people in the US have positive attitudes toward science (Pew Forum, 2021 [ Other Internet Resources ]).

Jewish thinkers have made substantive theoretical contributions to the relationship between science and religion, which differ in interesting respects from those seen in the literature written by Christian authors. To give just a few examples, Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), a prominent neo-Kantian German Jewish philosopher, thought of the relationship between Judaism and science in the light of the advances in scientific disciplines and the increased participation of Jewish scholars in the sciences. He argued that science, ethics, and Judaism should all be conceived of as distinct but complementary sciences. Cohen believed that his Jewish religious community was facing an epistemic crisis. All references to God had become suspect due to an adherence to naturalism, at first epistemological, but fast becoming ontological. Cohen saw the concept of a transcendent God as foundational to both Jewish practice and belief, so he thought adherence to wholesale naturalism threatened both Jewish orthodoxy and orthopraxy. As Teri Merrick (2020) argues, Cohen suspected this was in part due to epistemic oppression and self-censuring (though Cohen did not frame it in these terms). Because Jewish scientists wanted to retain credibility in the Christian majority culture, they underplayed and neglected the rich Jewish intellectual legacy in their practice. In response to this intellectual crisis, Cohen proposed to reframe Jewish thought and philosophy so that it would be recognized as both continuous with the tradition and essentially contributing to ethical and scientific advances. In this way, he reframed this tradition, articulating a broadly Kantian philosophy of science to combat a perceived conflict between Judaism and science (see the entry on Hermann Cohen for an in-depth discussion).

Jewish religious scholars have examined how science might influence religious beliefs, and vice versa. Rather than a unified response we see a spectrum of philosophical views, especially since the nineteenth and early twentieth century. As Shai Cherry (2003) surveys, Jewish scholars in the early twentieth century accepted biological evolution but were hesitant about Darwinian natural selection as the mechanism. The Latvian-born Israeli rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) thought that religion and science are largely separate domains (a view somewhat similar to Gould’s NOMA), though he believed that there was a possible flow from religion to science. For example, Kook challenged the lack of directionality in Darwinian evolutionary theory. Using readings of the Kabbalah (and Halakhah, Jewish law), he proposed that biological evolution fits in a larger picture of cosmic evolution towards perfection.

By contrast, the American rabbi Morcedai Kaplan (1881–1983) thought information flow between science and religion could go in both directions, a view reminiscent to Barbour’s dialogue position. He repeatedly argued against scientism (the encroachment of science on too many aspects of human life, including ethics and religion), but he believed nevertheless we ought to apply scientific methods to religion. He saw reality as an unfolding process without a pre-ordained goal: it was progressive, but not teleologically determined. Kaplan emphasized the importance of morality (and identified God as the source of this process), and conceptualized humanity as not merely a passive recipient of evolutionary change, but an active participant, prefiguring work in evolutionary biology on the importance of agency in evolution (e.g., Okasha 2018). Thus, Kaplan’s reception of scientific theories, especially evolution, led him to formulate an early Jewish process theology.

Reform Judaism endorses an explicit anti-conflict view on the relationship between science and religion. For example, the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, the first document of the Reform rabbinate, has a statement that explicitly says that science and Judaism are not in conflict:

We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism.

This Platform had an enduring influence on Reform Judaism over the next decades. Secular Jewish scientists such as Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Douglas Daniel Kahneman, and Stephen J. Gould have also reflected on the relationship between science and broader issues of existential significance, and have exerted considerable influence on the science and religion debate.

3. Central topics in the debate

Current work in the field of science and religion encompasses a wealth of topics, including free will, ethics, human nature, and consciousness. Contemporary natural theologians discuss fine-tuning, in particular design arguments based on it (e.g., R. Collins 2009), the interpretation of multiverse cosmology, and the significance of the Big Bang (see entries on fine-tuning arguments and natural theology and natural religion ). For instance, authors such as Hud Hudson (2013) have explored the idea that God has actualized the best of all possible multiverses. Here follows an overview of two topics that continue to generate substantial interest and debate: divine action (and the closely related topic of creation) and human origins. The focus will be on Christian work in science and religion, due to its prevalence in the literature.

Before scientists developed their views on cosmology and origins of the world, Western cultures already had a doctrine of creation, based on biblical texts (e.g., the first three chapters of Genesis and the book of Revelation) and the writings of church fathers such as Augustine. This doctrine of creation has the following interrelated features: first, God created the world ex nihilo, i.e., out of nothing. Differently put, God did not need any pre-existing materials to make the world, unlike, e.g., the Demiurge (from Greek philosophy), who created the world from chaotic, pre-existing matter. Second, God is distinct from the world; the world is not equal to or part of God (contra pantheism or panentheism) or a (necessary) emanation of God’s being (contra Neoplatonism). Rather, God created the world freely. This introduces an asymmetry between creator and creature: the world is radically contingent upon God’s creative act and is also sustained by God, whereas God does not need creation (Jaeger 2012b: 3). Third, the doctrine of creation holds that creation is essentially good (this is repeatedly affirmed in Genesis 1). The world does contain evil, but God does not directly cause this evil to exist. Moreover, God does not merely passively sustain creation, but rather plays an active role in it, using special divine actions (e.g., miracles and revelations) to care for creatures. Fourth, God made provisions for the end of the world, and will create a new heaven and earth, in this way eradicating evil.

Views on divine action are related to the doctrine of creation. Theologians commonly draw a distinction between general and special divine action, but within the field of science and religion there is no universally accepted definition of these two concepts. One way to distinguish them (Wildman 2008: 140) is to regard general divine action as the creation and sustenance of reality, and special divine action as the collection of specific providential acts, such as miracles and revelations to prophets. Drawing this distinction allows for creatures to be autonomous and indicates that God does not micromanage every detail of creation. Still, the distinction is not always clear-cut, as some phenomena are difficult to classify as either general or special divine action. For example, the Roman Catholic Eucharist (in which bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus) or some healing miracles outside of scripture seem mundane enough to be part of general housekeeping (general divine action), but still seem to involve some form of special intervention on God’s part. Alston (1989) makes a related distinction between direct and indirect divine acts. God brings about direct acts without the use of natural causes, whereas indirect acts are achieved through natural causes. Using this distinction, there are four possible kinds of actions that God could do: God could not act in the world at all, God could act only directly, God could act only indirectly, or God could act both directly and indirectly.

In the science and religion literature, there are two central questions on creation and divine action. To what extent are the Christian doctrine of creation and traditional views of divine action compatible with science? How can these concepts be understood within a scientific context, e.g., what does it mean for God to create and act? Note that the doctrine of creation says nothing about the age of the Earth, nor does it specify a mode of creation. This allows for a wide range of possible views within science and religion, of which Young Earth creationism is but one that is consistent with scripture. Indeed, some scientific theories, such as the Big Bang theory, first proposed by the Belgian Roman Catholic priest and astronomer Georges Lemaître (1927), look congenial to the doctrine of creation. The theory is not in contradiction, and could be integrated into creatio ex nihilo as it specifies that the universe originated from an extremely hot and dense state around 13.8 billion years ago (Craig 2003), although some philosophers have argued against the interpretation that the universe has a temporal beginning (e.g., Pitts 2008).

The net result of scientific findings since the seventeenth century has been that God was increasingly pushed into the margins. This encroachment of science on the territory of religion happened in two ways: first, scientific findings—in particular from geology and evolutionary theory—challenged and replaced biblical accounts of creation. Although the doctrine of creation does not contain details of the mode and timing of creation, the Bible was regarded as authoritative, and that authority got eroded by the sciences. Second, the emerging concept of scientific laws in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physics seemed to leave no room for special divine action. These two challenges will be discussed below, along with proposed solutions in the contemporary science and religion literature.

Christian authors have traditionally used the Bible as a source of historical information. Biblical exegesis of the creation narratives, especially Genesis 1 and 2 (and some other scattered passages, such as in the Book of Job), remains fraught with difficulties. Are these texts to be interpreted in a historical, metaphorical, or poetic fashion, and what are we to make of the fact that the order of creation differs between these accounts (Harris 2013)? The Anglican archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) used the Bible to date the beginning of creation at 4004 BCE. Although such literalist interpretations of the biblical creation narratives were not uncommon, and are still used by Young Earth creationists today, theologians before Ussher already offered alternative, non-literalist readings of the biblical materials (e.g., Augustine De Genesi ad litteram , 416). From the seventeenth century onward, the Christian doctrine of creation came under pressure from geology, with findings suggesting that the Earth was significantly older than 4004 BCE. From the eighteenth century on, natural philosophers, such as Benoît de Maillet, Lamarck, Chambers, and Darwin, proposed transmutationist (what would now be called evolutionary) theories, which seem incompatible with scriptural interpretations of the special creation of species. Following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), there has been an ongoing discussion on how to reinterpret the doctrine of creation in the light of evolutionary theory (see Bowler 2009 for an overview).

Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett (2003) have outlined a divine action spectrum to clarify the distinct positions about creation and divine action in the contemporary science and religion literature that focuses on Christians, agnostics, and atheists. They discern two dimensions in this spectrum: the degree of divine action in the natural world, and the form of causal explanations that relate divine action to natural processes. At one extreme are creationists. Like other theists, they believe God has created the world and its fundamental laws, and that God occasionally performs special divine actions (miracles) that intervene in the fabric of those laws. Creationists deny any role of natural selection in the origin of species. Within creationism, there are Old and Young Earth creationism, with the former accepting geology and rejecting evolutionary biology, and the latter rejecting both. Next to creationism is Intelligent Design, which affirms divine intervention in natural processes. Intelligent Design creationists (e.g., Dembski 1998) believe there is evidence of intelligent design in organisms’ irreducible complexity; on the basis of this they infer design and purposiveness (see Kojonen 2016). Like other creationists, they deny a significant role for natural selection in shaping organic complexity and they affirm an interventionist account of divine action. For political reasons they do not label their intelligent designer as God, as they hope to circumvent the constitutional separation of church and state in the US which prohibits teaching religious doctrines in public schools (Forrest & Gross 2004). Theistic evolutionists hold a non-interventionist approach to divine action: God creates indirectly, through the laws of nature (e.g., through natural selection). For example, the theologian John Haught (2000) regards divine providence as self-giving love, and natural selection and other natural processes as manifestations of this love, as they foster creaturely autonomy and independence. While theistic evolutionists allow for special divine action, particularly the miracle of the Incarnation in Christ (e.g., Deane-Drummond 2009), deists such as Michael Corey (1994) think there is only general divine action: God has laid out the laws of nature and lets it run like clockwork without further interference. Deism is still a long distance from ontological materialism, the view that the material world is all there is. Ontological materialists tend to hold that the universe is intelligible, with laws that scientists can discover, but there is no lawgiver and no creator.

Views on divine action were influenced by developments in physics and their philosophical interpretation. In the seventeenth century, natural philosophers, such as Robert Boyle and John Wilkins, developed a mechanistic view of the world as governed by orderly and lawlike processes. Laws, understood as immutable and stable, created difficulties for the concept of special divine action (Pannenberg 2002). How could God act in a world that was determined by laws?

One way to regard miracles and other forms of special divine action is to see them as actions that somehow suspend or ignore the laws of nature. David Hume (1748: 181), for instance, defined a miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the deity, or by the interposal of some invisible agent”, and, more recently, Richard Swinburne (1968: 320) defines a miracle as “a violation of a law of Nature by a god”. This concept of divine action is commonly labeled interventionist. Interventionism regards the world as causally deterministic, so God has to create room for special divine actions. By contrast, non-interventionist forms of divine action require a world that is, at some level, non-deterministic, so that God can act without having to suspend or ignore the laws of nature.

In the seventeenth century, the explanation of the workings of nature in terms of elegant physical laws suggested the ingenuity of a divine designer. The design argument reached its peak during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century (McGrath 2011). For example, Samuel Clarke (1705: part XI, cited in Schliesser 2012: 451) proposed an a posteriori argument from design by appealing to Newtonian science, calling attention to the

exquisite regularity of all the planets’ motions without epicycles, stations, retrogradations, or any other deviation or confusion whatsoever.

A late proponent of this view of nature as a perfect smooth machine is William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802).

Another conclusion that the new laws-based physics suggested was that the universe was able to run smoothly without requiring an intervening God. The increasingly deterministic understanding of the universe, ruled by deterministic causal laws as, for example, outlined by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827), seemed to leave no room for special divine action, which is a key element of the traditional Christian doctrine of creation. Newton resisted interpretations like these in an addendum to the Principia in 1713: the planets’ motions could be explained by laws of gravity, but the positions of their orbits, and the positions of the stars—far enough apart so as not to influence each other gravitationally—required a divine explanation (Schliesser 2012). Alston (1989) argued, contra authors such as Polkinghorne (1998), that mechanistic, pre-twentieth century physics is compatible with divine action and divine free will. Assuming a completely deterministic world and divine omniscience, God could set up initial conditions and the laws of nature in such a way as to bring God’s plans about. In such a mechanistic world, every event is an indirect divine act.

Advances in twentieth-century physics, including the theories of general and special relativity, chaos theory, and quantum theory, overturned the mechanical clockwork view of creation. In the latter half of the twentieth century, chaos theory and quantum physics have been explored as possible avenues to reinterpret divine action. John Polkinghorne (1998) proposed that chaos theory not only presents epistemological limits to what we can know about the world, but that it also provides the world with an “ontological openness” in which God can operate without violating the laws of nature. One difficulty with this model is that it moves from our knowledge of the world to assumptions about how the world is: does chaos theory mean that outcomes are genuinely undetermined, or that we as limited knowers cannot predict them? Robert Russell (2006) proposed that God acts in quantum events. This would allow God to directly act in nature without having to contravene the laws of nature. His is therefore a non-interventionist model: since, under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are no natural efficient causes at the quantum level, God is not reduced to a natural cause. Murphy (1995) outlined a similar bottom-up model where God acts in the space provided by quantum indeterminacy. These attempts to locate God’s actions either in chaos theory or quantum mechanics, which Lydia Jaeger (2012a) has termed “physicalism-plus-God”, have met with sharp criticism (e.g., Saunders 2002; Jaeger 2012a,b). After all, it is not even clear whether quantum theory would allow for free human action, let alone divine action, which we do not know much about (Jaeger 2012a). Next to this, William Carroll (2008), building on Thomistic philosophy, argues that authors such as Polkinghorne and Murphy are making a category mistake: God is not a cause in the way creatures are causes, competing with natural causes, and God does not need indeterminacy in order to act in the world. Rather, as primary cause God supports and grounds secondary causes. While this neo-Thomistic proposal is compatible with determinism (indeed, on this view, the precise details of physics do not matter much), it blurs the distinction between general and special divine action. Moreover, the Incarnation suggests that the idea of God as a cause among natural causes is not an alien idea in theology, and that God incarnate as Jesus at least sometimes acts as a natural cause (Sollereder 2015).

There has been a debate on the question to what extent randomness is a genuine feature of creation, and how divine action and chance interrelate. Chance and stochasticity are important features of evolutionary theory (the non-random retention of random variations). In a famous thought experiment, Gould (1989) imagined that we could rewind the tape of life back to the time of the Burgess Shale (508 million years ago); the chance that a rerun of the tape of life would end up with anything like the present-day life forms is vanishingly small. However, Simon Conway Morris (2003) has insisted species very similar to the ones we know now, including humans, would evolve under a broad range of conditions.

Under a theist interpretation, randomness could either be a merely apparent aspect of creation, or a genuine feature. Plantinga suggests that randomness is a physicalist interpretation of the evidence. God may have guided every mutation along the evolutionary process. In this way, God could

guide the course of evolutionary history by causing the right mutations to arise at the right time and preserving the forms of life that lead to the results he intends. (2011: 121)

By contrast, other authors see stochasticity as a genuine design feature, and not just as a physicalist gloss. Their challenge is to explain how divine providence is compatible with genuine randomness. (Under a deistic view, one could simply say that God started the universe up and did not interfere with how it went, but that option is not open to the theist, and most authors in the field of science and religion are not deists.) The neo-Thomist Elizabeth Johnson (1996) argues that divine providence and true randomness are compatible: God gives creatures true causal powers, thus making creation more excellent than if they lacked such powers. Random occurrences are also secondary causes. Chance is a form of divine creativity that creates novelty, variety, and freedom. One implication of this view is that God may be a risk taker—although, if God has a providential plan for possible outcomes, there is unpredictability but not risk. Johnson uses metaphors of risk taking that, on the whole, leave the creator in a position of control. Creation, then, is akin to jazz improvisation. Why would God take risks? There are several solutions to this question. The free will theodicy says that a creation that exhibits stochasticity can be truly free and autonomous:

Authentic love requires freedom, not manipulation. Such freedom is best supplied by the open contingency of evolution, and not by strings of divine direction attached to every living creature. (Miller 1999 [2007: 289])

The “only way theodicy” goes a step further, arguing that a combination of laws and chance is not only the best way, but the only way for God to achieve God’s creative plans (see, e.g., Southgate 2008 for a defense).

Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have similar creation stories, which ultimately go back to the first book of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis). According to Genesis, humans are the result of a special act of creation. Genesis 1 offers an account of the creation of the world in six days, with the creation of human beings on the sixth day. It specifies that humans were created male and female, and that they were made in God’s image. Genesis 2 provides a different order of creation, where God creates humans earlier in the sequence (before other animals), and only initially creates a man, later fashioning a woman out of the man’s rib. Islam has a creation narrative similar to Genesis 2, with Adam being fashioned out of clay. These handcrafted humans are regarded as the ancestors of all living humans today. Together with Ussher’s chronology, the received view in eighteenth-century Europe was that humans were created only about 6000 years ago, in an act of special creation.

Humans occupy a privileged position in these creation accounts. In Christianity, Judaism, and some strands of Islam, humans are created in the image of God ( imago Dei ). Humans also occupy a special place in creation as a result of the Fall. In Genesis 3, the account of the Fall stipulates that the first human couple lived in the Garden of Eden in a state of innocence and/or righteousness. This means they were able to not sin, whereas we are no longer able to refrain from sinning. By eating from the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil they fell from this state, and death, manual labor, as well as pain in childbirth were introduced. Moreover, as a result of this so-called “original sin”, the effects of Adam’s sin are passed on to every human being. The Augustinian interpretation of original sin also emphasizes that our reasoning capacities have been marred by the distorting effects of sin (the so-called noetic effects of sin): as a result of sin, our original perceptual and reasoning capacities have been marred. This interpretation is influential in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. For example, Plantinga (2000) appeals to the noetic effects of sin to explain religious diversity and unbelief, offering this as an explanation for why not everyone believes in God even though this belief would be properly basic.

There are different ways in which Christians have thought about the Fall and original sin. In Western Christianity, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is very influential, though there is no generally accepted Christian doctrine on original sin (Couenhoven 2005). For Augustine, humans were in a state of original righteousness before the Fall, and by their action not only marred themselves but the entirety of creation. By contrast, Eastern Orthodox churches are more influenced by Irenaeus, an early Church Father who argued that humans were originally innocent and immature, rather than righteous. John Hick (1966) was an influential proponent of “Irenaean style” theodicy in contemporary Christianity.

Over the past decades, authors in the Christian religion and science literature have explored these two interpretations (Irenaean, Augustinian) and how they can be made compatible with scientific findings (see De Smedt and De Cruz 2020 for a review). Scientific findings and theories relevant to human origins come from a range of disciplines, in particular geology, paleoanthropology (the study of ancestral hominins, using fossils and other evidence), archaeology, and evolutionary biology. These findings challenge traditional religious accounts of humanity, including the special creation of humans, the imago Dei , the historical Adam and Eve, and original sin.

In natural philosophy, the dethroning of humanity from its position as a specially created species predates Darwin and can already be found in early transmutationist publications. For example, Benoît de Maillet’s posthumously published Telliamed (1748, the title is his name in reverse) traces the origins of humans and other terrestrial animals from sea creatures. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed chimpanzees as the ancestors to humans in his Philosophie Zoologique (1809). The Scottish publisher and geologist Robert Chambers’ anonymously published Vestiges of Creation (1844) stirred controversy with its detailed naturalistic account of the origin of species. He proposed that the first organisms arose through spontaneous generation, and that all subsequent organisms evolved from them. Moreover, he argued that humans have a single evolutionary origin:

The probability may now be assumed that the human race sprung from one stock, which was at first in a state of simplicity, if not barbarism (1844: 305)

a view starkly different from the Augustinian interpretation of humanity as being in a prelapsarian state of perfection.

Darwin was initially reluctant to publish on human origins. While he did not discuss human evolution in his Origin of Species , he promised, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (1859: 487). Huxley (1863) wrote Man’s Place in Nature , the first book on human evolution from a Darwinian point of view which discussed fossil evidence, such as the then recently uncovered Neanderthal fossils from Gibraltar. Darwin’s (1871) Descent of Man identified Africa as the likely place where humans originated, and used comparative anatomy to demonstrate that chimpanzees and gorillas were closely related to humans. In the twentieth century, paleoanthropologists debated whether humans separated from the other great apes (at the time wrongly classified into the paraphyletic group Pongidae ) about 15 million years ago, or about 5 million years ago. Molecular clocks—first immune responses (e.g., Sarich & Wilson 1967), then direct genetic evidence (e.g., Rieux et al. 2014)—favor the shorter chronology.

The discovery of many hominin fossils, including Ardipithecus ramidus (4.4 million years ago), Australopithecus afarensis (nicknamed “Lucy”), about 3.5 million years old, the Sima de los Huesos hominins (about 400,000 years old, ancestors to the Neanderthals), Homo neanderthalensis , and the intriguing Homo floresiensis (small hominins who lived on the island of Flores, Indonesia, dated to 700,000–50,000 years ago) have created a rich, complex picture of hominin evolution. These finds are supplemented by detailed analyses of ancient DNA extracted from fossil remains, bringing to light a previously unknown species of hominin (the Denisovans) who lived in Siberia up to about 40,000 years ago. Taken together, this evidence indicates that humans did not evolve in a simple linear fashion, but that human evolution resembles an intricate branching tree with many dead ends, in line with the evolution of other species. Genetic and fossil evidence favors a predominantly African origin of our species Homo sapiens (as early as 315,000 years ago) with limited gene-flow from other hominin species such as Neanderthals and Denisovans (see, e.g., Richter et al. 2017).

In the light of these scientific findings, contemporary science and religion authors have reconsidered the questions of human uniqueness, imago Dei , the Incarnation, and the historicity of original sin. Some authors have attempted to reinterpret human uniqueness as a number of species-specific cognitive and behavioral adaptations. For example, van Huyssteen (2006) considers the ability of humans to engage in cultural and symbolic behavior, which became prevalent in the Upper Paleolithic, as a key feature of uniquely human behavior. Other theologians have opted to broaden the notion of imago Dei. Given what we know about the capacities for morality and reason in non-human animals, Celia Deane-Drummond (2012) and Oliver Putz (2009) reject an ontological distinction between humans and non-human animals, and argue for a reconceptualization of the imago Dei to include at least some nonhuman animals. Joshua Moritz (2011) raises the question of whether extinct hominin species, such as Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis , which co-existed with Homo sapiens for some part of prehistory, partook in the divine image.

There is also discussion of how we can understand the Incarnation (the belief that Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, became a human being) with the evidence we have of human evolution. Some interpret Christ’s divine nature quite liberally. For instance, Peacocke (1979) regarded Jesus as the point where humanity is perfect for the first time. Christ is the progression and culmination of what evolution has been working toward in the teleological, progressivist interpretation of evolution by Teilhard de Chardin (1971). According to Teilhard, evil is still horrible but no longer incomprehensible; it becomes a natural feature of creation—since God chose evolution as his mode of creation, evil arises as an inevitable byproduct. Deane-Drummond (2009), however, points out that this interpretation is problematic: Teilhard worked within a Spencerian progressivist model of evolution, and he was anthropocentric, seeing humanity as the culmination of evolution. Contemporary evolutionary theory has repudiated the Spencerian progressivist view, and adheres to a stricter Darwinian model. Deane-Drummond, who regards human morality as lying on a continuum with the social behavior of other animals, conceptualizes the Fall as a mythical, rather than a historical event. It represents humanity’s sharper awareness of moral concerns and its ability to make wrong choices. She regards Christ as incarnate wisdom, situated in a theodrama that plays against the backdrop of an evolving creation. Like all human beings, Christ is connected to the rest of creation through common descent. By saving us, he saves the whole of creation.

Debates on the Fall and the historical Adam have centered on how these narratives can be understood in the light of contemporary science. On the face of it, limitations of our cognitive capacities can be naturalistically explained as a result of biological constraints, so there seems little explanatory gain to appeal to the narrative of the Fall. Some have attempted to interpret the concepts of sin and Fall in ways that are compatible with paleoanthropology, notably Peter van Inwagen (2004) and Jamie K. Smith (2017), who have argued that God could have providentially guided hominin evolution until there was a tightly-knit community of primates, endowed with reason, language, and free will, and this community was in close union with God. At some point in history, these hominins somehow abused their free will to distance themselves from God. These narratives follow the Augustinian tradition. Others, such as John Schneider (2014, 2020), on the other hand, argue that there is no genetic or paleoanthropological evidence for such a community of superhuman beings.

This survey has given a sense of the richness of the literature of science and religion. Giving an exhaustive overview would go beyond the scope of an encyclopedia entry. Because science and religion are such broad terms, the literature has split up in diverse fields of “science engaged theology”, where a specific claim or subfield in science is studied in relation to a specific claim in theology (Perry & Ritchie 2018). For example, rather than ask if Christianity is compatible with science, one could ask whether Christian eschatology is compatible with scientific claims about cultural evolution, or the cosmic fate of the universe. As the scope of science and religion becomes less parochial and more global in its outlook, the different topics the field can engage with become very diverse.

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Comte, Auguste | cosmological argument | Hume, David: on religion | teleology: teleological arguments for God’s existence | theology, natural and natural religion

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Bryce Huebner, Evan Thompson, Meir-Simchah Panzer, Teri Merrick, Geoff Mitelman, Joshua Yuter, Katherine Dormandy, Isaac Choi, Egil Asprem, Johan De Smedt, Taede Smedes, H.E. Baber, Fabio Gironi, Erkki Kojonen, Andreas Reif, Raphael Neelamkavil, Hans Van Eyghen, and Nicholas Joll, for their feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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• Published: 13 November 2018

Philosophy of religion and the scientific turn

• Aku Visala   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8692-804X 1 &
• Olli-Pekka Vainio 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  4 , Article number:  135 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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Traditionally, analytic philosophy of religion has focused almost solely on specifically philosophical questions about religion. These include the existence of God and divine attributes, religious language, and the justification of religious beliefs, just to mention a few. Recently, many scholars in the field have begun to engage more directly with scientific results. We suggest that this is a promising direction for philosophy of religion to take. Nevertheless, we want to warn philosophy of religion against the excessive focus on methodology that has preoccupied the “science and religion dialogue” in theology. Instead of attempting to formulate a general methodology for all possible engagements between philosophy of religion and the sciences, philosophers of religion would do well to focus on local and particular themes. Since there is no single method in philosophy and since scientific disciplines that have religious relevance vary in their methods as well, progress can be made only if philosophical tools are employed to analyse particular and clearly demarcated questions.

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Since the 1950s, analytic philosophy of religion has focused almost solely on distinctly philosophical questions related to religion and theology. These include (but are not limited to) questions about religious language, arguments for the existence and non-existence of God and the concept of God. In the 1980s, philosophy of religion saw a renaissance when new and more diverse views of epistemology and metaphysics stirred up the field. Although some philosophers of religion have engaged with scientific results, usually either supporting of undermining theism (e.g., Swinburne, 2004 ), it is clear that the methods and the questions have been distinctly “philosophical” rather than scientific. In the meantime, analytic philosophy as a whole has been strongly shaped not only by methodological naturalism, where philosophy seeks to model itself after the sciences, but also by the increasing motivation to take into account the results of the sciences in philosophical work (Kornblith, 2016 ). The scientific turn in philosophy of mind and cognition is a good example of this. Following this general trend, philosophers of religion have begun to engage with the results of the sciences more and more (e.g., Plantinga, 2011 ; Nagasawa, 2012 ). It is perhaps misleading to talk about “a scientific turn” in the philosophy of religion: methodologically philosophy of religion has not become more scientific, nor are there many voices demanding that. Nevertheless, philosophers have begun to take scientific results into account in debates that have traditionally been conducted in philosophical terms only.

Generally speaking, we find this turn towards increasing engagement with the sciences a positive one. Not only does it make philosophy of religion more pluralistic and interdisciplinary, but it also injects the stale debates with new ideas and perspectives. We also want to maintain the “philosophical” nature of philosophy of religion: it cannot be turned or transformed into a science to supplement or replace the scientific study of religion.

In this article, we want to address two interconnected issues. The first has to do with the methods of engagement between the sciences and philosophy of religion. We will provide some methodological reflections on how this engagement with the sciences has been done and how it could be done better. By drawing lessons from theology, especially the “science and religion dialogue”, we suggest that philosophers of religion should not commit themselves to one, single method of engagement or enforce one methodological stance for all such engagements. We refer here especially to a number of scholars who have attempted to develop a post-foundationalist methodology for all such engagements. As far as we understand it, postfoundationalists have two goals. On the one hand, they seek rehabilitate theology as an academic enterprise; on the other hand, they seek to resist scientistic or reductionistic views of the sciences as a whole (e.g., Van Huyssteen, 2006 ).

Although we suggest that lessons can be learned from “religion and science”, we do not want to press the analogy too far. It is clear that philosophy of religion and “science and religion” dialogue are not completely analogous. The scope of the analogy obviously depends on how we understand, among other things, the nature of “science” and to what extent theology or philosophy of religion might be understood as faith-based or apologetic enterprises. Nevertheless, there is enough similarity between the cases that warrant the analogy for our purposes. The second part of the article highlight some topics where philosophers of religion have, we suggest, successfully taken into account or responded to scientific work thus contributing to the interdisciplinary discussion. We will conclude the article with reflections on future topics and questions, and some suggested modes of engagement.

Before going any further, we want to note the following. It is not our aim to offer a programmatic discussion of the nature of philosophy of religion as a whole, since this is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, we outline a way of understanding how the engagements between science, philosophy and religion could be conducted more efficiently; an apologia for a pluralistic methodological approach, one might say. Regarding the specific examples of some topics briefly mentioned along the way, we do not aim to break new ground.

What does philosophy of religion have to do with the sciences?

Philosophers of religion have many different motives for engaging the sciences. The most salient one has, of course, been the impact that the sciences might have for the theism/atheism debate. We call this the “apologetic motive”. On the atheist side, there are arguments suggesting that some large-scale scientific results, say, from evolutionary biology and cosmology, undermine theism in some way or another. According to a very popular argument, Darwinist evolutionary biology undermines those arguments for the existence of God that are based on biological design. Some have even suggested that evolutionary biology undermines all aspects of theism (e.g., Dawkins, 2006 ). However, it is not only the results of the sciences that are relevant in this context. Rather, the progress and trustworthiness of the sciences has also raised epistemological challenges to the rationality of religious beliefs and commitments. The Dutch philosopher Herman Philipse, ( 2012 ) is a good example of a philosopher who employs both strategies. First, he argues that the ways in which religious beliefs are formed (claims about revelations, testimony, etc.) are in fact much less reliable than scientific ones. For this reason, one should take scientific results as having superior authority over less reliably produced religious beliefs. Second, he argues that all arguments for the existence of God, gods and supernatural beings fail, be they empirical or conceptual.

The theist side of the debate has attempted to defuse the scientific challenge to theism in different ways. One well-known response is to adopt scientific-style reasoning in defence of theism, like Richard Swinburne, ( 2004 ) has sought to do for decades. According to Swinburne, metaphysical claims, such as the existence of God, can be established with some probability by invoking a large spectrum of empirical evidence. These include the existence and general features of our world, certain historical events and religious experiences. The theistic hypothesis, according to Swinburne, explains this evidence better than the naturalistic one. Another response comes from the so called Reformed Epistemology that seeks to defuse the epistemic challenge from science by defending a different kind of epistemology altogether. But this is all familiar territory to those in the field of philosophy of religion.

Although it is somewhat narrow, we find nothing wrong in principle with the apologetic motivation. One function of philosophy of religion is to make the reasons behind and the structure inherent in religious and non-religious worldviews as clear and transparent as possible. Moreover, it is a value for civic discourse to be based on views that are publicly and properly managed (Gutting, 2016 ). In what follows, we, nevertheless, want to look beyond the apologetic motive and seek wider forms of engagement between the sciences and philosophy of religion. Now, the question is what these engagements could look like. Here we might take our cue from philosopher Alvin Goldman, ( 1992 ), who is known for his work at the boundary of epistemology and the cognitive sciences. According to Goldman, there are at least three separate ways in which philosophers have engaged with the cognitive sciences.

First, the traffic can be from philosophy to some other discipline. Cognitive science is a field where philosophers have made significant contributions to empirical work. Philosophical contributions to the field include theories, models and hypotheses, but especially philosophical tools. As is well known, different systems of logic, probabilistic reasoning and semantic theories of philosophy are now widely employed in cognitive linguistics and artificial intelligence studies, for instance. Philosophical theories concerning the mind-body problem and consciousness, for instance, now have a life of their own in different fields of the cognitive sciences. As far as we see it, philosophers of religion have had very little engagement of this kind with the sciences in the last century or so. Philosophers of religion very seldom contribute anything to the sciences themselves. However, we will suggest later that this does not necessarily need to be so. Perhaps philosophers of religion could contribute to the sciences by providing claims and perhaps even theories that could be tested and assessed in the scientific study of religion or even experimental philosophy.

In the second form of engagement, philosophers can bring insights from philosophy of science, analyse background assumptions and metaphysical commitments of different theories. By assuming this role, the philosopher clarifies critical concepts thereby contributing to possible novel empirical questions and theoretical innovation in the target field. We think this kind of engagement could also include the interpretation of scientific results: what kinds of conclusions can be drawn from them given their methodological assumptions? This, we suggest, can also include engaging with popular science material, since oftentimes the most important interpretations of scientific results appear in popularised works rather than in scientific papers themselves.

This form of engagement has been more popular among philosophers of religion. They have debated interpretations of the aforementioned evolutionary biology and physical cosmology, for instance (Holder, 2004 ). However, more positive contributions via methodological criticism and analysis have been surprisingly rare. We think that there could be multiple scientific fields where philosophers of religion could make a distinctive contribution. The authors of this paper have worked on the scientific study of religion (Visala, 2011 ), interdisciplinary models of human nature, and the psychology of disagreement (Vainio, 2017 ) just to mention a few.

The most natural domain for the philosophers of religion to engage in this way would be religious studies and the scientific study of religion. Various approaches in the study of religion have their own distinctive philosophical questions that have overlapped somewhat with philosophy of religion. These include, among other things, the concept of “religion” itself. Questions have been raised whether “religion” is a helpful scientific category at all; perhaps “tradition” or “practice” would be more accurate. Against this, one could maintain that “religion” still has pragmatic value in the study of religion: it is useful to have a general definition of religion but one must at the same time remember that it might not work in all cases (Nongbri, 2013 ).

Coming back to Goldman, there is a third way in which he sees the relationship of philosophy and the sciences playing out. Instead of contributing to the cognitive sciences, philosophers can apply the results and theories from this field to reformulate or answer philosophical problems. When philosophers of religion have engaged the sciences in this way, the motivation has mainly been apologetic, but it need not be so. Philosophers of religion should use a wide variety of scientific results, since their own interests span from moral and religious knowledge to metaphysics. This variety of interest beyond the apologetic motivation can be seen in a recent edited volume on scientific approaches to philosophy of religion (Nagasawa, 2012 ). Essays in the volume cover many different topics and seek to employ theories from the natural and behavioural sciences to problems in philosophy of religion. There are essays on psychology of counterfactual thinking, multiverse cosmology, the cognition of religious disagreement, as well as the psychology of character formation and responsibility.

In philosophy of religion, there has been a long-standing debate on what role naturalistic explanations of religion have in the atheism vs. theism debate. It is clear that simply offering a naturalistic explanation of belief in God or gods does not show that these beliefs are false. Nevertheless, such explanations might cast doubt upon religious claims in some other way. In the current scene, these issues are discussed in the context of so called debunking arguments of ethics, morality and religion. The main issue here is whether the epistemic status of our value-beliefs, moral beliefs and religious beliefs changes after we take into account evolutionary and cognitive explanations of these beliefs. We will return to this issue in more detail later.

What can philosophers learn from the science and religion dialogue?

The question is how exactly philosophers of religion should engage with the sciences. In what follows, we want to suggest that we need not enforce one single methodology for such engagements. Here we want to draw a specific lesson from theology, where the “science and religion dialogue” has been going on for some time now. It seems that many theological postfoundationalists have attempted to formulate an overarching methodology for theology and science engagements. Against this, we want to suggest that philosophers of religion can proceed successfully without strongly committing themselves to some overarching methodological stance. Philosophers of religion should be pluralists: engagements between philosophy and the sciences should be conducted more “locally” than “globally” and taking into account the diverse interests of those actually involved in the engagement. Something similar is also acknowledged in general philosophical methodology, so our argument does not constitute any kind of special pleading (Cappelen, 2017 ).

The best way to approach the “science and religion dialogue” is to look at its aims. After four or five decades of intense research and branching out towards various scientific disciplines, it seems that the “dialogue” has not really achieved its aims as they were originally conceived. Although the dialogue began in the 1970s in the English-speaking world, mainly in the UK, it has since been taken up in continental Europe, as well as in the US. The dialogue was originally an attempt to form a workable theological position between two extremes: science inspired naturalism that rejects central theological claims (the existence of God and the possibility of revelation, for instance) and entails a large-scale conflict between science and theology, and creationism or various forms of intelligent design theory that reject the validity of large parts of contemporary science, especially biology. Furthermore, this view was supposed to be disseminated amongst both scientists and theologians: from now on, both could work together in solving the great mysteries of life and cosmos. So, the aim was to make both academic theology and actual religious communities adopt a more positive attitude towards the sciences and to convince the sceptical scientists to adopt a friendlier attitude towards religion and theology. Early on, scientist/theologians such as John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacocke and Ian Barbour, ( 1998 ), among others, argued for a deep compatibility between scientific and theological worldviews.

The field has enjoyed steady growth since the early days and it has established itself as a kind of sub-discipline of theology. The enquiry so far has produced constructive theological proposals that seek to integrate scientific insights into theology (e.g., Peacocke 2004 ). Several journals ( Zygon , Theology and Science ), institutions ( Ian Ramsey Centre in Oxford, the Zygon Centre for Religion and Science in Chicago), professor’s chairs and lectureships (Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton Theological Seminary, Boston University) and societies ( International Society for Science and Religion , for instance) have emerged to support and structure the research in the field. The intellectual development of the field is summarised in numerous textbooks and handbooks published in the last few years (e.g., Clayton and Simpson, 2006 ).

Regardless of the steady growth of the field both academically and intellectually, there are dissenting voices. Philosopher Willem Drees’ analysis is dim: “Despite much activity, however, consensus on issues of importance seems far away, the impact on theology and on religious communities is limited and the academic credibility of ‘religion and science’ is marginal.” ( 2009 ). Apart from occasional knee-jerks towards biological evolution, Western theology, for the most part, has proceeded without taking into account what the sciences say about important theological issues, such as the nature of human beings. The same is true of actual religious communities, which oftentimes exhibit a hostile attitude towards science. Finally, the science and theology dialogue has had very little impact on the academia at large.

It is surprising to note that there are very few critical assessments of the science and theology dialogue from the theological side. Most textbooks and handbooks only mention the rapid development of the field but do not provide a general assessment as to whether the field has achieved its goals. So far, many have turned to postfoundationalism as methodological tool to achieve the original goals set for the debate (e.g., Van Huyssteen, 2006 ; Marshall, 2002 ). The underlying assumption was that if the right method were to be found, the dialogue would subsequently sort itself out.

However, it is clear that the science and religion dialogue has not achieved methodological unity or consensus. According to Drees, ( 2009 ), the failure to reach the original aims stems from the fragmentation endemic to the field. The fragmentation is most likely produced by the mutually exclusive philosophical assumptions and interests of the participants: most participants operate on the basis of their own (and mutually incompatible) religious (or non-religious) assumptions and, thus, understand the nature of science, religion and theology differently than others. Some might be critical of the sciences and unwilling to modify their theologies, whereas others are willing to make large-scale theological revisions to accommodate even the most thoroughgoing versions of scientific naturalism. Another methodological issue is the analytic-continental divide: the area is torn between continental style theology and postmodern philosophy in Europe and more analytically and science-oriented approaches in the English-speaking world.

Although we do not see much progress in the distinctly theological part of the dialogue, other parts of the discipline have progressed well. Here we have in mind the research conducted into the history of the relationship between religions and the sciences. Indeed, the work done here has successfully debunked the very popular conflict narrative or conflict myth of science and religion (Numbers, 2009 ). Significant work has been done on the Galileo case, the birth of the scientific method in the late medieval and renaissance Europe, as well as the 19th century debates on Darwinism just to mention a few topics (Harrison, 1998 , 2015 ; Brooke, 1991 ).

We can draw an important moral from this: when the science and religion dialogue has made progress, the progress has come about through scholars working on methods they know well (in this case historical ones) and focusing on specific claims (the conflict myth, for instance). We think that this should be also the model for the future of scholarship. Instead of formulating the supposedly correct overall method for the engagement, like the postfoundationalists suggest, scholars should localise their approach and concentrate, for example, on particular instances where scientific theories or results seem to be relevant to religious views and use the methods that seem to be appropriate for this specific task.

The debate about debunking

We now move from the methodological discussion towards the topical. More specifically, we want to highlight one area where philosophers of religion have successfully engaged with ethicists, epistemologists and scientists. This is the debate about psychological or evolutionary debunking arguments. Given the progress of offering evolutionary and cognitive accounts of the emergence of moral and religious beliefs, there have been suggestions that such accounts undermine the rationality or justification of such beliefs or preclude moral and religious knowledge altogether. This debate, we suggest, is a point where philosophers of religion can engage with the sciences in all aforementioned ways. First, they can provide hypotheses to be tested by the scientists (could there be a specific cognitive mechanism for religious experiences, for instance). Second, they can engage in methodological analysis and clarification of the work in cognitive science and evolutionary biology. Finally, they can use the results in multiple ways: assess whether they are relevant for the theism/atheism debate and rework their ideas about religious or moral epistemology, just to mention a few.

What are evolutionary debunking arguments? The discussion has heated up as a result of the increasingly detailed evolutionary and cognitive explanations of our value-beliefs, moral beliefs (Joyce, 2003 ; Griffiths and Wilkins, 2013 ) and god-beliefs (Leech and Visala, 2011 ). Debunking arguments can be aimed at undermining the truth of these beliefs or the basis of which we come to believe them. Consider god-beliefs and the archaeologist Steven Mithen, for example. According to Mithen, religion is a human universal: it can be found in almost all cultures and societies. This fact, he continues, can be explained by positing the existence of a supernatural realm where gods reside or by providing evidence that the human mind itself creates these ideas about the supernatural. Mithen goes for the latter solution, since the “on-going activity of the universe and life are explained by entirely natural processes”. He concludes that

Religious thought is uniquely associated with Homo sapiens and arose as a consequence of cognitive fluidity, which was in turn a consequence of the origin of language. In this regard, there appears to be no need to invoke a moment of divine intervention that initiated the start of a revelation. For me, therefore, there is no supernatural, no God to be revealed. (Mithen, 2009 )

As far as we see it, the argument can be characterised as follows. The fact that there is a plausible naturalistic explanation for the emergence of belief in gods, demonstrates that god-beliefs (and supernatural belief in general) is false. To be more precise, the deductive version of the argument would be this:

If there is a complete or sufficiently complete causal explanation of how belief in God came about and this explanation does not include God as a causal factor, then there is no God.

Current cognitive and evolutionary accounts of religion provide a complete or sufficiently complete causal explanation of this kind and they do not include God as a causal factor.

Therefore, there is no God.

Such an argument has a number of problems. First, there seems to be very little reason to accept 1. The falsity of god-beliefs cannot be inferred from the fact that there exists a causal explanation why people have god-beliefs that does not mention any god. This would commit the genetic fallacy. By exposing the causal history of a belief says nothing about the truth of the belief. This is because the truth (or falsity) of a proposition has no necessary relationship to the causes that led people to believe it. For such reasons, philosophers of all stripes consider such inferences as invalid.

Furthermore, premise 2 is also vulnerable to critique. One could point out that we do not as of yet know whether the scientific theories of religion we now have will withstand the test of time. Or one could grant that perhaps the cognitive and evolutionary factors that current theories invoke to explain religion are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for the emergence of religion (or at least we do not know that they are). Thus, it seems that we do not have enough reasons to exclude the possibility of other causal factors being involved (Visala, 2011 ).

Given the aforementioned points, it seems to us that debunking arguments aimed at the truth of god-beliefs or perhaps even moral beliefs are not very plausible. However, debunking arguments usually target the grounding of a belief rather than its truth. In this case, they seek to undermine the rationality, justification or otherwise cast doubt upon the belief on the basis of how it is generated. Philosopher Guy Kahane, ( 2011 ) provides a schematic version of the argument:

S’s belief that p is explained by X.

X is a process that does not track the truth of p.

Therefore, S’s belief that p is not justified.

It is not difficult to adapt this schema for our purposes.

Susan’s belief that there is a God is explained by her unconscious cognitive mechanisms.

These cognitive mechanisms are not truth-tracking with respect to the existence or non-existence of God.

Therefore, Susan’s belief that there is a God is not justified.

There is a considerable body of work dealing with debunking arguments of this kind (e.g.,Visala, 2014 ; Jong and Visala, 2014 ; Leech and Visala, 2012 ; Clark and Rabinowitz, 2011 ; Schloss and Murray, 2009 ; Trigg and Barrett, 2014 ; De Cruz and de Smedt, 2014 ; Vainio, 2016 ). Let us simply mention some counter strategies that have emerged in the literature to block the aforementioned argument.

First, premise 4 suffers from the same problems as premise 1 above. So, it seems that any given individual’s belief in God is underdetermined by her intuitive cognitive mechanisms. If this is the case, then even if we could eventually get a full description of a person’s intuitive cognitive mechanisms and demonstrate that such mechanisms are unreliable sources of god-beliefs, we could not conclude that god-beliefs were unwarranted. They could be justified on some other grounds.

Second, premise 5 looks much more plausible and defensible. One defence would be as follows. It could be argued, for instance, that a causal connection of a certain kind has to connect a belief and its target for the belief to be justified. An argument could be made that such a link might not exist in the case of theism: the best explanation on offer seems to suggest that if God did not exist, people might be theists anyway. One cognitive mechanisms singled out for its unreliability is the postulated (hyper)sensitive agency detection device (Barrett, 2011 ). This system responds to clues of agency and purposeful action in perceptual input. The suggestion is that human agency detection is oversensitive or hypersensitive: it overextends agency where there is none (natural occurrences, luck, misfortune, etc.). In addition to being oversensitive, agency detection is unreliable in other ways as well. The god-beliefs it generates or supports are extremely diverse and mutually incompatible: the religious worlds are populated by various gods, spirits, ghosts and other non-natural agencies. This diversity demonstrates that human agency detection is unreliable.

There have been a number of responses to such arguments. Philosopher Michael Murray ( 2009 ) and others have maintained that the unreliability of agency detection is difficult to prove without assuming the truth of atheism. The bottom line is that, for the most part, our agency detection successfully detects actual agency. We identify other humans, animals and their various kinds of intentions very reliably. Without assuming atheism, there seems to be nothing in the cognitive science account of agency detection that would rule out the possibility of genuine agency detection in a religious context as well.

As for the link between unreliability and diversity, Murray has tried to respond to this as well. He suggests that the diversity might be a product of the cultural context where the outputs of the agency detection system are interpreted rather than the system itself. Thus, the outputs of the agency detection system would be stable across cultures and therefore reliable, although their cultural elaborations would change from context to context. One might respond to Murray here by introducing an epistemological worry: how do we know what the “real” outputs of agency detection system are, since they are always interpreted in some cultural context? Is not the fact that the outputs can be interpreted differently itself a signal of the unreliability of the mechanism? As such responses demonstrate, it is far from clear that the problem of religious diversity has been solved. The discussion on debunking arguments is likely to continue.

Future issues

Lastly, we wish to briefly highlight some promising fields of enquiry where philosophy of religion and other sciences can meet and produce something beneficial, not only for academic specialists but for the public. These topics include free will, virtues, religion and violence and cosmology.

Free will and moral responsibility

Philosophers of religion are interested in free will for a variety of reasons. Notions of free will and responsibility are central to many religious doctrines, including incarnation, sin, grace and salvation. In addition, free will is crucial in debates about personhood of both God and human beings. Finally, free will has do with philosophical and theological views of moral cognition and virtue. Despite the fact that Christian theologians disagree about free will to some extent, they nevertheless maintain that humans are moral agents, who are accountable for their actions in front of God and one another.

Interestingly, some cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have been sceptical of free will. Inspired by the 1980s studies of neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, psychologist Daniel Wegner, ( 2002 ) argues that free will is an illusion. According to Wegner, conscious decisions are not involved in the production of human actions. Instead, underlying neural mechanisms cause both actions and feelings of conscious decision-making. In other words, our conscious “decisions” are more like rationalisations that attempt to retroactively make rational the actions caused by subconscious, non-rational mechanisms.

These claims sparked an enormous philosophical and scientific debate (e.g., Baer and Kaufman and Baumeister, 2008 ). Philosophers of religion could engage with this debate in a variety of ways. They could highlight, among other critics of Wegner and others, that a very limited notion of free will is being assumed here. It is assumed that an action must be immediately preceded by a conscious decision in order to be free. Against this, philosophers of religion could maintain that our moral responsibility practices are rather diverse and varied: it seems that people can be held responsible for actions that are not immediately preceded by conscious decisions.

Freedom and moral responsibility are fruitful areas of discussion, because of the probability of new neuroscientific and cognitive science results in the near future. The study of cognitive and neural processes of decision-making is progressing quite rapidly. The engagement need not take the form of opposing the sceptical conclusion. It can also channel the results of this research into philosophy of religion. In terms of human decision-making and moral cognition, there is an important lesson to be learned here: human moral decisions and choices are not always as deliberate and conscious as humans might like to think. Most of our cognitive mechanisms work automatically without our conscious awareness. And, like breathing, we do not consciously decide to do most of the things that we do.

Virtues and moral character

Ever since Plato and Aristotle, we have asked whether and how teaching and learning virtues might be possible. Recent advances in moral psychology have provided some empirical studies that demonstrate how stable our characters are and how they might be influenced, for good or for worse (Miller, 2014 ; Peterson and Seligman, 2004 ). The current state of the art seems to suggest that we humans are bundles of various habits some of which are good while some bad. None of us is simply virtuous or vicious, but we can excel in some areas while failing in many others. Nonetheless, our characters appear to be relatively stable, and also subject to behavioural improvement or degeneration.

As we come to understand how the human mind works more and more, this raises important philosophical and religious questions, which are not, as such, answerable by the sciences alone. What are virtues we should teach to our citizens? What is the best way to do so? The received answer is that we need small-scale institutions, like families and clubs, that are best suited for cultivating virtuous behaviour (Adams, 2006 ). However, these theories can and should be tested in the future. The current escalated culture war and campus meltdowns in USA make these questions all the more important.

How should we view moral failures and responsibility given what we know about the weakness and malleability of the human mind? Why some forms of action that appear virtuous, can be in fact vicious (Tosi and Warmke, 2016 )? These are likewise timely and practical questions, which incidentally were thoroughly investigated by patristic and medieval authors (Saarinen, 1994 ). Contemporary authors have not so far engaged these works in constructive manner.

Religion, tolerance and violence

The acts of terror perpetrated in the name of Islam have produced a burgeoning field of study since 9/11. While we still may hear simplistic accusation about the relationship of religiosity and violent or extremist behaviour, there is ample amount of material that uses philosophical clarity to address this relationship in detail. For example, philosophical tools, social sciences, anthropology, psychology and history have been used to successfully argue for the complexity of this relationship (Atran, 2010 , Clarke, 2014 , Clarke et al. 2013 , Vainio, 2017 ). While there are situations where religious behaviour and violence seem to correlate, it is simply not warranted to claim that religiosity per se causes violence more than general human “groupish” or group-oriented behaviour.

The existing issues concern, among other things, the definition of religion, harm and tolerance. In multicultural Western societies, we face more and more questions about religious freedom and religious recognition. Answering these questions requires interdisciplinary work, where philosophy of religion should play important role. Obviously, the question concerning the freedom of religion or freedom of conscience cannot be answered without having well-defined concepts of religion, freedom and conscience that are agreed upon by the disputants. In USA, there is an ongoing discussion whether “freedom of worship” is the same thing as “freedom of religion”. It seems that this redefinition restricts the meaning of religion so that special freedom would be applicable to the places and moments of “worship” and not to public life. This, however, enforces a very narrow definition what religious convictions are and what they entail.

But granting the freedom of religion creates new issues, such as how should individuals and institutions encounter and foster multiple religious, or ideological, identities within the same public space. Since the Enlightenment, we have been familiar with the attitude of toleration, but now many argue that this are not enough. Instead of toleration, we should aim for acknowledgement and recognition. Since these demands come from political philosophy, they function quite well with national and racial identities, but run into problems in cases where there are ideological convictions involved, be they secular or religious. The practical question is what we can reasonably demand from people when we know how political, moral and religious convictions are formed and sustained (Vainio and Visala, 2016 ).

Cosmology and human existence

Several scientists have recently popularised their work in the form of popular science books, which also delve into questions that are not inherently scientific. Effectively, many scientists use their authority as scientists to engage philosophical or theological questions (Krauss, 2012 ; Vilenkin, 2006 ). Some such claims have been subjected to criticism not only by theists but also atheists (Nagel, 2010 ). We think that this is important task for philosophers of religion to undertake simply because it is not good for the public discourse to be based on highly contested or even blatantly false views.

Philosophy of religion has traditionally discussed the meaning of Big Bang-cosmology and whether it supports, for example, Kalam cosmological argument (Craig and Sinclair, 2012 ). Recent ongoing discussion concerns multiverse cosmologies and their effects on religious views (Holder, 2004 ). An example of a cosmological question, which is not directly religious but it has religious relevance, is the issue of human cosmic significance (Kahane, 2014 ; Mulgan, 2015 ). Briefly put, how should we construe human significance and value when we know that the universe is mind-bogglingly huge and we are just vanishing bits of dust in the midst of endless empty space?

A further question concerns the possibility of objective moral value in our almost incomprehensibly large cosmos. While philosophers of religion have focused on arguing for theism as the source of objective value, there has been an emergence of various non-naturalistic positions that acknowledge the value theistic considerations and arguments while rejecting theism (Wielenberg, 2014 ). While non-naturalist options in metaethics have become more popular in philosophy, this quite likely means more work and visibility for philosophers of religion who have for long wrestled with these questions (Cuneo, 2016 ).

We have suggested a modest methodological pluralism in philosophy of religion, when it engages the sciences. Since there is no single methodology in philosophy and there are various scientific methodologies depending on the subject matter, there cannot be just one monolithic method that could be used to solve the issues in the interface of science and philosophy. The methods and questions are determined ad hoc and based on the nature of the issue at hand. It is, of course, possible and even hoped for that philosophers of religion provide contextual methodologies that define how philosophical tools are to be used in a specified context. One such example is the analytic theology project that investigates the reasonability of theological doctrines and attempts to find new ways to formulate them with analytic tools (Arcadi, 2017 ).

Meanwhile, we propose that the enquiry should pay attention to a broad range of epistemic virtues, such as transparency, honesty and all the other virtues necessary for critical thinking, which should guide the scholars as they go about thinking these issues. While there is some disagreement concerning the ultimate goals of philosophy in general and philosophy of religion in particular, we believe that virtually everyone thinks that these goals include, even if they are not exhausted by, rational and public enquiry of fundamental questions of being and existence, providing arguments and counter-arguments to pre-theoretical convictions and assessing strengths and weaknesses of various claims that are relevant to our worldview (Gutting, 2016 ). We cannot see how meaningful public discussion about these matters could take place without the perspectives provided by philosophers of religion.

Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this paper as no datasets were analysed or generated.

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• v.2012; 2012

Religion, Spirituality, and Health: The Research and Clinical Implications

Harold g. koenig.

1 Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, P.O. Box 3400, Durham, NC 27705, USA

2 Department of Medicine, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21413, Saudi Arabia

This paper provides a concise but comprehensive review of research on religion/spirituality (R/S) and both mental health and physical health. It is based on a systematic review of original data-based quantitative research published in peer-reviewed journals between 1872 and 2010, including a few seminal articles published since 2010. First, I provide a brief historical background to set the stage. Then I review research on R/S and mental health, examining relationships with both positive and negative mental health outcomes, where positive outcomes include well-being, happiness, hope, optimism, and gratefulness, and negative outcomes involve depression, suicide, anxiety, psychosis, substance abuse, delinquency/crime, marital instability, and personality traits (positive and negative). I then explain how and why R/S might influence mental health. Next, I review research on R/S and health behaviors such as physical activity, cigarette smoking, diet, and sexual practices, followed by a review of relationships between R/S and heart disease, hypertension, cerebrovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease and dementia, immune functions, endocrine functions, cancer, overall mortality, physical disability, pain, and somatic symptoms. I then present a theoretical model explaining how R/S might influence physical health. Finally, I discuss what health professionals should do in light of these research findings and make recommendations in this regard.

1. Historical Background and Introduction

Religion, medicine, and healthcare have been related in one way or another in all population groups since the beginning of recorded history [ 1 ]. Only in recent times have these systems of healing been separated, and this separation has occurred largely in highly developed nations; in many developing countries, there is little or no such separation. The history of religion, medicine, and healthcare in developed countries of the West, though, is a fascinating one. The first hospitals in the West for the care of the sick in the general population were built by religious organizations and staffed by religious orders. Throughout the Middle Ages and up through the French Revolution, physicians were often clergy. For hundreds of years, in fact, religious institutions were responsible for licensing physicians to practice medicine. In the American colonies, in particular, many of the clergy were also physicians—often as a second job that helped to supplement their meager income from church work.

Care for those with mental health problems in the West also had its roots within monasteries and religious communities [ 2 ]. In 1247, the Priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem was built in London on the Thames River [ 3 ]. Originally designed to house “distracted people,” this was Europe's (and perhaps the world's) first mental hospital. In 1547, however, St. Mary's was torn down and replaced by Bethlehem or Bethlem Hospital [ 4 ]. Over the years, as secular authorities took control over the institution, the hospital became famous for its inhumane treatment of the mentally ill, who were often chained [ 5 ], dunked in water, or beaten as necessary to control them. In later years, an admission fee (2 pence) was charged to the general public to observe the patients abusing themselves or other patients [ 4 ]. The hospital eventually became known as “bedlam” (from which comes the word used today to indicate a state of confusion and disarray).

In response to the abuses in mental hospitals, and precipitated by the death of a Quaker patient in New York asylum in England, an English merchant and devout Quaker named William Tuke began to promote a new form of treatment of the mentally ill called “moral treatment.” In 1796, he and the Quaker community in England established their own asylum known as the York Retreat [ 6 ]. Not long after this, the Quakers brought moral treatment to America, where it became the dominant form of psychiatric care in that country [ 6 ]. Established in Philadelphia by the Quakers in 1813, “Friends Hospital” (or Friends Asylum) became the first private institution in the United States dedicated solely to the care of those with mental illness [ 7 ]. Psychiatric hospitals that followed in the footsteps of Friends Asylum were the McLean Hospital (established in 1818 in Boston, and now associated with Harvard), the Bloomingdale Asylum (established in 1821 in New York), and the Hartford Retreat (established in 1824 in Connecticut)—all modeled after the York Retreat and implementing moral treatment as the dominant therapy.

It was not until modern times that religion and psychiatry began to part paths. This separation was encouraged by the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. After being “introduced” to the neurotic and hysterical aspects of religion by the famous French neurologist Jean Charcot in the mid-1880s, Freud began to emphasize this in a widely read series of publications from 1907 through his death in 1939. Included among these were Religious Acts and Obsessive Practices [ 8 ], Psychoanalysis and Religion [ 9 ], Future of an Illusion [ 10 ], and Moses and Monotheism [ 11 ]. These writings left a legacy that would influence the practice of psychiatry—especially psychotherapy—for the rest of the century and lead to a true schism between religion and mental health care. That schism was illustrated in 1993 by a systematic review of the religious content of DSM-III-R, which found nearly one-quarter of all cases of mental illness being described using religious illustrations [ 12 ]. The conflict has continued to the present day. Consider recent e-letters in response to two articles published in The Psychiatrist  about this topic [ 13 , 14 ] and an even more recent debate about the role of prayer in psychiatric practice [ 15 ]. This conflict has manifested in the clinical work of many mental health professionals, who have generally ignored the religious resources of patients or viewed them as pathological. Consider that a recent national survey of US psychiatrists found that 56% said they never, rarely, or only sometimes inquire about religious/spiritual issues in patients with depression or anxiety [ 16 ]. Even more concerning, however, is that the conflict has caused psychiatrists to avoid conducting research on religion and mental health. This explains why so little is known about the relationship between religious involvement and severe mental disorders (see Handbook of Religion and Health ) [ 17 ].

Despite the negative views and opinions held by many mental health professionals, research examining religion, spirituality, and health has been rapidly expanding—and most of it is occurring outside the field of psychiatry. This research is being published in journals from a wide range of disciplines, including those in medicine, nursing, physical and occupational therapy, social work, public health, sociology, psychology, religion, spirituality, pastoral care, chaplain, population studies, and even in economics and law journals. Most of these disciplines do not readily communicate with each another, and their journal audiences seldom overlap. The result is a massive research literature that is scattered throughout the medical, social, and behavioral sciences.

To get a sense of how rapidly the research base is growing see Figure 1 . The graphs plot the number of studies published in peer-reviewed journals during every noncumulative 3-year period from 1971 to 2012. Note that about 50% of these articles are reports of original research with quantitative data, whereas the other 50% are qualitative reports, opinion pieces, reviews, or commentaries. Google Scholar presents a more comprehensive picture since it includes studies published in both Medline and non-Medline journals. These graphs suggest that the volume of research on R/S and health has literally exploded since the mid-1990s.

Religion spirituality and health articles published per 3-year period (noncumulative) Search terms: religion, religious, religiosity, religiousness, and spirituality (conducted on 8/11/12; projected to end of 2012).

2. Definitions

Before summarizing the research findings, it is first necessary to provide definitions of the words religion and spirituality that I am using. There is much controversy and disagreement concerning definitions in this field, particularly over the term “spirituality,” and space here does not allow a full discussion of these complex issues. For an in depth discussion, including an exploration of contamination and confounding in the measurement of spirituality, I refer the reader to other sources [ 18 – 20 ]. Here are the definitions we provided in the Handbook .

“[Religion] Involves beliefs, practices, and rituals related to the transcendent , where the transcendent is God, Allah, HaShem, or a Higher Power in Western religious traditions, or to Brahman, manifestations of Brahman, Buddha, Dao, or ultimate truth/reality in Eastern traditions. This often involves the mystical or supernatural. Religions usually have specific beliefs about life after death and rules about conduct within a social group. Religion is a multidimensional construct that includes beliefs, behaviors, rituals, and ceremonies that may be held or practiced in private or public settings, but are in some way derived from established traditions that developed over time within a community. Religion is also an organized system of beliefs, practices, and symbols designed (a) to facilitate closeness to the transcendent, and (b) to foster an understanding of one's relationship and responsibility to others in living together in a community.” [ 21 ].

“Spirituality is distinguished from all other things—humanism, values, morals, and mental health—by its connection to that which is sacred, the transcendent . The transcendent is that which is outside of the self, and yet also within the self—and in Western traditions is called God, Allah, HaShem, or a Higher Power, and in Eastern traditions may be called Brahman, manifestations of Brahman, Buddha, Dao, or ultimate truth/reality. Spirituality is intimately connected to the supernatural, the mystical, and to organized religion, although also extends beyond organized religion (and begins before it). Spirituality includes both a search for the transcendent and the discovery of the transcendent and so involves traveling along the path that leads from nonconsideration to questioning to either staunch nonbelief or belief, and if belief, then ultimately to devotion and finally, surrender. Thus, our definition of spirituality is very similar to religion and there is clearly overlap.” [ 22 ].

For the research review presented here, given the similarity in my definition of these terms and the fact that spirituality in the research has either been measured using questions assessing religion or by items assessing mental health (thereby contaminating the construct and causing tautological results), I will be using religion and spirituality interchangeably (i.e., R/S).

3. Method of the Review

I summarize the research findings between R/S and health first in the area of mental health outcomes, then for health behaviors, and finally for physical health outcomes. The information presented here is based on a systematic review of peer-reviewed original data-based reports published though mid-2010 and summarized in two editions of the Handbook of Religion and Health [ 23 , 24 ]. How these systematic reviews were conducted, however, needs brief explanation. This is particularly true for ratings of study methodology that are used to summarize the findings below.

The systematic review to identify the studies presented in the Handbooks and summarized in this paper was conducted as follows. We utilized a combination of strategies to identify the studies (excluding most reviews or qualitative research). First, we systematically searched online databases (PsycINFO, MEDLINE, etc.) using the search words “religion,” “religiosity,” “religiousness,” and “spirituality” to identify studies on the R/S-health relationship. Second, we asked prominent researchers in the field to alert us to published research they knew about and to send us research that they themselves had conducted. Third, if there were studies cited in the reference lists of the studies located, we tracked down those as well. Using this method, we identified over 1,200 quantitative original data-based publications during the period 1872 to 2000 and 2,100 studies examining the R/S-health relationship from 2000 to 2010. All of these studies are described in the appendices of the two editions of the Handbook. Based on other reviews of the research conducted around this same time period (but more limited), we estimate that our review captured about 75% of the published research. Bear in mind that many, many more qualitative studies have been published on the topic that were not included in this review.

In order to assess the methodological quality of the studies, quality ratings were assigned as follows. Ratings of each of the more than 3,300 studies were made on a scale from 0 (low) to 10 (high) and were performed by a single examiner (HGK) to ensure rating consistency. Scores were determined according to the following eight criteria: study design (clinical trial, prospective cohort, cross-sectional, etc.), sampling method (random, systematic, or convenience), number of R/S measures, quality of measures, quality of mental health outcome measure, contamination between R/S measures and mental health outcomes, inclusion of control variables, and statistical method, based on a scheme adapted from Cooper [ 25 ]. Cooper emphasized the definition of variables, validity and reliability of measures, representativeness of the sample (sample size, sampling method, and response rates), research methods (quality of experimental manipulation and adequacy of control group for clinical trials), how well the execution of the study conformed to the design, appropriateness of statistical tests (power, control variables), and the interpretation of results.

To assess the reliability of the ratings, we compared HGK's ratings on 75 studies with the ratings made by an independent outside reviewer (Andrew Futterman, Ph.D., professor of psychology, College of the Holy Cross, a scientist familiar with the scoring criteria and active in the field of R/S-health research). When we examined correlations between HGK and Futterman's ratings, we found them moderately correlated (Pearson r = 0.57). Since scores of 7 or higher indicated higher quality studies, we also compared the scores between the two raters in terms of lower (0–6) versus higher (7–10) quality. This was done by dichotomizing scores into two categories (0–6 versus 7–10) and comparing the categories between the two examiners. The kappa of agreement ( κ ) between the two raters was 0.49 (where kappas of 0.40 to 0.75 indicate good agreement [ 26 ]). Overall, the raters agreed on whether quality was low or high in 56 of the 75 studies or 75%. I now summarize the results of the systematic review described above.

4. Religion, Spirituality, and Mental Health

Approximately 80% of research on R/S and health involves studies on mental health. One would expect stronger relationships between R/S and mental health since R/S involvement consists of psychological, social, and behavioral aspects that are more “proximally” related to mental health than to physical health. In fact, we would not expect any direct or immediate effects of R/S on physical health, other than indirectly through intermediary psychosocial and behavioral pathways. With regard to mental health, we would expect R/S to boost positive emotions and help neutralize negative emotions, hypothesizing that it serves as both a life-enhancing factor and as a coping resource. With regard to the latter, there is both qualitative and quantitative research suggesting that R/S helps people to deal better with adversity, either external adversity (difficult environmental circumstances) or internal adversity (genetic predisposition or vulnerability to mental disorders).

In the present paper, I have chosen to cite original reports as examples of the most rigorous studies in each area based on ratings in the Handbooks (i.e., 7 or higher on 0–10 scale). Cited here are both positive and negative studies reporting significant relationships. For some topics, such as well-being and depression, there are too many high-quality studies to cite, so only a few examples of the best studies are provided.

4.1. Coping with Adversity

In the first edition of the Handbook [ 27 ], we identified 110 studies published prior to the year 2000 and 344 studies published between 2000 and 2010 for a total of 454 studies. Among these reports are descriptions of how R/S helped people to cope with a wide range of illnesses or in a variety of stressful situations. These include people dealing with general medical illness [ 28 , 29 ], chronic pain [ 30 ], kidney disease [ 31 ], diabetes [ 32 , 33 ], pulmonary disease [ 34 ], cancer [ 35 , 36 ], blood disorders [ 37 ], heart/cardiovascular diseases [ 38 , 39 ], dental [ 40 ] or vision [ 41 ] problems, neurological disorders [ 42 ], HIV/AIDS [ 43 ], systemic lupus erythematosus [ 44 ], irritable bowel syndrome [ 45 ], musculoskeletal disease [ 46 ], caregiver burden [ 47 – 49 ],  psychiatric illness [ 50 , 51 ], bereavement [ 52 , 53 ], end-of-life issues [ 54 , 55 ], overall stress [ 56 – 58 ], natural disasters [ 59 , 60 ], war [ 61 , 62 ] or acts of terrorism [ 63 ], and miscellaneous adverse life situations [ 64 – 66 ]. In the overwhelming majority of studies, people reported that R/S was helpful.

4.2. Positive Emotions

Positive emotions include well-being, happiness, hope, optimism, meaning and purpose, high self-esteem, and a sense of control over life. Related to positive emotions are positive psychological traits such as altruism, being kind or compassionate, forgiving, and grateful.

4.2.1. Well-Being/Happiness

By mid-2010, at least 326 quantitative, peer-reviewed studies had examined relationships with R/S. Of those, 256 (79%) found only significant positive associations between R/S and well-being (including eight studies at a statistical trend level, that is, 0.05 < P < 0.10). Only three studies (<1%) reported a significant inverse relationship between R/S and well-being. Of the 120 studies with the highest methodological rigor (7 or higher in quality on the 0–10 scale), 98 (82%) reported positive relationships (including two at a trend level) [ 67 – 77 ] and one study reported a negative relationship (but only at a trend level) [ 78 ].

4.2.2. Hope

At least 40 studies have examined relationships with R/S, and of those, 29 (73%) reported only significant positive relationships with degree of hope; no studies found an inverse relationship. Of the six highest quality studies, half found a positive relationship [ 79 – 81 ].

4.2.3. Optimism

We located 32 studies examining relationships with R/S, and of those, 26 (81%) reported significant positive relationships. Of the 11 best studies, eight (73%) reported significant positive relationships [ 82 – 85 ]. Again, as with hope, no studies reported inverse relationships.

4.2.4. Meaning and Purpose

At least 45 studies have examined relationships with R/S, and 42 (93%) reported significant positive relationships. These studies were often in populations where there was a challenge to having meaning and purpose, such as in people with chronic disabling illness. Of the 10 studies with quality ratings of 7 or higher, all 10 reported significant positive associations [ 86 – 89 ].

4.2.5. Self-Esteem

Critics have claimed that R/S adversely affects self-esteem because it emphasizes humility rather than pride in the self [ 90 ]. Furthermore, R/S could exacerbate guilt in some for not living up to the high standards of conduct prescribed by religious traditions, resulting in low self-esteem. We found 69 studies that examined associations with R/S, and of those, 42 (61%) found greater self-esteem among those who were more R/S and two (3%) reported lower self-esteem. Of the 25 studies with the highest methodological rigor, 17 (68%) reported greater self-esteem [ 91 – 98 ] and two (8%) found worse self-esteem [ 99 , 100 ]. Not surprisingly, these findings are parallel to those of depression below (in the opposite direction, of course).

4.2.6. Sense of Control

Although one might expect R/S to correlate positively with an external locus of control (i.e., the Transcendent controlling events), and some studies confirm this, the majority of research finds a positive correlation with an internal not an external sense of control. Of 21 studies that have examined these relationships, 13 (61%) found that R/S was related to a greater sense of personal control in challenging life circumstances. Of the nine best studies, four reported significant positive relationships (44%) [ 101 – 104 ] and three report significant negative relationships (33%) [ 105 – 107 ], whereas the two remaining studies reported complex or mixed results (significant positive and negative associations, depending on R/S characteristic). R/S beliefs may provide an indirect sense of control over stressful situations; by believing that God is in control and that prayer to God can change things, the person feels a greater sense of internal control (rather than having to depend on external agents of control, such as powerful other people).

4.2.7. Positive Character Traits

With regard to character traits, the findings are similar to those with positive emotions. With regard to altruism or frequency of volunteering, 47 studies have examined relationships with R/S. Of those, 33 (70%) reported significant associations, whereas five (11%) found less altruism among the more R/S; of the 20 best studies, 15 (75%) reported positive relationships [ 108 – 113 ] and two (10%) found negative associations [ 114 , 115 ] (both concerning organ donations, which some religions prohibit). With regard to forgiveness, 40 studies have examined correlations with R/S, and 34 (85%) reported significant positive relationships and no studies found negative associations. Among the 10 highest quality studies, seven (70%) reported greater forgiveness among the more R/S [ 116 – 119 ], a finding that recent research has supported [ 120 ]. Regarding gratefulness, five of five studies found positive associations with R/S [ 121 , 122 ], and with regard to kindness/compassion, three of three studies reported significant positive relationship with R/S [ 123 ]. Admittedly, all of the studies measuring character traits above depend on self-report.

4.3. Depression

As with self-esteem, mental health professionals have argued that R/S might increase guilt by focusing on sin and could thus lead to depression. Again, however, this has not been found in the majority of studies. Given the importance of depression, its wide prevalence in the population, and the dysfunction that it causes (both mental and physical), I describe the research findings in a bit more detail. Overall, at least 444 studies have now examined relationships between R/S and depression, dating back to the early 1960s. Of those, 272 (61%) reported significant inverse relationships with depression (including nine studies at a trend level), and 28 (6%) found relationships between R/S and greater depression (including two studies at a trend level). Of the 178 studies with the highest methodological rigor, 119 (67%) reported inverse relationships [ 124 – 135 ] and 13 (7%) found positive relationships with depression [ 136 – 148 ].

Of 70 prospective cohort studies, 39 (56%) reported that greater R/S predicted lower levels of depression or faster remission of depression, whereas seven (10%) predicted worse future depression and seven (10%) reported mixed results (both significant positive and negative associations depending on R/S characteristic). Of 30 clinical trials, 19 (63%) found that R/S interventions produced better outcomes than either standard treatment or control groups. Two studies (7%) found standard treatments were superior to R/S interventions [ 149 , 150 ] and one study reported mixed results.

Note that an independent review of this literature published in 2003 found that of 147 studies involving 98,975 subjects, the average correlation between R/S and depression was −0.10. Although this is a small correlation, it translates into the same effect size that gender has on depressive symptoms (with the rate of depression being nearly twice as common in women compared to men). Also, the average correlation reported in the 2003 review was 50% stronger in stressed versus nonstressed populations [ 151 ].

A widely renowned psychiatric epidemiology group at Columbia University, led by Lisa Miller and Myrna Weissman, has come out with a series of recent reports on R/S and depression studying a cohort of low- and high-risk children born to parents with and without depressive disorder. The findings from this cohort support an inverse link between R/S and depression, particularly in high-risk individuals [ 152 – 154 ].

4.4. Suicide

Correlations between R/S and suicide attempt, completed suicide, and attitudes toward suicide are consistent with those found for depression, self-esteem, and hope. Those who are depressed, without hope, and with low self-esteem are at greater risk for committing suicide. At least 141 studies have now examined relationships between R/S and the suicide variables above. Of those, 106 (75%) reported inverse relationships and four (3%) found positive relationships. With regard to the 49 studies with the highest methodological rigor, 39 (80%) reported less suicide, fewer suicide attempts, or more negative attitudes toward suicide among the more R/S [ 155 – 170 ] and two (4%) found positive relationships (one study in Delhi, India [ 171 ], and one in college students distressed over R/S concerns [ 172 ]).

4.5. Anxiety

Anxiety and fear often drive people toward religion as a way to cope with the anxiety. Alternatively, R/S may increase anxiety/fear by its threats of punishment for evil deeds and damnation in the next life. There is an old saying that emphasizes this dual role: religion comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comforted. Sorting out cause and effect here is particularly difficult given the few prospective cohort studies that have examined this relationship over time. However, a number of clinical trials have also examined the effects of R/S interventions on anxiety levels. Overall, at least 299 studies have examined this relationship, and of those, 147 (49%) reported inverse association with R/S (three at a trend level), whereas 33 (11%) reported greater anxiety in those who were more R/S. Of the latter, however, only one was a prospective study, one was a randomized clinical trial, and 31 (94%) were cross-sectional studies (where it was not clear whether R/S caused anxiety or whether anxiety increased R/S as a coping response to the anxiety). Of the 67 studies with quality ratings of seven or higher, 38 (55%) reported inverse relationships [ 173 – 182 ] and seven (10%) found positive relationships (greater anxiety among the more R/S) [ 183 – 189 ].

Among these 299 studies were 239 cross-sectional studies, 19 prospective cohort studies, 9 single-group experimental studies, and 32 randomized clinical trials. Of the 19 longitudinal studies, 9 (47%) reported that R/S predicted a lower level of anxiety over time; one study (5%) found an increase in anxiety (among women undergoing abortion for fetal anomaly) [ 189 ], seven reported no association, and two reported mixed or complex results. Of the nine experimental studies, seven (78%) found a reduction in anxiety following an R/S intervention (before versus after comparison). Of the 32 randomized clinical trials, 22 (69%) reported that an R/S intervention reduced anxiety more than a standard intervention or control condition, whereas one study (3%) found an increase in anxiety following an R/S intervention in persons with severe alcohol dependence [ 190 ].

4.6. Psychotic Disorder/Schizophrenia

We identified 43 studies that have examined relationships between R/S and chronic psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. Of the 43 studies examining psychosis, 14 (33%) reported inverse relationships between R/S and psychotic symptoms (one at a trend level), 10 (23%) found a positive relationship between R/S and psychotic symptoms (one at a trend level), eight reported mixed results (significant negative and positive associations, depending on the R/S characteristic measured), and one study reported complex results. Of these studies, seven had quality ratings of seven or higher; of those, two found inverse relationships, two found positive relationship, two reported mixed results (negative and positive), and one found no association. Note that the two studies finding inverse relationships between R/S and psychosis were both prospective studies [ 191 – 193 ], finding that R/S predicted better outcomes in subjects with psychotic disorders or symptoms. Of the two studies reporting positive relationships (both cross-sectional), one study found that importance of religion was significantly and positively associated with religious delusions [ 194 ] (not surprising), and the other study found that importance of religion was associated with “psychotic-like” symptoms in a national sample of Mexican Americans [ 195 ]; since the latter study involved participants who were not mentally ill, religion-related cultural factors may have influenced this finding. For a recent and more comprehensive discussion of R/S, schizophrenia, other chronic psychotic disorders, and the challenges distinguishing psychotic symptoms from religious beliefs, the reader is referred elsewhere [ 196 ].

4.7. Bipolar Disorder

Despite it's importance and wide prevalence, we could locate only four studies examining the relationship between R/S and bipolar (BP) disorder. Two found a positive association between R/S and bipolar disorder, and the remaining two reported mixed findings (both positive and negative correlations, depending on R/S characteristic). Of the two studies with high-quality ratings, one found a positive association and the other reported mixed findings. The first study of 334 US veterans with BP disorder found that a higher frequency of prayer or meditation was associated with mixed states and a lower likelihood of euthymia, although no association was found between any religious variable and depression or mania [ 197 ]. A second study examined a random national sample of 37,000 Canadians and found that those who attributed greater importance to higher spiritual values were more likely to have BP disorder, whereas higher frequency of religious attendance was associated with a lower risk of disorder [ 198 ]. In a qualitative study of 35 adults with bipolar disorder (not included in the review above), one of the six themes that participants emphasized when discussing their quality of life was the spiritual dimension. Over one-third of participants in that study talked about the relationship between BP disorder and R/S, emphasizing struggles to disentangle genuine spiritual experiences from the hyperreligiosity of the disorder. In another report, a case of mania precipitated by Eastern meditation was discussed; also included in this article was a review of nine other published cases of psychosis occurring in the setting of meditation [ 199 ].

4.8. Personality Traits

Personality traits most commonly measured today in psychology are the Big Five: extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience. These are assessed by the NEO Personality Inventory [ 200 ]. Another personality inventory commonly used in the United Kingdom is the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, which assesses extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism [ 201 ]. Relationships between personality traits and R/S using these measures have been examined in many studies [ 202 ]. With regard to psychoticism (a trait that assesses risk taking or lack of responsibility, rather than psychotic symptoms), 19 studies have examined its relationship to R/S, with 84% of those reporting significant inverse relationships (and no studies reporting a positive relationship). There have been at least 54 quantitative studies examined relationships between R/S and neuroticism, of which 24% found an inverse relationship and 9% reported a positive relationship (most of the remaining found no association). Concerning extraversion, there have been 50 studies, with 38% reporting a positive relationship with R/S and 6% reporting an inverse or negative relationship. With regard to conscientiousness, there have been 30 studies, of which the majority (63%) reported significant positive relationships with R/S and only 3% found significant inverse relationships. For agreeableness, 30 studies have examined relationships with R/S, and 87% of these studies reported positive relationships (no studies report inverse relationships). Finally, there have been 26 studies examining openness to experience, and of those, 42% found positive relationships with R/S and 12% reported negative relationships. Thus, R/S persons tend to score lower on psychoticism and neuroticism, and higher on extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience. They score especially low on psychoticism and especially high on agreeableness and conscientiousness. These personality traits have physical health consequences that we are only beginning to recognize [ 203 – 205 ].

4.9. Substance Abuse

If R/S influences one domain of mental health, it is in the area of substance abuse. With regard to alcohol use, abuse, and dependence, at least 278 studies have now examined relationships with R/S. Of those, 240 (86%) reported inverse relationships and only 4 studies (1%) indicated a positive relationship. Of the 145 studies with the best methodology, 131 (90%) reported inverse relationships [ 206 – 221 ] and only one study found a positive relationship [ 222 ]. Findings are similar with regard to drug use or abuse. We located 185 studies, of which 84% reported inverse relationship with R/S and only two studies (1%) found positive relationships. Of the 112 best studies, 96 (86%) reported inverse relationships [ 223 – 238 ] and only one study found a positive relationship [ 239 ]. The vast majority of these studies are in young persons attending high school or college, a time when they are just starting to establish substance use habits (which for some will interfere with their education, future jobs, family life, and health). Thus, the protective effects of R/S on substance abuse may have influences on health across the lifespan.

4.10. Social Problems

Here I examine research in two areas of social instability (delinquency/crime and marital instability) and two areas of social stability (social support and social capital). Given the emphasis that most major world religions place on human relationships, love, and compassion, one might expect that some of the strongest relationships with R/S would be found here, and they are indeed.

4.10.1. Delinquency/Crime

At least 104 studies have examined relationships with R/S. Of those, 82 (79%) reported significant inverse relationships (five at a trend level), whereas three (3%) found positive relationships with more delinquency/crime. Of the 60 studies with quality ratings of 7 or higher, 49 (82%) reported inverse relationships [ 240 – 252 ] and only one study found a positive relationship [ 253 ]. Of particular interest are the 10 studies examining relationships between R/S and school grades/performance in adolescents and college students between 2000 and 2009, of which all 10 (100%) found that more R/S youth did better than less religious youth [ 254 ].

4.10.2. Marital Instability

We identified 79 studies that examined relationships with marital instability. Of those, 68 (86%) found R/S related to greater marital stability and no studies reported an association with greater marital instability. Of the 38 methodologically most rigorous studies, 35 (92%) reported significant relationships between R/S and greater marital stability [ 255 – 265 ]. An independent meta-analysis reviewing research conducted before the year 2000 likewise concluded that greater religiousness decreased the risk of divorce and facilitated marital functioning and parenting [ 266 ].

4.10.3. Social Support

There is substantial evidence indicating a relationship between R/S and social support. Of 74 quantitative peer-reviewed studies of R/S and social support, 61 (82%) found significant positive relationships, and none found inverse relationships. Of the 29 best studies, 27 (93%) reported significant positive relationships [ 82 , 267 – 274 ]. For older adults in particular, the most common source of social support outside of family members comes from members of religious organizations [ 275 , 276 ].

4.10.4. Social Capital

Social capital, an indirect measure of community health, is usually assessed by level of community participation, volunteerism, trust, reciprocity between people in the community, and membership in community-based, civic, political, or social justice organizations. Research has examined relationships between R/S and social capital. We located a total of 14 studies, with 11 (79%) finding significant positive relationships between R/S and level of social capital, and none reporting only inverse relationships. Almost all of these studies were of high quality, and of the 13 studies with ratings of seven or higher, 10 (77%) found that R/S was related to greater social capital [ 277 – 280 ].

5. Explaining the Relationship: R/S and Mental Health

R/S influences mental health through many different mechanisms, although the following are probably the predominant ones (see Figure 2 ). First, religion provides resources for coping with stress that may increase the frequency of positive emotions and reduce the likelihood that stress will result in emotional disorders such as depression, anxiety disorder, suicide, and substance abuse. Religious coping resources include powerful cognitions (strongly held beliefs) that give meaning to difficult life circumstances and provide a sense of purpose. Religions provide an optimistic worldview that may involve the existence of a personal transcendental force (God, Allah, Jehovah, etc.) that loves and cares about humans and is responsive to their needs. These cognitions also give a subjective sense of control over events (i.e., if God is in control, can influence circumstances, and be influenced by prayer, then prayer by the individual may positively influence the situation). Religious beliefs provide satisfying answers to existential questions, such as “where did we come from,” “why are we here,” and “where are we going,” and the answers apply to both this life and the next life, thus reducing existential angst. These beliefs also help to normalize loss and change and provide role models of persons suffering with the same or similar problems (often illustrated in religious scriptures). Thus, religious beliefs have the potential to influence the cognitive appraisal of negative life events in a way that makes them less distressing. For people with medical illness, these beliefs are particularly useful because they are not lost or impaired with physical disability—unlike many other coping resources that are dependent on health (hobbies, relationships, and jobs/finances).

Theoretical model of causal pathways for mental health (MH), based on Western monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam). (Permission to reprint obtained. Original source: Koenig et al. [ 17 ]). For models based on Eastern religious traditions and the Secular Humanist tradition, see elsewhere. (Koenig et al. [ 24 ]).

Second, most religions have rules and regulations (doctrines) about how to live life and how to treat others within a social group. When individuals abide by those rules and regulations, this reduces the likelihood of stressful life events that reduce positive emotions and increased negative ones. Examples of stressful life events that religion may help people avoid are divorce or separation, difficulties with children, financial stress resulting from unfair practices in the marketplace, incarceration for lawbreaking (cheating or crime), and venereal diseases from risky sexual practices. Religions also usually discourage the use of drugs and excessive amounts of alcohol that increases the risk of engaging in the behaviors above (crime, risky sex) that are associated with negative mental health consequences.

Third, most religions emphasize love of others, compassion, and altruistic acts as well as encourage meeting together during religious social events. These prosocial behaviors have many consequences that buffer stress and lead to human support when support is needed during difficult times. Because religion encourages the helping of others and emphasizes a focus outside of the self, engagement in other-helping activities may increase positive emotions and serve to distract from one's own problems. Religion also promotes human virtues such as honesty, forgiveness, gratefulness, patience, and dependability, which help to maintain and enhance social relationships. The practice of these human virtues may also directly increase positive emotions and neutralize negative ones.

Thus, there are many possible mechanisms by which R/S may enhance mental and social health. This is not to say that R/S always does so. Religion may also be used to justify hatred, aggression, prejudice, and the exclusion of others; gain power and control over vulnerable individuals (as seen in cults); foster rigid thinking and obsessive practices; lead to anxiety, fear, and excessive guilt over minor infractions (and even self-mutilation in some cases); produce psychosocial strains due to failure to live up to high religious standards; lead to escape from dealing with family problems (through excessive involvement in religious or spiritual activities); and delay diagnosis and effective mental health care (due to antagonistic relationships with mental health professionals). While R/S is not a panacea, on the balance, it is generally associated with greater well-being, improved coping with stress, and better mental health. This relationship with mental health has physical health consequences (see Section 7 below).

6. Religion, Spirituality, and Health Behaviors

Religious doctrines influence decisions about health and health behaviors. In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, for example, there is an emphasis on caring for the physical body as a “Temple of the Holy Spirit” (see 1 Corinthian 6:19-20) [ 281 ]. Religious scriptures in other faith traditions also emphasize the person's responsibility to care for and nourish their physical body [ 282 – 284 ]. Behaviors that have the potential to harm the body are usually discouraged. This is reflected in teachings from the pulpit and influences what is considered appropriate within religious social groups. In summarizing the research on R/S and health behaviors, I cite only a few of the studies with high-quality ratings since there are so many.

6.1. Cigarette Smoking

The influence of R/S is most evident in it's “effects” on cigarette smoking. At least 137 studies have examined relationship between R/S and smoking, and of those, 123 (90%) reported statistically significant inverse relationships (including three at a trend level) and no studies found either a significant or even a trend association in the other direction. Of the 83 methodologically most rigorous studies, 75 (90%) reported inverse relationships with R/S involvement [ 213 , 285 – 294 ]. Not surprisingly, the physical health consequences of not smoking are enormous. Decreased cigarette smoking will mean a reduction in chronic lung disease, lung cancer, all cancers (30% being related to smoking), coronary artery disease, hypertension, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases.

6.2. Exercise

Level of exercise and physical activity also appears linked to R/S. We located 37 studies that examined this relationship. Of those, 25 (68%) reported significant positive relationships (two at a trend level) between R/S involvement and greater exercise or physical activity, whereas six (16%) found significant inverse relationships. Of 21 studies with the highest quality ratings, 16 (76%) reported positive associations [ 82 , 295 – 300 ] and two (10%) found negative associations [ 296 , 301 ].

Writers in the popular press have encouraged the combining of R/S activity and exercise through “prayer walking” [ 302 , 303 ] and “walking meditation.” [ 304 ].

At least 21 studies have examined relationships between R/S and a healthy diet. A healthy diet here involves increased intake of fiber, green vegetables, fruit, and fish; low intake of snacks, processed foods, and fat; regular vitamin intake; frequent eating of breakfast; overall better nutrition (following recommended nutritional guidelines). Of those studies, 13 (62%) found a significant positive association between R/S and a healthier diet (one at a trend level) and one found a worse diet [ 305 ]. Among the 10 studies with the highest quality ratings, seven (70%) reported a better diet among those who were more R/S [ 213 , 306 – 310 ]. In addition, we identified 23 studies that examined relationships between R/S and blood cholesterol levels. Of those, more than half (12 studies) found significantly lower cholesterol among those who were more R/S, whereas three studies (13%) reported significantly higher cholesterol levels. Of the nine best studies, five (56%) reported lower cholesterol [ 311 – 313 ] or a lowering of cholesterol in response to a R/S intervention [ 314 , 315 ], whereas one found higher cholesterol (but only in Mexican American men) [ 316 ].

6.4. Weight

Although R/S people tend to eat a healthier diet, they also eat more of it. This, then, is the one health behavior that places R/S individuals at greater risk for medical illness. At least 36 studies have examined the associations between weight (or body mass index) and R/S involvement. Of those, 14 (39%) found a positive relationship (R/S associated with greater weight), whereas only seven (19%) reported an inverse relationship. The situation does not improve when results from the most rigorously designed studies are examined. Among the 25 studies with the highest quality ratings, 11 (44%) reported greater weight among the more R/S [ 82 , 317 – 322 ] and five (20%) found lower weight (or less underweight [ 323 ]). Lower weight among the more R/S appears only in a few religious groups (Amish [ 324 ], Jews [ 325 ], and Buddhists [ 326 ]), in those with certain demographic characteristics (white, older, and high education) [ 327 ], and in response to a specific R/S intervention [ 328 ] or practice [ 314 , 329 ]. Faith-based weight-reduction programs in religious communities have been shown to be effective [ 328 , 330 , 331 ].

6.5. Sexual Behavior

We identified 95 studies that examined relationships between R/S and risky sexual activity (sex outside of marriage, multiple partners, etc.). Of those, 82 studies (86%) found significant inverse relationships with R/S (one at a trend level) and only one study (1%) found a significant relationship with more risky sexual activity [ 332 ]. Of the 50 highest quality studies, 42 (84%) reported inverse relationships [ 333 – 343 ] and none found a positive one. If those who are more R/S engage in less risky sexual behavior, this means they should have fewer venereal diseases, that is, less syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, chancroid, chlamydia, viral hepatitis, and human papillomavirus and human immunodeficiency virus, many of which have serious physical health consequences.

7. Religion, Spirituality, and Physical Health

There is rapidly growing evidence that stress and negative emotions (depression, anxiety) have (1) adverse effects on physiological systems vital for maintenance of physical health and healing [ 344 – 346 ], (2) increase susceptibility to or worse outcomes from a wide range of physical illnesses [ 347 – 351 ], and (3) may shorten the lifespan prematurely [ 352 , 353 ]. Social support, in turn, has long been known to protect against disease and increase longevity [ 354 – 356 ]. By reducing stress and negative emotions, increasing social support, and positively affecting health behaviors, R/S involvement should have a favorable impact on a host of physical diseases and the response of those diseases to treatment. As in the earlier sections, I cite high-quality studies as examples. Since there are fewer high-quality studies for physical health than for mental health or for health behaviors, I cite all of the studies with ratings of seven or higher.

7.1. Coronary Heart Disease (CHD)

Given the strong connections between psychosocial stressors, health behaviors, and CHD, it is not surprising that there is a link with R/S. Our review uncovered 19 studies that examined associations between R/S and CHD. Of those, 12 (63%) reported a significant inverse relationship, and one study reported a positive relationship. Of the 13 studies with the most rigorous methodology, nine (69%) found inverse relationships with CHD [ 357 – 365 ] and one found a positive one [ 366 ]. In addition, there have been at least 16 studies examining relationships between R/S and cardiovascular reactivity, heart rate variability, outcomes following cardiac surgery, and other cardiovascular functions. Of those, 11 studies (69%) reported that R/S was significantly related to positive cardiovascular functions or outcomes [ 367 – 374 ] or to lower levels of inflammatory markers such as C-reactive protein [ 375 – 377 ] and fibrinogen [ 378 ] that place individuals at high risk for cardiovascular disease.

7.2. Hypertension

The word “hypertension” itself suggests a relationship with stress or tension, and high blood pressure has been linked to greater psychosocial stress [ 379 – 381 ]. At least 63 studies have examined the relationship between R/S and blood pressure (BP), of which 36 (57%) reported significantly lower BP in those who are more R/S (five at a trend level) and seven (11%) reported significantly higher BP (one at a trend level). Of the 39 highest quality studies, 24 (62%) report lower BP (including one at a trend level) among those who are more R/S [ 382 – 394 ] or in response to an R/S intervention [ 328 , 395 – 404 ] (including a study whose results were reported twice, once for the overall sample and once for the sample stratified by race).

Two lower quality studies [ 405 , 406 ] and five well-done studies [ 407 – 411 ] (13%, including one at a trend level), however, reported higher BP in the more R/S or with religious fasting. The reason for an association between R/S and higher BP is not entirely clear. Perhaps, in certain population subgroups, intrapsychic religious conflict between psychosexual drives and religious standards creates unconscious stress that elevates BP. However, there is another possibility. This may be related to confounding by ethnicity. Three of the five studies reporting increased BP with increased R/S included in their samples a large proportion of ethnic minorities (samples from large urban settings such as Detroit and Chicago, made up of 36% to 100% African Americans). Since African Americans are more likely to have high BP (40% with hypertension) [ 412 ] and because African Americans are also the most religious ethnic group in society [ 413 ], it may be that controlling for race in these analyses is simply not sufficient to overcome this powerful confound.

7.3. Cerebrovascular Disease

Relationships between R/S, hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases or disease risk factors ought to translate into a lower risk of stroke. We located nine studies that examined this relationship, of which four reported a lower risk of stroke, all having quality ratings of seven or higher [ 414 – 417 ].

One study, however, reported significantly more carotid artery thickening, placing R/S individuals at higher risk for stroke [ 418 ]. Again, however, 30% of that sample was African American an ethnic group, known to be both highly religious and at high risk for stroke.

7.4. Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia

Physiological changes that occur with stress and depression (elevated blood cortisol, in particular) are known to adversely affect the parts of the brain responsible for memory [ 419 – 421 ]. The experience of negative emotions may be like pouring hydrochloric acid on the brain's memory cells [ 422 ]. By reducing stress and depression through more effective coping, R/S may produce a physiological environment that has favorable effects on cognitive functioning. Furthermore, R/S involvement may also engage higher cortical functions involved in abstract thinking (concerning moral values or ideas about the transcendent) that serve to “exercise” brain areas necessary for retention of memories. Regardless of the mechanism, at least 21 studies have examined relationships between R/S involvement and cognitive function in both healthy persons and individuals with dementia. Of those, 10 (48%) reported significant positive relationships between R/S and better cognitive functioning and three (14%) found significant negative relationships. Of the 14 studies with the highest quality ratings, eight (57%) reported positive relationships [ 423 – 430 ] and three (21%) reported negative relationships with cognitive function [ 431 – 433 ]. Studies finding negative relationships between R/S and cognitive function may be due to the fact that R/S persons have longer lifespans (see below), increasing the likelihood that they will live to older ages when cognition tends to decline. More recent research supports a positive link between R/S and better cognitive function in both dementia and in old age [ 434 , 435 ].

7.5. Immune Function

Intact immune function is critical for health maintenance and disease prevention and is assessed by indicators of cellular immunity, humoral immunity, and levels of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines. We identified 27 studies on relationships between R/S and immune functions, of which 15 (56%) found positive relationships or positive effects in response to a R/S intervention, and one (4%) found a negative effect [ 436 ]. Of the 14 studies with the highest quality ratings, 10 (71%) reported significant positive associations [ 437 – 443 ] or increased immune functions in response to a R/S intervention [ 444 – 447 ]. No high-quality study found only an inverse association or negative effect, although one study reported mixed findings [ 448 ]. In that study, religious attendance was related to significantly poorer cutaneous response to antigens; however, it was also related (at a trend level) to higher total lymphocyte count, total T-cell count, and helper T-cell count. In addition, importance of religious or spiritual expression was related to significantly higher white blood cell count, total lymphocyte count, total T cells, and cytotoxic T cell activity.

There have also been a number of studies examining R/S and susceptibility to infection (or viral load in those with HIV), which could be considered an indirect measure of immune function. We identified 12 such studies, of which eight (67%) reported significantly lower infection rates or lower viral loads in those who were more R/S (including one at a trend level); none found greater susceptibility to infection or greater viral load. Ten of the 12 studies had quality ratings of 7 or higher; of those, seven (70%) reported significant inverse associations with infection/viral load [ 440 , 441 , 449 – 454 ].

7.6. Endocrine Function

Because stress hormones (cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine) have a known influence on immune (and cardiovascular) functions, they are important factors on the pathway between R/S involvement and health [ 455 , 456 ]. We identified 31 studies that examined R/S and associations with or effects on endocrine functions. Of those, 23 (74%) reported positive relationships or positive effects and no studies reported negative associations or negative effects. Of the 13 methodologically most rigorous studies, nine (69%) reported positive associations with R/S [ 457 – 461 ] or positive effects of an R/S intervention (all involving Eastern meditation) [ 462 – 465 ]. We (at Duke) are currently examining the effects of religious cognitive-behavioral therapy on a host of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines, cortisol, and catecholamines in patients with major depressive disorder, although results will not be available until 2014 [ 466 ].

7.7. Cancer

At least 29 studies have examined relationships between R/S and either the onset or the outcome of cancer (including cancer mortality). Of those, 16 (55%) found that those who are more R/S had a lower risk of developing cancer or a better prognosis, although two (7%) reported a significantly worse prognosis [ 467 , 468 ]. Of the 20 methodologically most rigorous studies, 12 (60%) found an association between R/S and lower risk or better outcomes [ 469 – 480 ], and none reported worse risk or outcomes. The results from some of these studies can be partially explained by better health behaviors (less cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse, etc.), but not all. Effects not explained by better health behaviors could be explained by lower stress levels and higher social support in those who are more R/S. Although cancer is not thought to be as sensitive as cardiovascular disorders to psychosocial stressors, psychosocial influences on cancer incidence and outcome are present (discussions over this are ongoing [ 481 , 482 ]).

7.8. Physical Functioning

Ability to function physically, that is, performing basic and instrumental activities of daily living such as toileting, bathing, shopping, and using a telephone, is a necessary factor for independent living. Persons who are depressed, unmotivated, or without hope are less likely to make attempts to maintain their physical functioning, particularly after experiencing a stroke or a fall that forces them into a rehabilitation program to regain or compensate for their losses. Several studies have examined the role that R/S plays in helping people to maintain physical functioning as they grow older or regain functioning after an illness. We identified 61 quantitative studies that examined relationships between R/S and disability level or level of functioning. Of those, 22 (36%) reported better physical functioning among those who were more R/S, 14 (23%) found worse physical functioning, and six studies reported mixed findings. Considering the 33 highest quality studies, 13 (39%) reported significantly better physical functioning among those who were more R/S (including one study at a trend level) [ 483 – 495 ], six (18%) found worse functioning [ 496 – 501 ], and five studies (15%) reported mixed results [ 82 , 124 , 502 – 504 ] (significant positive and negative associations, depending on R/S characteristic). Almost all of these studies involve self-reported disability and many were cross-sectional, making it impossible to determine order of causation—that is, (1) does R/S prevent the development of disability, (2) does disability prevent R/S activity, (3) does R/S promote disability, or (4) does disability cause people to turn to religion to cope with disability.

7.9. Self-Rated Health

There is more agreement across studies regarding the relationship between R/S and self-rated health (SRH) than between R/S and physical functioning. While based on participants' subjective impression, self-rated health is strongly related to objective health, that is, future health, health services use, and mortality [ 505 – 507 ]. Might R/S, perhaps because it is related to greater optimism and hope, influence one's self-perceptions of health in a positive way? At least 50 studies have now examined the relationship between R/S and self-rated health. Of those, 29 (58%) reported that R/S was related to better SRH, while five (10%) found that it was related to worse SRH. Of the 37 methodologically most rigorous studies, 21 (57%) reported significant positive relationships between R/S and SRH [ 503 , 508 – 527 ], whereas three (8%) found the opposite [ 528 – 530 ].

7.10. Pain and Somatic Symptoms

On the one hand, pain and other distressing somatic symptoms can motivate people to seek solace in religion through activities such as prayer or Scripture study. Thus, R/S is often turned to in order to cope with such symptoms. For example, in an early study of 382 adults with musculoskeletal complains, R/S coping was the most common strategy for dealing with pain and was considered the second most helpful in a long list of coping behaviors [ 531 ]. More recent research supports this earlier report [ 532 ]. On the other hand, R/S may somehow cause an increase in pain and somatic symptoms, perhaps by increasing concentration on negative symptoms or through the physical manifestations of hysteria, as claimed by Charcot in his copious writings around the turn of the 20th century [ 533 ].

We identified 56 studies that examined relationships between R/S and pain. Of those, 22 (39%) reported inverse relationships between R/S and pain or found benefits from an R/S intervention, whereas 14 (25%) indicated a positive relationship between R/S and greater pain levels (13 of 14 being cross-sectional). Of the 18 best studies, nine (50%) reported inverse relationships (less pain among the more R/S [ 534 ] or reduced pain in response to a R/S intervention [ 535 – 542 ]), while three (20%) reported positive relationships (worse pain in the more R/S) [ 543 – 545 ]. Research suggests that meditation is particularly effective in reducing pain, although the effects are magnified when a religious word is used to focus attention [ 546 , 547 ]. No clinical trials, to my knowledge, have shown that meditation or other R/S interventions increase pain or somatic symptoms.

7.11. Mortality

The most impressive research on the relationship between R/S and physical health is in the area of mortality. The cumulative effect of R/S, if it has any benefits to physical health, ought to reveal itself in an effect on mortality. The research suggests it does. At least 121 studies have examined relationships between R/S and mortality. Most of these are prospective cohort studies, where baseline R/S is assessed as a predictor of mortality during the observation period, controlling for confounders. Of those studies, 82 (68%) found that greater R/S predicted significantly greater longevity (three at a trend level), whereas six studies (5%) reported shorter longevity. Considering the 63 methodologically most rigorous studies (quality ratings of 8 or higher), 47 (75%) found R/S predicting greater longevity (two at trend level) [ 548 – 566 ], whereas three (5%) reported shorter longevity [ 567 – 569 ]. Another systematic review [ 570 ] and two meta-analyses [ 571 , 572 ] have confirmed this relationship between R/S and longer survival. The effects have been particularly strong for frequency of attendance at religious services in these three reviews. Survival among frequent attendees was increased on average by 37%, 43%, and 30% (mean effect being 37% across these reviews). An increased survival of 37% is highly significant and equivalent to the effects of cholesterol lowering drugs or exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation after myocardial infarction on survival [ 573 ].

8. Explaining the Relationship: R/S and Physical Health

How might R/S involvement influence physical health and longevity? There are at least three basic pathways: psychological, social, and behavioral (see Figure 3 ).

Theoretical model of causal pathways to physical health for Western monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism). (Permission to reprint obtained. Original source: Koenig et al. [ 17 ]). For models based on Eastern religious traditions and the Secular Humanist tradition, see elsewhere (Koenig et al. [ 24 ]).

8.1. Psychological

As noted above, there is ample evidence that R/S—because it facilitates coping and imbues negative events with meaning and purpose—is related to better mental health (less depression, lower stress, less anxiety, greater well-being, and more positive emotions). Furthermore, several randomized clinical trials have shown that R/S interventions improve mental health (at least in those who are R/S). There is also much evidence that poor mental health has adverse physiological consequences that worsen physical health and shorten the lifespan (see earlier references). Thus, it stands to reason that R/S might influence physical health through psychological pathways.

8.2. Social

R/S involvement is associated with greater social support, greater marital stability, less crime/delinquency, and greater social capital. R/S beliefs and doctrines encourage the development of human virtues such as honesty, courage, dependability, altruism, generosity, forgiveness, self-discipline, patience, humility, and other characteristics that promote social relationships. Participation in a R/S community not only provides supportive social connections and opportunities for altruism (through volunteering or other faith-based altruistic activities), but also increases the flow of health information that may increase disease screening and promote health maintenance. Social factors, in turn, are known to influence both mental health and physical health and predict greater longevity [ 574 – 576 ]. Again, if R/S boosts supportive social interactions and increases community trust and involvement, then it should ultimately influence physical health as well.

8.3. Health Behaviors

Finally, R/S promotes better health behaviors, and is associated with less alcohol and drug use, less cigarette smoking, more physical activity and exercise, better diet, and safer sexual practices in the overwhelming majority of studies that have examined these relationships. Living a healthier lifestyle will result in better physical health and greater longevity. Consider the following report that appeared on CNN (Cable Network News). On January 3, 2009, after the death of the Guinness Book of World Records' oldest person, Maria de Jesus age 115, next in line was Gertrude Baines from Los Angeles. Born to slaves near Atlanta in 1894, she was described at 114 years old as “spry,” “cheerful,” and “talkative.” When she was 112 years old, Ms. Baines was asked by a CNN correspondent to explain why she thought she had lived so long. Her reply: “God. Ask Him. I took good care of myself, the way he wanted me to.” Brief and to the point.

8.4. Other Pathways

There are many ways by which R/S could have a positive influence on physical health, although the pathways above are probably the major ones. Genetic and developmental factors could also play a role in explaining these associations. There is some evidence that personality or temperament (which has genetic roots) influences whether or not a person becomes R/S. To what extent R/S persons are simply born healthier, however, is quite controversial. Note that more R/S persons are typically those with the least resources (minority groups, the poor, and the uneducated), both in terms of finances and access to healthcare resources. Karl Marx said that religion is the “opiate of the masses.” Rather than being born healthier, then, the opposite is more likely to be true for R/S persons. R/S could actually be viewed as acting counter to an evolutionary force that is trying to weed genetically vulnerable people from the population. R/S involvement is providing the weak with a powerful belief system and a supportive community that enables them to survive. For a more complete discussion of the role of genetic factors in the R/S-physical health relationship, see the Handbook [ 577 ].

Another important point needs to be made. Nowhere do I claim that supernatural mechanisms are responsible for the relationship between R/S and health. The pathways by which R/S influences physical health that researchers can study using the natural methods of science must be those that exist within nature—that is, psychological, social, behavioral, and genetic influences. Thus, this research says nothing about the existence of supernatural or transcendent forces (which is a matter of faith), but rather asks whether belief in such forces (and the behaviors that result from such beliefs) has an effect on health. There is every reason to think it does.

9. Clinical Implications

There are clinical implications from the research reviewed above that could influence the way health professionals treat patients in the hospital and clinic.

9.1. Rationale for Integrating Spirituality

There are many practical reasons why addressing spiritual issues in clinical practice is important. Here are eight reasons [ 578 ] (and these are not exhaustive).

First, many patients are R/S and have spiritual needs related to medical or psychiatric illness. Studies of medical and psychiatric patients and those with terminal illnesses report that the vast majority have such needs, and most of those needs currently go unmet [ 579 , 580 ]. Unmet spiritual needs, especially if they involve R/S struggles, can adversely affect health and may increase mortality independent of mental, physical, or social health [ 581 ].

Second, R/S influences the patient's ability to cope with illness. In some areas of the country, 90% of hospitalized patients use religion to enable them to cope with their illnesses and over 40% indicate it is their primary coping behavior [ 582 ]. Poor coping has adverse effects on medical outcomes, both in terms of lengthening hospital stay and increasing mortality [ 583 ].

Third, R/S beliefs affect patients' medical decisions, may conflict with medical treatments, and can influence compliance with those treatments. Studies have shown that R/S beliefs influence medical decisions among those with serious medical illness [ 584 , 585 ] and especially among those with advanced cancer [ 586 ] or HIV/AIDs [ 587 ].

Fourth, physicians' own R/S beliefs often influence medical decisions they make and affect the type of care they offer to patients, including decisions about use of pain medications [ 588 ], abortion [ 589 ], vaccinations [ 590 ], and contraception [ 591 ]. Physician views about such matters and how they influence the physician's decisions, however, are usually not discussed with a patient.

Fifth, as noted earlier, R/S is associated with both mental and physical health and likely affects medical outcomes. If so, then health professionals need to know about such influences, just as they need to know if a person smokes cigarettes or uses alcohol or drugs. Those who provide health care to the patient need to be aware of all factors that influence health and health care.

Sixth, R/S influences the kind of support and care that patients receive once they return home. A supportive faith community may ensure that patients receive medical followup (by providing rides to doctors' offices) and comply with their medications. It is important to know whether this is the case or whether the patient will return to an apartment to live alone with little social interaction or support.

Seventh, research shows that failure to address patients' spiritual needs increases health care costs, especially toward the end of life [ 592 ]. This is a time when patients and families may demand medical care (often very expensive medical care) even when continued treatment is futile. For example, patients or families may be praying for a miracle. “Giving up” by withdrawing life support or agreeing to hospice care may be viewed as a lack of faith or lack of belief in the healing power of God. If health professionals do not take a spiritual history so that patients/families feel comfortable discussing such issues openly, then situations may go on indefinitely and consume huge amounts of medical resources.

Finally, standards set by the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Hospital Organizations (JCAHO) and by Medicare (in the US) require that providers of health care show respect for patients' cultural and personal values, beliefs, and preferences (including religious or spiritual beliefs) [ 593 ]. This point was reinforced by a personal communication with Doreen Finn ( [email protected] ), Senior Associate Director, who works under Mark Pelletier ( [email protected] ), Executive Director, JCAHO, Hospital Accreditation (January 6–12, 2012). If health professionals are unaware of those beliefs, they cannot show respect for them and adjust care accordingly.

9.2. How to Integrate Spirituality into Patient Care

What would I recommend in terms of addressing spiritual issues in clinical care?

First and foremost, health professionals should take a brief spiritual history. This should be done for all new patients on their first evaluation, especially if they have serious or chronic illnesses, and when a patient is admitted to a hospital, nursing home, home health agency, or other health care setting. The purpose is to learn about (1) the patient's religious background, (2) the role that R/S beliefs or practices play in coping with illness (or causing distress), (3) beliefs that may influence or conflict with decisions about medical care, (4) the patient's level of participation in a spiritual community and whether the community is supportive, and (5) any spiritual needs that might be present [ 594 ]. It is the health professional , not the chaplain, who is responsible for doing this two-minute “screening” evaluation. If spiritual needs are discovered, then the health professional would make a referral to pastoral care services so that the needs can be addressed. The spiritual history (and any spiritual needs addressed by pastoral services) should be documented in the medical record so that other health professionals will know that this has been done. Although notes need not be detailed, enough information should be recorded to communicate essential issues to other hospital staff.

Ideally, the physician, as head of the medical care team, should take the spiritual history. However, since only about 10% of physicians in the US “often or always” do so [ 595 ], the task often falls to the nurse or to the social worker. Although systematic research is lacking in this area, most nurses and social workers do not take a spiritual history either. Simply recording the patient's religious denomination and whether they want to see a chaplain, the procedure in most hospitals today, is NOT taking a spiritual history.

Second, R/S beliefs of patients uncovered during the spiritual history should always be respected. Even if beliefs conflict with the medical treatment plan or seem bizarre or pathological, the health professional should not challenge those beliefs (at least not initially), but rather take a neutral posture and ask the patient questions to obtain a better understanding of the beliefs. Challenging patients' R/S beliefs is almost always followed by resistance from the patient, or quiet noncompliance with the medical plan. Instead, the health professional should consult a chaplain and either follow their advice or refer the patient to the chaplain to address the situation. If the health professional is knowledgeable about the patient's R/S beliefs and the beliefs appear generally healthy, however, it would be appropriate to actively support those beliefs and conform the healthcare being provided to accommodate the beliefs.

Third, most health professionals without clinical pastoral education do not have the skills or training to competently address patients' spiritual needs or provide advice about spiritual matters. Chaplains have extensive training on how to do this, which often involves years of education and experience addressing spiritual issues. They are the true experts in this area. For any but the most simple spiritual needs, then, patients should be referred to chaplains to address the problem.

Fourth, conducting a spiritual history or contemplating a spiritual intervention (supporting R/S beliefs, praying with patients) should always be patient centered and patient desired. The health professional should never do anything related to R/S that involves coercion. The patient must feel in control and free to reveal or not reveal information about their spiritual lives or to engage or not engage in spiritual practices (i.e., prayer, etc.). In most cases, health professionals should not ask patients if they would like to pray with them, but rather leave the initiative to the patient to request prayer. The health professional, however, may inform R/S patients (based on the spiritual history) that they are open to praying with patients if that is what the patient wants. The patient is then free to initiate a request for prayer at a later time or future visit, should they desire prayer with the health professional. If the patient requests, then a short supportive prayer may be said aloud, but quietly, with the patient in a private setting. Before praying, however, the health professional should ask the patient what he or she wishes prayer for, recognizing that every patient will be different in this regard. Alternatively, the clinician may simply ask the patient to say the prayer and then quietly confirm it with an “amen” at the end.

Fifth, R/S beliefs of health professionals (or lack of belief) should not influence the decision to take a spiritual history, respect and support the R/S beliefs of patients, or make a referral to pastoral services. These activities should always be patient centered, not centered on the health professional. One of the most common barriers to addressing spiritual issues is health professionals' discomfort over discussing such issues. This often results from lack of personal R/S involvement and therefore lack of appreciation for the importance and value of doing so. Lack of comfort and understanding should be overcome by training and practice. Today, nearly 90% of medical schools (and many nursing schools) in the US include something about R/S in their curricula [ 596 ] and this is also true to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom [ 597 ] and Brazil [ 598 ]. Thus, spirituality and health is increasingly being addressed in medical and nursing training programs.

Sixth, health professionals should learn about the R/S beliefs and practices of different religious traditions that relate to healthcare, especially the faith traditions of patients they are likely to encounter in their particular country or region of the country. There are many such beliefs and practices that will have a direct impact on the type of care being provided, especially when patients are hospitalized, seriously ill or near death. A brief description of beliefs and practices for health professionals related to birth, contraception, diet, death, and organ donation is provided elsewhere [ 599 ].

Finally, if spiritual needs are identified and a chaplain referral is initiated, then the health professional making the referral is responsible for following up to ensure that the spiritual needs were adequately addressed by the chaplain. This is especially true given the impact that unmet spiritual needs are likely to have on both medical outcomes and healthcare costs. Given the short lengths of stay in today's modern hospital (often only 2–4 days), spiritual needs identified on admission are unlikely to be resolved by discharge. Therefore, a spiritual care discharge plan will need to be developed by the hospital social worker in consultation with the chaplain, which may involve (with the patient's written consent) contact with the patient's faith community to ensure that spiritual needs are addressed when the patient returns home. In this way, continuity of pastoral care will be ensured between hospital and community.

10. Conclusions

Religious/spiritual beliefs and practices are commonly used by both medical and psychiatric patients to cope with illness and other stressful life changes. A large volume of research shows that people who are more R/S have better mental health and adapt more quickly to health problems compared to those who are less R/S. These possible benefits to mental health and well-being have physiological consequences that impact physical health, affect the risk of disease, and influence response to treatment. In this paper I have reviewed and summarized hundreds of quantitative original data-based research reports examining relationships between R/S and health. These reports have been published in peer-reviewed journals in medicine, nursing, social work, rehabilitation, social sciences, counseling, psychology, psychiatry, public health, demography, economics, and religion. The majority of studies report significant relationships between R/S and better health. For details on these and many other studies in this area, and for suggestions on future research that is needed, I again refer the reader to the Handbook of Religion and Health [ 600 ].

The research findings, a desire to provide high-quality care, and simply common sense, all underscore the need to integrate spirituality into patient care. I have briefly reviewed reasons for inquiring about and addressing spiritual needs in clinical practice, described how to do so, and indicated boundaries across which health professionals should not cross. For more information on how to integrate spirituality into patient care, the reader is referred to the book, Spirituality in Patient Care [ 601 ]. The field of religion, spirituality, and health is growing rapidly, and I dare to say, is moving from the periphery into the mainstream of healthcare. All health professionals should be familiar with the research base described in this paper, know the reasons for integrating spirituality into patient care, and be able to do so in a sensible and sensitive way. At stake is the health and well-being of our patients and satisfaction that we as health care providers experience in delivering care that addresses the whole person—body, mind, and spirit.

Conflict of Interests

The author declares that he has no conflict of interests.

Acknowledgment

The support to write this paper was provided in part by the John Templeton Foundation.

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Research Article

When Science Replaces Religion: Science as a Secular Authority Bolsters Moral Sensitivity

Contributed equally to this work with: Onurcan Yilmaz, Hasan G. Bahçekapili

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Department of Psychology, Dogus University, 34722, Acibadem, Istanbul, Turkey

• Onurcan Yilmaz, 
• Hasan G. Bahçekapili

• Published: September 11, 2015
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137499
• Reader Comments

Scientific and religious thinking compete with each other on several levels. For example, activating one generally weakens the other. Since priming religion is known to increase moral behaviour and moral sensitivity, priming science might be expected to have the opposite effect. However, it was recently demonstrated that, on the contrary, science priming increases moral sensitivity as well. The present set of studies sought to replicate this effect and test two explanations for it. Study 1 used a sentence unscrambling task for implicitly priming the concept of science but failed to replicate its effect on moral sensitivity, presumably due to a ceiling effect. Study 2 replicated the effect with a new measure of moral sensitivity. Study 3 tested whether science-related words create this effect by activating the idea of secular authority or by activating analytic thinking. It was demonstrated that words related to secular authority, but not words related to analytic thinking, produced a similar increase in moral sensitivity. Religiosity level of the participants did not influence this basic finding. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that science as a secular institution has overtaken some of the functions of religion in modern societies.

Citation: Yilmaz O, Bahçekapili HG (2015) When Science Replaces Religion: Science as a Secular Authority Bolsters Moral Sensitivity. PLoS ONE 10(9): e0137499. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137499

Editor: Michiel van Elk, University of Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS

Received: January 1, 2015; Accepted: August 3, 2015; Published: September 11, 2015

Copyright: © 2015 Yilmaz, Bahçekapili. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

In parallel with the historical tension between science and religion, recent psychological studies have revealed a conflict in people’s minds between scientific and religious thinking. For example, exposing people to stimuli that prime science or analytic thinking leads to a reduction in religious faith [ 1 ]. In addition, intuitive thinkers are more likely to believe in God than analytic thinkers [ 2 ]. Similarly, the same study also found that when people are led to think analytically, they report less belief in God.

On the other hand, it is well known that exposing people to religious symbols leads them to more prosocial, and hence moral, behaviour [ 3 ]. Conversely, exposing people to scientific arguments to the effect that free will is an illusion makes them more likely to cheat in a subsequent task [ 4 ]. If one assumes the existence of very simple causal relationships among religious, scientific and moral thought, one would expect scientific thinking to lead to a weakening in morality. A recent study [ 5 ] revealed that, in contrast to that expectation, exposing people to stimuli that prime science leads to heightened sensitivity to punish a moral violation. Clearly, the relationship among scientific, religious and moral thought is more complex than initially assumed.

Implicit priming of both religious words (e.g., divine , soul , God ) and secular words (e.g., police , court , civil ) leads to increased prosocial behaviour [ 3 ]. Thus, one could argue that, at least in modern societies, secular institutions have overtaken religious institutions in their capacity to promote prosociality and living harmoniously as a moral society [ 6 ]. As an integral part of the secular society, science might be seen as representing secular authority and hence science priming can enhance prosociality by increasing moral sensitivity. Alternatively, science priming might activate analytic thinking and the notion of rationality and hence increase moral sensitivity. Preference for analytic thinking has been shown to influence wrongness judgments for moral violations [ 7 ] and inducing analytic thought has been shown to lead to more utilitarian moral judgments [ 8 ]. It is therefore not unreasonable to expect a similar influence of analytic priming on moral sensitivity.

The present research is designed to test these two alternative explanations of the effect reported by Ma-Kellams and Blascovich [ 5 ]. We first tried to replicate the original findings on a Turkish sample since the findings in question were obtained with relatively small samples. The replication attempt was further motivated by the general concern that psychological effects discovered in western samples may not be replicated in non-western samples (see [ 9 , 10 ]) and by the recent failure of replication of traditional implicit religious priming effect on a Middle Eastern sample [ 11 ]. In the present case, while science priming increases moral sensitivity in a population like the US where science enjoys a real secular authority, the same may not be true in a presumably less secular and more religious population where science does not have the same privileged status. Study 1 and Study 2 attempted to replicate the original finding. Study 3 used either secular authority priming (hypothesized to activate the notions of justice) or analytic priming (hypothesized to activate rational thinking) to see whether either leads to an increase in moral sensitivity as compared to a neutral priming group.

The ethics committee at Dogus University in Istanbul approved this study. All participants provided written informed consent and were fully debriefed at the end of the study.

Participants.

Eighty three undergraduates (54 women, 27 men, two “no answer”) from Dogus University took part in Study 1 whose ages ranged between 18 and 28 ( M = 21.05, SD = 1.82). All participants were native speakers of Turkish. They were randomly assigned to either the Science ( n = 42) or the Neutral ( n = 41) group. The majority of the participants were Muslim ( n = 59). Of the remaining 24, 17 reported belief in God without being affiliated with a religion, three were atheists, and four did not answer. None of the participants could guess the hypotheses or the variables of the study during the debriefing given after the study.

Design and Procedure.

The experiment was conducted in a classroom setting in several sessions, each involving 10–15 participants. The participants first took either science priming or neutral priming. They then read a date rape scenario (adapted from [ 5 ]) and indicated how wrong they viewed the action described on a 0–100 scale (going from “not wrong at all” to “extremely wrong”). The scenario involves a man and a woman who get close to each other after getting drunk and go to the woman’s apartment. After kissing, the woman does not want to go further but the man disregards her objections and consummates the relationship.

The manipulation involved a scrambled sentence task adapted from the one used by Ma-Kellams and Blascovich [ 5 ] (see also [ 12 ]). In both groups, the participants formed 10 sentences with four words each by taking out one of the given words and rearranging the remaining four. Five sentences in the science group contained the target words logical , hypothesis , laboratory , scientist and theory . Sentences in the neutral group did not contain any target words and did not form a coherent theme.

We also assessed the religiosity levels of the participants in order to see whether religiosity interacts with any of our variables. We asked the participants to rate to what extent they consider themselves as a religious person from 1 (not at all religious) to 7 (highly religious).

Results and Discussion

Gender had neither a main effect on moral sensitivity nor significantly interacted with any other variable. Importantly, the priming manipulation did not have a significant main effect, F (1, 81) = 0.54, p = .464, ηp² = .007. Although mean wrongness rating in the Science group ( M = 93.57, SD = 11.96; 95% CI [89.84, 97.30]) was higher than in the Neutral group ( M = 91.34, SD = 15.49; 95% CI [86.45, 96.23]), it did not reach significance. When we controlled for religiosity as a covariate from 1 (not at all religious) to 7 (highly religious), the main effect of priming condition remained constant, F (1, 77) = 0.32, p = .576, ηp² = .004.

Although this result might indicate that the original findings are spurious, another possibility is that date rape is seen as obviously wrong by almost everyone in the Turkish culture and therefore we encountered a ceiling effect. This interpretation is supported by the observation that the majority of the participants in both groups (64% and 66%) gave the maximum wrongness score (100) for the moral violation in the scenario. We therefore tested the same effect with a milder scenario in the next study.

Fifty-eight undergraduates (49 women, 9 men) from Dogus University in Istanbul took part in Study 2 (mean age = 21.05, SD = 3.54). All participants were native speakers of Turkish. As in Study 1, they were randomly assigned to either the Science ( n = 29) or the Neutral ( n = 29) group. The majority of the participants were Muslim ( n = 40). Of the remaining 18, seven reported belief in God without being affiliated with a religion, seven were atheists, and four did not answer. None of the participants could guess the hypotheses or the variables of the study during the debriefing given after the study.

The main procedural difference from Study 1 was the use of two different scenarios to measure moral sensitivity. One scenario represents the fairness/justice dimension of Haidt’s [ 13 ] Moral Foundations Theory and the other one represents the care/harm dimension. In the care/harm scenario, two people are driving fast to avoid being late for an important meeting. One of them realizes that they ran over and injured a cat. After thinking about it for a while, they decide not to take care of the cat and move on. In the fairness/justice scenario, one person buys a lottery ticket but leaves it unattended on a desk top. A friend of his gets hold of the ticket and learns that it won the big prize. After thinking about it for a while, he decides not to inform his friend and get the prize all by himself. The participants were asked to rate how wrong the action was in each scenario on a 0–100 scale as in Study 1. The order of the scenarios was counterbalanced.

No analyses on the basis of gender were conducted since the number of men was too low. We first conducted a 2 (priming: science or neutral) x 2 (scenario type: care/harm or fairness/justice) mixed ANOVA (where the latter factor was within-subjects) on moral sensitivity. This analysis revealed no significant main effect of priming, F (1, 56) = 1.58, p = .215, ηp² = . 027 . However, there was a significant interaction between priming condition and scenario type, F (1, 56) = 8.48, p = .005, ηp² = . 132 . Since the effect of science priming on moral sensitivity is different for different dimensions of morality, we conducted separate one-way ANOVAs for different types of moral scenarios.

In the care/harm scenario, priming condition had a significant main effect on moral sensitivity, F (1, 56) = 8.00, p = .006, ηp² = .125. The Science priming group ( M = 86.55, SD = 18.13; 95% CI [79.65, 93.45]) showed higher levels of moral sensitivity than the Neutral priming group ( M = 71.72, SD = 21.64; 95% CI [63.49, 79.96]). When we controlled for religiosity, the results again revealed a significant main effect of priming in the care/harm scenario, F (1, 55) = 7.68, p = .008, ηp² = .123.

In the fairness/justice scenario, on the other hand, priming did not have a main effect on moral sensitivity, F (1, 56) = 0.31, p = .582, ηp² = .005. When we controlled for religiosity, the results remained constant, F (1, 55) = 0.51, p = .479, ηp² = .009.

The results indicate that science priming increases moral sensitivity in the care/harm scenario but not in the fairness/justice scenario. This suggests that being reminded of science influences only harm-related morality. In the next study, we investigated the possible mechanisms underlying this effect by testing two alternative hypotheses.

Study 3 tested whether science exerts its moral sensitivity boosting effect by activating analytic thinking or the idea of secular authority. We first conducted a pilot study to see whether science words indeed prime secular authority or analytic thinking. In this study, like in Studies 1 and 2, the participants were assigned either to the Science group ( n = 18) or to the Neutral group ( n = 17). They were then given a word stem completion task. In this task, participants were given two or three letters as the stem of a possible word and were asked to generate a word as quickly as possible that completes the given stem (e.g., SA_____ → SAMPLE or SANE). Five of the stems were the first two or three letters of words related to secular authority ( court , civil , judge , police , university ), five were the first two or three letters of words related to analytic thinking ( reason , analysis , logical , think , rational ), and five were neutral ( wood , paper , cry , bottle , handbag ). (The actual words used in the study were in Turkish since all participants were Turkish native speakers.) The results revealed that science priming indeed increased the accessibility of words related to secular authority: Participants in the Science group ( M = 2.50, SD = 0.79; 95% CI [2.11, 2.89]) produced more secular authority words compared to the Neutral group ( M = 1.82, SD = 0.81; 95% CI [1.41, 2.24]), F (1, 33) = 6.30, p = .017, ηp² = .160. The results were similar with respect to words related to analytic thinking: Participants in the Science group ( M = 1.50, SD = 0.92; 95% CI [1.04, 1.96]) produced more analytic thinking words compared to the Neutral group ( M = 0.65, SD = 0.61; 95% CI [0.34, 0.96]), F (1, 33) = 10.30, p = .003, ηp² = .238. These results suggest that priming science reminds of both secular authority and analytic thinking. The purpose of Study 3 was to determine through which of these paths science influenced moral judgments.

In Study 3, we estimated a medium effect ( f ) of .3, which required a total sample of 177 with 95% power of detecting any effect. We therefore determined the sample size to be 59 for each condition. One hundred and seventy seven undergraduates (146 women, 30 men, one “no answer”) from Yeditepe and Dogus University in Istanbul took part in Study 3 whose ages ranged between 18 and 35 ( M = 22.41, SD = 6.09). All participants were native speakers of Turkish. They were randomly assigned to the Secular priming group ( n = 59), the Analytic thinking priming group ( n = 59) or the Neutral priming group ( n = 59). The majority of the participants were Muslim ( n = 131). Of the remaining 46, 28 reported belief in God without being affiliated with a religion, 15 were atheists, and three did not answer. One participant realized that the priming manipulation, which was presented by the experimenters as a linguistic ability test, had a different purpose, but still could not guess the real hypothesis of the study. Excluding this participant from the analyses did not alter the main findings. Thus, the analyses below include the entire sample.

The procedure was similar to that of Study 2. Only the care/harm scenario was used to measure moral sensitivity. The participants were randomly assigned to the Secular, Analytic or Neutral priming groups where they unscrambled 10 sentences. The five target words in the Secular group were court , civil , judge , police , and contract [ 3 ]. The five target words in the Analytic group were ponder , analysis , logical , think , and rational [ 1 ]. The words in the Neutral group did not form a coherent theme.

A two-way ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of gender, F (1, 170) = 4.23, p = .041, ηp² = .024: Females ( M = 80.62, SD = 22.48) reported more moral sensitivity than males ( M = 71.67, SD = 23.57). However, gender did not interact with the priming condition, F (1, 170) = 0.31, p = .732, ηp² = .004. A separate one-way ANOVA revealed a significant effect of priming condition on moral sensitivity, F (2, 174) = 5.40, p = .005, ηp² = .058. A Tukey HSD post hoc test demonstrated that the difference between the Secular ( M = 86.69, SD = 17.66; 95% CI [82.09, 91.30] and the Neutral groups ( M = 74.41, SD = 25.88; 95% CI [67.66, 81.15] was significant at p = .009 ( d = 0.55) and the Secular and Analytic ( M = 75.68, SD = 22.69; 95% CI [69.76, 81.59] groups was significant at p = .022 ( d = 0.54), whereas the difference between the Analytic and the Neutral groups ( p = .949; d = 0.05) was not significant ( Fig 1 ). When we controlled for religiosity, the effect of priming remained constant, F (2, 173) = 5.17, p = .007, ηp² = .056. These results suggest that science priming exerts its boosting effect on moral sensitivity not by activating analytic thinking but by activating the idea of secular authority.

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Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137499.g001

General Discussion

This research replicated the effect of scientific thinking on moral sensitivity. In Study 1, we used the date rape scenario originally used by McKellams and Blascovich [ 5 ] but could not obtain a significant effect presumably because of a ceiling effect. In Study 2, we replicated the original finding by McKellams and Blascovich [ 5 ] with a care/harm scenario but not with a fairness/justice scenario. In Study 3, we demonstrated that the relation between science and moral sensitivity is due to the secular authority aspect of science and not due to its potential to activate analytic thinking.

In their Study 4, Ma-Kellams and Blascovich [ 5 ] found the effect of science priming on moral sensitivity in the domain of fairness/justice. One difference between the procedures of their study and our Study 2 is that they measured actual behaviour (money allocation in a dictator game) whereas we measured moral judgments on a hypothetical scenario (money allocation after a big win in lottery). It is possible that our scenario was not seen as sufficiently realistic and representative of real life moral decision making and therefore did not activate fairness concerns in the participants. It is also possible that the original findings by Ma-Kellams and Blascovich are spurious, a plausible interpretation given their small sample size and barely significant results (see [ 14 ]). It is therefore imperative to further test the effect of science priming on the fairness dimension of morality in future studies, preferably with more realistic scenarios (see [ 15 ] for examples of such scenarios).

The original contribution of the present research, the boosting effect of secular authority on moral judgment, together with the finding that science priming activates the idea of secular authority, is most plausibly explained by the hypothesis that science increases moral sensitivity through the activation of secular authority. This hypothesis is consistent with the previously demonstrated effect of science and secular authority on prosocial behaviour. For example, Ma-Kellams and Blascovich [ 5 ] demonstrated that science promotes prosocial behaviour as well as moral sensitivity. Similarly, Shariff and Norenzayan [ 3 ] demonstrated the influence of secular authority priming on prosocial behaviour. The power of religion to establish social harmony and to foster cooperation among genetically unrelated people is one of the most important factors behind human civilization [ 16 – 18 ]. However, in many modern societies where religiosity levels are at an all-time low, this historical role of religion has been largely overtaken by secular institutions [ 6 ]. In addition, there is evidence suggesting that people see religion and government as interchangeable sources of control and that decreased faith in one leads to increased faith in the other [ 19 ]. Thus, secular institutions motivate prosocial behaviour as much as religion [ 3 ]. The target words used in science priming in Study 2 ( hypothesis , laboratory , scientist , logical and theory ) might have primed the concept of science as a secular institution whose mission is to increase the welfare of society through technological progress (see [ 5 ]). Thus, our results are consistent with the idea that science is also a form of authority in modern societies able to motivate (at least some) moral sensitivity without moderation by religion.

On the other hand, religion is known to promote intergroup conflict as well as intragroup harmony [ 6 ]. Analogously, secular institutions can have both prosocial and antisocial effects. For example, in a classic study [ 20 ], the majority of the participants obeyed a scientific authority figure and (seemingly) shocked another participant at the highest possible level. This dual function of religious and secular institutions suggests an intriguing possibility: What religion or secular authority provides is not prosocial or antisocial behaviour per se but rather increased sensitivity for and conformity to (perceived) local norms. If this view is correct, being reminded of religion or secular authority should lead to antisocial behaviour if that is the behaviour consistent with the norm made salient by the relevant priming. The finding that synagogue-priming in Israeli settlers led to increased support for a suicide attack against Palestinians [ 21 ] seems to support this interpretation. The possible relation between science-priming and similar norm-compliant behaviour needs to be further investigated in future studies.

The conclusion drawn from this study might be made stronger by a mediation analysis showing the exact causal chain among science priming, accessibility of secular words and moral wrongness judgments. In addition, in Study 3 the absence of science priming is another limitation of our study. Therefore, future studies should evaluate the effect of science, secular authority and analytic thinking priming within the same design.

One further potential limitation of the research reported here is that it investigated moral norms only in the domains of care/harm and fairness/justice. Thus, another suggestion for further study is to explore the role of science, and of secular authority in general, in the other domains of morality (viz., authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty and purity/sanctity; [ 13 ]).

Turkey is a country which has made its transition to secularism about 90 years ago, but where religious values are still strong. In this regard, it seems interesting that reminders of secular authority can function like reminders of religious monitoring on Turkish participants. It might be surmised that, rather than Western Europe or the rest of the Middle East, Turkey culturally resembles the US more since both religious and secular institutions have some degree of power in both. A recent indication of this resemblance is a poll on the public acceptance of evolutionary theory. Miller, Scott, and Okamoto [ 22 ] demonstrated that, in a survey of more than 20 countries, Turkey and the US were the two countries with the lowest degree of acceptance of evolutionary theory. One major predictor of disbelief in evolutionary theory turns out to be strong belief in a personal God and frequency of religious attendance. If our speculation about the cultural similarity of Turkey and the US is true, it might be interesting to try to replicate the present results in Scandinavian countries where religious authority has almost been completely replaced by secular authority, and also in some Middle Eastern countries where religion reigns supreme and secular institutions are still in a precarious situation.

Supporting Information

S1 dataset. full dataset of study 1..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137499.s001

S2 Dataset. Full Dataset of Study 2.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137499.s002

S3 Dataset. Full Dataset of Study 3.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137499.s003

Acknowledgments

We thank Mehmet Harma, Engin Arik and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and Ceyda Hisarkaya, Ceren Engin, Selen Kucuktas and Eldem Erdem for their help in data collection.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: OY HGB. Performed the experiments: OY HGB. Analyzed the data: OY HGB. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: OY HGB. Wrote the paper: OY HGB.

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Understanding Science

How science REALLY works...

People of many different faiths and levels of scientific expertise see no contradiction between science and religion.

Science and religion: Reconcilable differences

In fact, people of many different faiths and levels of scientific expertise see no contradiction at all between science and religion. Many simply acknowledge that the two institutions deal with different realms of human experience. Science investigates the ​​ natural world , while religion deals with the spiritual and ​​ supernatural  — hence, the two can be complementary. Many religious organizations have issued statements declaring that there need not be any conflict between religious faith and the scientific perspective on evolution. 1

Furthermore, contrary to stereotype, one certainly doesn’t have to be an atheist in order to become a scientist. A 2005 survey of scientists at top research universities found that more than 48% had a religious affiliation and more than 75% believe that religions convey important truths. 2  Some scientists — like Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and George Coyne, astronomer and priest — have been outspoken about the satisfaction they find in viewing the world through both a scientific lens and one of personal faith.

This is not to suggest that science and religion  never  come into conflict. Though the two generally deal with different realms (​​ natural  vs. spiritual), disagreements do arise about where the boundaries between these realms lie when dealing with questions at their interface. And sometimes, one side crosses a boundary in its claims. For example, when religious tenets make strong claims about the natural world (e.g., claiming that the world was created in six days, as some literal interpretations of the Bible might require), faith and science can find themselves in conflict.

Though such clashes may garner print, airwave, and bandwidth headlines, it’s important to remember that, behind the scenes and out of the spotlight, many cases exist in which religious and scientific perspectives present no conflict at all. Thousands of scientists busily carry out their research while maintaining personal spiritual beliefs, and an even larger number of everyday folks fruitfully view the natural world through an ​​ evidence -based, scientific lens and the supernatural world through a spiritual lens. Accepting a scientific worldview needn’t require giving up religious faith.

1 National Center for Science Education.  Voices for evolution . Retrieved December 29, 2008. 2 Ecklund, E.H., and C.P. Scheitle. 2007. Religion among academic scientists: Distinctions, disciplines, and demographics.  Social Problems  54(2):289-307.

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New journal on religion, gender, and sexuality

UCR professor to co-edit “QTR,” is a fee-free, open access journal supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and Duke University Press

A $100,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and a publishing partnership with Duke University Press is helping launch the new peer-reviewed academic journal, “ QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion .” 

QTR is the first journal of its kind, offering audiences and authors access to unique academic research that connects religion, gender, and sexuality. QTR will have no paywalls. 

The founding co-editors are Melissa M. Wilcox , UC Riverside religious studies professor, and Joseph A. Marchal , religious studies professor at Ball State University in Indiana. Wilcox and Marchal have been working with a team of colleagues on this project since 2018. With the founding of a new conference on Queer and Trans Studies in Religion that has been meeting at UCR since 2019, the team confirmed what scholars wanted: an inclusive and accessible academic journal to serve the variety of scholars, educators, and members of the public who care about the mutual influences of sexuality, gender, and religion. 

The first issue of the journal is expected to be released online in late April. QTR is already accepting articles and creative submissions for future issues. 

Key to the vision of QTR is its fee-free, open access publishing model. Under most open access models, authors pay the journal to make the paper freely available to any reader; some fees can range from $2,000-$3,000. The support of Luce helps the new Duke University Press journal remove such barriers from both directions. 

Wilcox and Marchal hope the journal, which will have an independent accompanying website, can serve as a trusted source and a place where new perspectives can be learned. 

“We are immensely grateful to the Henry Luce Foundation and to Duke University Press for sharing our vision of the importance of this public-access project, especially in the current political environment,” said Wilcox, the Holstein Family and Community Chair of Religious Studies at UCR . “Religion is historically a part of both oppression and resistance, and the work of scholars and creatives in this area can help us all to better understand and intervene in these dynamics.” 

The journal comes at a timely point in history; according to the American Civil Liberties Union, just in 2023, nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ legislative bills have been introduced in the United States . Many of those bills challenge or restrict gender-transition care for minors, trans sports laws, books, and even drag shows. Many of these bills are rooted in specific religious perspectives that are both contextualized and challenged by scholars of trans and queer studies in religion.  

Studying trans and queer people in religion is an opportunity to grow in knowledge and to debunk sometimes baseless interpretations of Christian teachings that underlie a lot of the newest wave of trans antagonism, Wilcox said. 

Marchal said while students and communities are craving knowledge on issues surrounding this topic many higher education institutions and communities are still playing catch up with the decades of research on queer and trans studies in religion. 

QTR’s forthcoming companion website will include more bite-sized examples of research to understand how sexuality, gender, and religion are historically interconnected. The website will include multimedia, blog-style entries, and other resources to address general interest in this area.    

“There is an abundance of desire to learn about religion and gender and sexuality. These aspects of life are intertwined, even intimately connected,” Marchal said. “When people start learning about this stuff, they tend to be surprised, because most have only learned the limited approaches that certain hierarchical institutions have taken when talking about our bodies, our sexuality, our genders. The picture of religious people and practices is much richer, more complicated, and variable than this dominant narrative, as the scholars who have been studying trans and queer people within religions have shown for a long time. This journal will provide a prominent and high-quality venue for such scholarship.” 

Learn more about QTR: www.queertransreligion.org

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People say they're leaving religion due to anti-LGBTQ teachings and sexual abuse

Jason DeRose

The PRRI poll found that the vast majority of those who are unaffiliated are content to stay that way. Just 9% of respondents say they're looking for a religion that would be right for them. Hanan Isachar/Getty Images hide caption

The PRRI poll found that the vast majority of those who are unaffiliated are content to stay that way. Just 9% of respondents say they're looking for a religion that would be right for them.

People in the U.S. are leaving and switching faith traditions in large numbers. The idea of "religious churning" is very common in America, according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).

It finds that around one-quarter (26%) of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated, a number that has risen over the last decade and is now the largest single religious group in the U.S. That's similar to what other surveys and polls have also found, including Pew Research .

PRRI found that the number of those who describe themselves as "nothing in particular" has held steady since 2013, but those who identify as atheists have doubled (from 2% to 4%) and those who say they're agnostic has more than doubled (from 2% to 5%).

This study looks at which faith traditions those unaffiliated people are coming from.

Despite church prohibitions, Catholics still choose IVF to have children

"Thirty-five percent were former Catholics, 35% were former mainline Protestants, only about 16% were former evangelicals," says Melissa Deckman, PRRI's chief executive officer. "And really not many of those Americans are, in fact, looking for an organized religion that would be right for them. We just found it was 9%."

That these people are not looking for a religion has, Deckman says, implications for how and even whether houses of worship should try to attract new people.

Among other findings: The Catholic Church is losing more members than it's gaining, though the numbers are slightly better for retention among Hispanic Catholics.

There is much lower religious churn among Black Protestants and among Jews who seem overall happy in their faith traditions and tend to stay there.

As for why people leave their religions, PRRI found that about two-thirds (67%) of people who leave a faith tradition say they did so because they simply stopped believing in that religion's teachings.

An Arizona church known for feeding migrants now says the city is blocking its work

And nearly half (47%) of respondents who left cited negative teaching about the treatment of LGBTQ people.

Those numbers were especially high with one group in particular.

"Religion's negative teaching about LGBTQ people are driving younger Americans to leave church," Deckman says. "We found that about 60% of Americans who are under the age of 30 who have left religion say they left because of their religious traditions teaching, which is a much higher rate than for older Americans."

Hispanic Americans are also more likely to say they've left a religion over LGBTQ issues. Other reasons cited for leaving: clergy sexual abuse and over-involvement in politics.

The new PRRI report is based on a survey of more than 5,600 adults late last year.

Purim — a festive Jewish holiday with an ending often ignored

About one-third of religiously unaffiliated Americans say they no longer identify with their childhood religion because the religion was bad for their mental health. That response was strongest among LGBTQ respondents.

The survey also asked about the prevalence of the so-called "prosperity Gospel." It found that 31% of respondents agreed with the statement "God always rewards those who have good faith with good health, financial success, and fulfilling personal relationships."

Black Americans tend to agree more with these theological beliefs than other racial or ethnic groups. And Republicans are more likely than independents and Democrats to hold such beliefs.

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The most anti-science belief you can hold is that science is a religion

“Fringe”, “weird” and “unthinkable” are perfectly acceptable descriptors any science writer might use when rightfully denouncing some hare-brained professor’s paper that suggests, for instance, the North American sasquatch is the leading driver of climate change, or that Elvis Presley and Tupac Shakur are responsible for kidnapping Shelly Miscavige. Science journalism has a job to do — and that includes verbally smacking the pseudoscience out of academic hustlers to defend the dignity of both the reader and the science. We stan a scientific diss track in this shop, and I’d gladly lend my pen to such a cause.

But when science writers dismiss robustly-debated philosophical theories this way — like panpsychism , one well-known theory about the possible nature of subjective consciousness even in inanimate objects — they look less like erudite champions of empirical truth, and more like a Victorian drawing room full of phrenologists scoffing at William James’ notions of psychology while proclaiming that “there isn't a single head-bump of evidence to support this theory.”

At least, that’s what they looked like this past week when Popular Mechanics science writer Stav Dimitropoulos offered a fresh bit of nuanced reporting on the renewed popular interest around the philosophical theory of panpsychism. To grossly oversimplify, the theory posits that consciousness isn’t just the currently scientifically-inexplicable emergent property of a human brain as many consider it now, but a property of pretty much any self-organizing system of material things. Panpsychism’s principles stretch back to human’s earliest notions of classical philosophy but have also evolved right alongside the sciences (like, you know, theories within humanities disciplines do).

Its core concepts have been advocated for by the likes of Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose , as well as physicists like Author Eddington and David Bohm, and even William James himself. As a theory, panpsychism challenges us to consider whether we featherless bipeds might be thinking a bit too primitively when we assume objectively extant concepts we have no real way to quantify — like consciousness — can only be produced by neuronal sparks of the electrified hamburger meat between our ears.

Panpsychism winks at us from our species’ inquisitive past and seems to ask, “Aren’t you the same hairless apes that once laughed at a guy for suggesting all matter was ultimately made of vibration? Do you think your primitive little frontal cortex is equivalent to the skull of Zeus, and that the totality of all possible wisdom springs from it fully armored as Athena?” 

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When fuzzy terms like “ artificial superintelligence ” are getting tossed around to describe black-box processes of a computer network you can pay to be your girlfriend, I’d say panpsychism’s questions are worth more than an embarrassingly tone-deaf snicker from science writers. Similarly well-timed amid all the recent heady research into quantum mechanics, Dimitropoulos’ rather eloquent piece invites readers to examine the current limits of material physics’ theories and see what the brainiacs in humanities departments have to say about self-awareness and the mind’s role in the wider universe.

But judging by the frantic oinking of science writers who quickly piggybacked off her click-traffic, you’d have thought the article was a crayon-scrawled defense of flat-earthers. Seemingly affronted by the possibility that a philosophical theory might offer a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to a problem that physics was never asked nor meant to solve alone, a gaggle of presumably muttonchopped science writers eagerly charged into the latest skirmish of a decades-old fray between philosophers and physicists.

In overindulgent headlines and ill-advised body-copy, would be defenders of the faith of Scientism gleefully celebrated missing the entire point of panpsychism across some widely circulating and uninformed articles that I’d rather not further promote.

It’s disappointing to see but not a surprise. A lack of curiosity about the possibilities of consciousness is the hallmark of anti-science attitudes, even among those appointed to herald the sober inquiry of an awe-striking world of which the human race is but one fleeting member. And to do this job right — hell, to even get beyond our own trembling ontological frailty long enough to learn something about this existence — we have to fight anti-science attitudes in every quarter, even our own. 

We should start with our own beliefs. To that end, the most anti-science belief you can hold isn’t that the earth is flat, that consciousness may be more than human thought, or that existence may be more than we can quantify at the moment — it’s that science is a religion. And when you treat science like a religion, like a framework for limiting the interpretation of the world’s possibilities, rather than like a framework for discovering those possibilities — you stop writing science journalism and you start writing Scientism apologia.

When your congregation zealously overestimates the epistemological functionality of empiricism in the work of logical positivism, you trap the conversation of science and consciousness in your lethally boring Vienna wagon-Circling. And in this way, yes, you insult the dignity of both the reader and the science. 

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes , a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title: uni-smart: universal science multimodal analysis and research transformer.

Abstract: In scientific research and its application, scientific literature analysis is crucial as it allows researchers to build on the work of others. However, the fast growth of scientific knowledge has led to a massive increase in scholarly articles, making in-depth literature analysis increasingly challenging and time-consuming. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has offered a new way to address this challenge. Known for their strong abilities in summarizing texts, LLMs are seen as a potential tool to improve the analysis of scientific literature. However, existing LLMs have their own limits. Scientific literature often includes a wide range of multimodal elements, such as molecular structure, tables, and charts, which are hard for text-focused LLMs to understand and analyze. This issue points to the urgent need for new solutions that can fully understand and analyze multimodal content in scientific literature. To answer this demand, we present Uni-SMART (Universal Science Multimodal Analysis and Research Transformer), an innovative model designed for in-depth understanding of multimodal scientific literature. Through rigorous quantitative evaluation across several domains, Uni-SMART demonstrates superior performance over leading text-focused LLMs. Furthermore, our exploration extends to practical applications, including patent infringement detection and nuanced analysis of charts. These applications not only highlight Uni-SMART's adaptability but also its potential to revolutionize how we interact with scientific literature.

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