Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to

LOUISE BROWN, the world's first test-tube baby, turns 30 this week. She is no longer the miracle she once seemed: more than 3 million people have now been conceived through in vitro fertilisation. Indeed, IVF has become such a common means of conception that it is hard to believe the Catholic church still opposes it.

At the time of Brown's birth, the church was undecided about the morals and ethics of IVF, but it has since banned its members from using the technology, declaring it "morally unacceptable". That is primarily because it views fertilised embryos as potential human beings, and thus sees the destruction of embryos, a common aspect of the IVF process, as equivalent to murder.

That is not the only problem: there is also a moral question over the extent to which humans should usurp the role of the divine. In 1986 Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, wrote that IVF "entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person". In other words, IVF allows us to play God.

The Catholic church's position is looking ever more absurd, especially when you consider that it stands virtually alone on this matter. The vast majority of Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu groups see IVF as a useful means to an essential end: overcoming infertility. Muslim scholars issued their first proclamation, or fatwa, on IVF within two years of Brown's birth. This came from the leaders of the majority Sunni group, to which over 90 per cent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims belong. The fatwa decreed that a married couple

It had all the fervour of a revivalist meeting. True, there were no hallelujahs, gospel songs or swooning, but there was plenty of preaching, mostly to the converted, and much spontaneous applause for exhortations to follow the path of righteousness. And right there at the forefront of everyone's thoughts was God.

Yet this was no religious gathering–quite the opposite. Some of the leading practitioners of modern science, many of them vocal atheists, were gathered last week in La Jolla, California, for a symposium entitled Beyond belief: Science, religion, reason and survival hosted by the Science Network, a science-promoting coalition of scientists and media professionals convening at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. They were there to address three questions. Should science do away with religion? What would science put in religion's place? And can we be good without God?

First up to address the initial question was cosmologist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas, Austin. His answer was an unequivocal yes. “The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion,” Weinberg told the congregation. “Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilisation.”

Those uncompromising words won Weinberg a rapturous response. Yet not long afterwards he was being excoriated for not being tough enough on religion, and admitting he would miss it once it was gone. Religion was, Weinberg had said, like “a crazy old aunt” who tells lies and stirs up mischief. “She was beautiful once,” he suggested. “She's been with us a long time. When she's gone we may miss

What a lost opportunity! When Harriet Miers withdrew as a nominee for the US supreme court, her Christian critics missed out on a chance to show that it is possible to combine integrity and rationality with religious belief. It's an opportunity that these days presents itself all too rarely. Now President Bush has chosen a nominee to please the conservative Christians who operate under the bizarre assumption that faith gives believers special authority on moral issues.

Bush spent weeks under sustained attack for not putting up a hard-line conservative candidate for the supreme court, a siege that eventually broke the Miers nomination. The conservatives' grievance was that Miers, though an evangelical Christian, is not against abortion per se. Indeed, she seems unwilling to use the tenets of her faith to lay down the law on issues of modern ethics. In a 1993 speech unearthed shortly before her nomination was withdrawn, Miers declared that "when science cannot determine the facts and decisions vary based upon religious belief, then government should not act". The hardliners feared she would not vote the "Christian" way on issues such as stem cells and human reproductive cloning, so they got her removed.

Although she didn't say so explicitly, Miers's view seems to be that on many of these issues there is no such thing as a "Christian position". Such a view is correct, and never has there been a greater need for it to be stated explicitly.

Advances in science and technology have thrown up many subjects for debate, but the Bible cannot be said to speak to these issues more clearly than most human beings' moral sense. In fact, those Christians who say their faith somehow gives them special authority on questions of bioethics couldn't be more wrong: they are if anything less well placed than everyone else. That's because, instead of considering the facts of an issue purely on their merits, they are forced to consider also how comfortably these facts sit with their beliefs. They have, in effect, a conflict of interest.

Scott Atran knows a thing or two about fundamentalists, and as far as he's concerned, they are nice people. "I certainly find very little hatred; they act out of love," he says. "These people are very compassionate." Atran, who studies group dynamics at the University of Michigan, is talking about suicide bombers, extremists by anyone's standards and not representative of fundamentalist ideology in general (New Scientist, 23 July, page 18). But surprisingly, much of what Atran has discovered about suicide bombers helps to explain the psychology of all fundamentalist movements.

Ideas about the nature of fundamentalist belief initially drew heavily on work from the 1950s, when psychologists were trying to explain why some people were drawn to authoritarian ideologies such as Nazism. Guided by that research, psychologists focused on individuals, looking for personality traits, modes of thinking and even psychological flaws that might mark fundamentalists out from other people. The conclusion they came to was that there is no real difference between fundamentalists and everybody else. "The fundamentalist mentality is part of human nature," writes Stuart Sim, a cultural theorist at the University of Sunderland in the UK. "All of us are capable of exhibiting this kind of behaviour."

Attention has now turned away from individual psychology to focus on the power of the group. "We evolved to have close and intimate group contacts: we cooperate to compete," says Atran. The psychology of fundamentalism is, literally, more than the sum of its parts; taken individually, fundamentalists are rather unremarkable. "The notion that you might be able to find something in a fundamentalist's brain scan is a non-starter," says John Brooke, a professor of science and religion at the University of Oxford.

Astronomers like to think they know where the stars are. They can point to them in the night sky: there's Polaris, there's Vega, there's Adhara... We've had the night sky mapped for millennia now. But how do we know the maps are right? After all, no one has been out to check that the stars really are where we think they are.

Our celestial maps are based on the assumption that photons of light almost always travel from the stars to our telescopes on Earth in a straight line. Is that a fair assumption? Maybe not. "The universe is roughly 13 billion years old: a lot of things could have happened to photon trajectories in that time," says Akhlesh Lakhtakia.

It is an unusual claim from someone in his job. Lakhtakia is not an astronomer, but an electrical engineer based at Penn State University in University Park, Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, working with Tom Mackay, a mathematician at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, he has now published a string of peer-reviewed papers showing that some of our astronomical observations really could be wrong. They have demonstrated that our cherished night sky could be replete with optical illusions created by the gravitational fields of black holes.