Rachel's Paideia Blog

Brown Symposium Reflection

The first of the two lectures I saw was Andrew Newberg's "How God Can Change Your Brain," in which Newberg discussed his work with brain imaging during and related to religious practices in several different groups of people. This lecture sounded interesting to me, but I don't know how much I really gained from it. I felt like I could have guessed the results of his tests--people's relationship with God does affect their brains! As an agnostic leaning towards atheism, I don't doubt that religious people get something out of praying, meditating, or contemplating the idea of God. I don't even doubt that it's beneficial to them. I didn't think anyone really doubted that, so I wasn't so much impressed with Newberg's findings. What was most interesting (and entertaining) to me about his discussion was the study in which participants were asked to draw pictures of God. I was particularly amused by the slide he showed of an eight year old's drawing of a bearded man with misshaped legs and a dialogue bubble saying "LISTEN TO ME!". I'm pretty sure that would have been similar to my interpretation as an eight year old, and I find that a little disturbing. He said that something like 15 or 20% of the drawings were similar--actual human forms. The majority were nature scenes or abstract swirling things, and a lot were left blank. I don't know exactly how to interpret all of this, but I think it would be worth discussing under the theme of "understanding human behavior". Religion has everything to do with human behavior, as does science, and I like the idea of combining the two.
I also went to was David Sloan Wilson’s lecture “Evolution as the Theory of Choice for the Study of Religion” and found it to be very interesting, and agreed with a lot of what he said. His statement about religion being entirely a social construct was especially appealing to me, as it is a topic that comes up often in my circle of friends. I have for a long time felt that religion was constructed because humans are constantly questioning “why?” and religion gives many people that answer. For me, not so much, but I understand the purpose and the sentiment. I thought his chicken experiment was interesting as well, especially since it dealt with a lot of issues that have recently been discussed in my anthropology class. The group of chickens who faired best were not necessarily the "strongest" or "most intelligent", but rather those best adapted to their environments and best equipped to benefit the production of the entire group. This shows the true meaning of Darwin's idea of "survival of the fittest", as opposed to the pop-culture interpretation of it (i.e. strongest/most intelligent survive).
In general I enjoyed the Brown Symposium, perhaps more than I expected to when I heard about the topic of science and religion. Though it's not what I'm really REALLY interested in studying, it is important and interesting to know about.

posted by Rachel @ 7:11 PM