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HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

Clashes between the use of faith vs. scientific evidence to explain the world around us dates back centuries and is perhaps most visible today in the arguments between evolution and creationism. Now Science 2.0 reports that according to researchers at Case Western Reserve University and Babson College, the conflict between science and religion may have its origins in the structure of our brains [science20.com]. According to their research, to believe in a supernatural god or universal spirit, people appear to suppress the brain network used for analytical thinking and engage the empathetic network, the scientists say. When thinking analytically about the physical world, people appear to do the opposite. "When there's a question of faith, from the analytic point of view, it may seem absurd," says Tony Jack. "But, from what we understand about the brain, the leap of faith to belief in the supernatural amounts to pushing aside the critical/analytical way of thinking to help us achieve greater social and emotional insight."

In a series of eight experiments, the researchers found the more empathetic the person, the more likely he or she is religious. That finding offers a new explanation for past research showing women tend to hold more religious or spiritual worldviews than men. The gap may be because women have a stronger tendency toward empathetic concern than men. Atheists, the researchers found, are most closely aligned with psychopaths--not killers, but the vast majority of psychopaths classified as such due to their lack of empathy for others. "Because of the tension between networks, pushing aside a naturalistic world view enables you to delve deeper into the social/emotional side," Jack says. "And that may be the key to why beliefs in the supernatural exist throughout the history of cultures. It appeals to an essentially nonmaterial way of understanding the world and our place in it [plos.org]." "Having empathy doesn't mean you necessarily have anti-scientific beliefs," says Jared Friedman. "Instead, our results suggest that if we only emphasize analytic reasoning and scientific beliefs, as the New Atheist movement suggests, then we are compromising our ability to cultivate a different type of thinking, namely social/moral insight."

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