Commentary: What is this thing called religion?

* 05 April 2008
* From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
* A. C. Grayling

AS LONG as religion was untouchably sacred, it was by definition beyond the prying fingers of objective inquiry. Now society has matured enough to empirically scrutinise religion, and late last year a group of nine European universities led by the University of Oxford began to examine religious belief and behaviour, helped by a ¬2 million European Commission grant.

The project, called Explaining Religion (EXREL), brings together psychology, biology, anthropology and history to investigate both the common and the variable features of "religiosity" (this is the term EXREL uses) and to test theories about it - including the current leader in the field, which is that religiosity exists because of the way that human cognitive architecture functions.

According to EXREL's website, the project partners "aim to develop a computational model of religious dynamics that can be used to explain present and past religious traditions, and to simulate likely future directions". This is a fascinating and worthwhile project, and is sure to be controversial, whatever its outcome.

Illumination may come from seeing how differently the brains of religious and non-religious people function in appropriate experimental circumstances as revealed by fMRI and PET scanning. It is surely relevant that there are such interesting correlations as those between dopamine levels in the brain and degree of religiosity - the more severe a person's Parkinson's disease, the less religious he or she tends to be - but a crucial aspect of the investigations will be the historical and anthropological data, because they affect from the outset what the investigation's target actually is.

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