Tag Religious belief

Entries 2 Total

Can we ever be right about right and wrong?

Oct 26, ’08 1:22 PM

This is Sam Har­ris, author of Let­ter to to a Chris­tian Nation and The End of Faith, speak­ing at Bey­ond Belief.

Har­ris’ thesis is that ques­tions of mor­al­ity are per­fectly within the realm of sci­entific enquiry and, that because human well-being is real­ised at the level of the brain, an emer­ging and matur­ing brain sci­ence will have a lot to say about right and wrong.

While I have an easy time under­stand­ing the idea that mor­al­ity is part of evol­u­tion­ary inher­it­ance I’ve always felt a little uneasy about how one recon­ciles value for diversity with a thesis that seems to sug­gest an homo­gen­isa­tion of cul­tural norms, but Har­ris goes some way to alle­vi­at­ing these con­cerns in this talk.

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First study of religious faith at the level of the brain: research volunteers needed

May 5, ’08 10:05 AM

Sam Har­ris is under­tak­ing what is appar­ently a first: the study of reli­gious faith at the level of the brain.

If you’re inter­ested he’s put out a request for volun­teers — par­tic­u­larly Chris­ti­ans — to take part in a sur­vey to help refine their exper­i­mental stimuli:

We are pre­par­ing to run another fMRI study of belief and dis­be­lief, and we need volun­teers to help us refine our exper­i­mental stim­uli. This prom­ises to be the first study of reli­gious faith at the level of the brain. By respond­ing to the four sur­veys I have pos­ted online, you can make an enorm­ous con­tri­bu­tion to this work.

Please answer as many of the sur­veys as you can. If you only have time to answer one, please choose at ran­dom (oth­er­wise, we will have many more responses to the first than to the others).

Feel free to post this mes­sage to your blog or to for­ward the rel­ev­ant links to your friends. I espe­cially need Chris­ti­ans to respond, as one of the goals of these sur­veys is to design stim­uli that a major­ity of Chris­ti­ans will find doc­trin­ally sound.

I will, of course, pass along the res­ults of this work the moment I have some­thing to report.

Many thanks for your help.

All the best,
Sam
samharris.org

Note: Each sur­vey starts with the same first page of questions.

Belief Sur­vey A
Belief Sur­vey B
Belief Sur­vey C
Belief Sur­vey D

External links:

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