U.S. author Robert Wright traces the history of God and suggests that it might all point to the unfolding of something divine, though perhaps not in the sense that most people of faith would envision.

In his just published “The Evolution of God,” Wright takes his readers on a thought-provoking journey through the spiritual beliefs of our hunter-gatherer ancestors to the development of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. You can see my interview with Wright here.

Wright’s engaging book covers a lot of ground and it certainly raises many questions that may be of interest to readers of this blog. I’m just going to throw a few of them out here — trust me, there could be many, many more.

1. RELIGION AND SCIENCE:

Has religion in the past given rise to science? The Polynesians that Captain James Cook encountered in the 18th century tried to predict the weather by looking at the night sky – and often succeeded. They believed this was divinely inspired  but as Wright notes:

“The apparent explanation is that both the night sky and the prevailing winds change seasonally. So there was indeed a correlation between stars and weather; the Polynesians just had the wrong explanation … Still, this is the way scientific progress often starts: finding a correlation between two variables and positing a plausible if false explanation. In this sense, ’science’ dates back to preliterate times.”

2.  MONOTHEISM AND INTOLERANCE/TOLERANCE

Wright argues that “scriptural interpretaion is obedient to facts on the ground” and that “… monotheism turns out to be, morally speaking, a very malleable thing, something that, when circumstances are auspicious, can be a fount of tolerance and compassion.”

3. A PURPOSE-DRIVEN HISTORY?

Acadamic history in the West has, for the most part, long since abandoned the view that the march of history is also the march of progress. But Wright raises the possibility that the unfolding drama of human history has been one of moral progress and that this might — just might — point to divine guidance.

“What might qualify as evidence of a larger purpose at work in the world? For one thing, a moral direction in history. If history naturally carries human consciousness toward moral enlightenment, however slowly and fitfully, that would be evidence that there’s some point to it all,” he writes.

Wright is well aware that many people will take issue with this thesis, especially in light of the horrors of the 20th century. Critics could also point to the rocky start of the 21st century with the Sept 11 attacks, the war in Congo, the depths of corporate greed … well, the list could be almost endless. In Wright’s America, secular humanists on the left have decried Wall Street’s behavior and almost all of the policies of the past administration of President George W. Bush; religious conservatives have seen almost nothing but moral decline since the 1950s and 1960s.

But as Wright told me:  “I think the fact that we have such a dim view of the 20th century is itself a sign of our moral progress.”

There is much more to this book including a history of God — or one might say the changing or conflicting image of God in the human mind — that is ground in material conditions, culture and politics. Much of it involves an on-going discussion on growth of “non-zero-sum” relationships in the world and the notion of “moral imagination” or “our capacity to put ourselves in the shoes of another person” as Wright describes it.

But what do you think? Are there signs that humanity has made moral progress and could it be a sign of something divine?

(Author Photo by Barry Munger)

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Beer, which as an alcoholic beverage is forbidden in Islam to its believers, has long had it easy in mainly Muslim Malaysia. The country’s population of 27 million is made up of about 55 percent Malay Muslims and mainly Chinese and Indian ethnic minorities who practice a variety of faiths including Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism. The personal right of the non-Muslims to drink alcoholic beverages is legally recognised, a sign of tolerance despite the special status of Islam under Article 11 of the Malaysian constitution.  So beer is not difficult to find in convenience stores, supermarkets and entertainment outlets.

(Photo: Beer drinkers, 20 July 2009/Nguyen Huy Kham)

But this easygoing attitude towards beer has hit the rocks of late amid what some suspect has been a growing religiosity of the country’s Muslims.  Last month, 32-year old Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarnor very nearly became the first woman to be caned in Malaysia for drinking alcohol under rarely enforced Islamic criminal laws.  Caught drinking beer in a hotel lobby in the eastern state of Pahang by religious enforcement officers, she was sentenced to six strokes of the cane and a fine.  This was possible because Malaysia practices a dual-track legal system. Muslims are subject to Islamic family and criminal laws that run alongside national civil laws.

A Malaysian Islamic appeals court judge ordered a review of Kartika’s sentence, but a public debate is still raging. Opinions are divided even among Islamic scholars with some questioning what the exact punishment for the offence, which isn’t specified in the Quran, should be. Others are in full support and believe that Kartika’s sentence was mild.

(Photo: Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, 21 Aug  2009/Zainal Abd Halim)

This was not the first time beer has run foul of Malaysia’s Muslims.  The opposition Islamist party grabbed headlines last month when it insisted on full implementation of an alcohol ban for Muslims in the country’s most developed state of Selangor ,which it governs. The call by the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) did not amuse its die-hard secular partner, the mainly ethnic Chinese Democratic Action Party. A war of words erupted between the two parties.

Anger towards beer has in fact been known to have turned literally explosive. In 2000, a cult group known as Al Maunah raided a military armoury, then mounted grenade attacks against a Hindu temple and a Carlsberg brewery.

Beer has been a major target, but not the only subject drawing the wrath of some Muslims in the country. The Islamist PAS last month protested against a planned concert by the band Michael Learns To Rock, believing it an insult to allow the act to perform during the fasting month of Ramadan.

The government has also employed regulations to similar effect, namely in the recent ban against Muslims from attending a concert by U.S. hip hop band The Black Eyed Peas. The government later did a U-turn on the restriction.

Malaysians can watch music videos on satellite television with any problem. It is not impossible to spot Muslims in pubs and nightclubs drinking alcohol despite strict Islamic laws. These contradictions are difficult to explain. Some feel it’s part of a natural and continuing struggle among Muslims trying to balance faith and modernity. Others believe the majority of Muslims in the country are turning towards greater conservatism, which bodes ill for tolerance in this mainly Muslim but still multi-religious country.

(Photo: The Black Eyed Peas, 6 July 2009/Denis Balibouse)

Add to that an increasingly intense political battle between the ruling United Malays National Organisation and the opposition PAS for the support of the majority Malays ahead of the next election due by 2013. With each party trying to outdo the other on who is the better champion of Islam, Malaysian beer lovers could be forgiven for wondering whether the taps will one day run dry.

What’s needed is for Malaysians of all religions to sit down and talk to each about these issues more often and honestly. Thirsty work, but nothing that cannot be resolved over several pints of orange juice.

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It’s Ramadan and on a bustling shopping street on the fringes of northern Paris, the holy month is in full swing. Bearded men in long robes collect alms, women in headscarves sell sweet pastries. But the period of fasting and charitable acts has little impact on the work of activist Christine Jamaa, whose office is in a secret location not far from the busy street market.

Jamaa, who heads the Voix de Femmes (Women’s Voice) group helping victims of forced marriage,  met me there last week for a interview for my feature “New school year puts French on forced marriage alert.” In the feature, another activist, Fatou Diouf (pictured above in a photo by Jacky Naegelen), told of her family’s attempt to kidnap her and force her into marrying her uncle in Senegal at the age of 18.

While I was in Jamaa’s office, her phone was constantly ringing with emergency calls from threatened girls and women - most of them Muslims of Africa, Asian or Middle Eastern descent. Jamaa herself is a Muslim, like many of the activists who help victims of forced marriage here, and she keeps telling the families and the women at risk that Islam bans forced marriage.

In her experience, however, the families don’t care. “They just pick the parts of Islam that are convenient to them,” she told me. A few years ago, Jamaa worked with an imam to try and use religion to fight the practice. But they had to stop after the imam himself was threatened by angry families.

For now, she believes religion can play a marginal part in dealing with marriage conflicts. Once the girl has fled the family, and the parents show some regret, an imam may be able to smooth the reconciliation process. Faith can also reassure the victims, who almost always feel terribly guilty about running away. And Jamaa believes a strong stance among Muslim leaders could help: “I’m still waiting for a fatwa saying forced marriages are haram (forbidden),” she said with an air of resignation.

Even if such a fatwa were issued, most of these families would probably ignore it. For Fatou Diouf, a French woman of Senegalese descent, the practice is not about religion anyway, but about tradition. Her own ordeal began when she dated a non-Muslim Cameroonian in France at the age of 18. Her family lured her to Senegal, then told her they had already married her off to her 36-year-old uncle in a religious ceremony that did not require her presence.

(Image: Voix de Femmes poster — the text says “Forced marriage … a one-way ticket? The girls refuse.”)

“I had my father on the phone, and he said, I’m fed up with you fooling around in France, you’re going to stay down there,” she told me. Later on, after she escaped, Jamaa travelled back to France and eventually confronted her parents about their betrayal. Her father justified himself - but not by invoking religion. “He said friends had started asking why I was always out, where I was, he said I would be treated like a whore,” she said.

The activists and victims I spoke to cited many different motives for forced marriage in migrant communities here. But the strongest factor seems to be a fear of daughters becoming too independent, too rebellious, “too French”. And even though activists say some of the victims are from Christian, Hindu or Jewish immigrant backgrounds, the majority — based on their accounts — does seem to be Muslim. There are unfortunately no reliable official statistics to give a clearer picture.

One interesting insight the activists gave was that the most fervent young Muslim women - the kind who wear the full veils that have sparked such a lively debate in France - tend to pick their own partners rather than submit to their families’ will. Most fully veiled women say they have chosen to wear the niqab themselves, often against the wishes of their parents. So if their parents try to arrange a union with a man not pious enough for them, they reply by saying Islam forbids forced marriage and then choose a similarly devout spouse.

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Every summer the green hills of Rebkong are home to unique celebrations during which local Tibetans believe the mountain gods visit villagers -- and each other -- through human mediums.

Reuters photographer Christina Hu documents the celebrations in the multimedia presentation above. To read the full story click here.

Last week, a college in Mangalore in India banned a student wearing a burqa from attending class. The principal told local media the college had a policy of not allowing symbols of religion.

The media did not say if there were students on campus with a 'bindi' (dot) on their foreheads or crucifixes around their necks or turbans on their heads, other symbols of religion one commonly sees in India, besides the ubiquitous "Om" scarves and t-shirts.

Mangalore, a cosmopolitan city, is no stranger to controversy; it was recently in the news for attacks on bars and women by a fundamentalist Hindu outfit that declared they were against Indian culture.

Nor is the controversy over headscarves and burqas limited to India. UK's Jack Straw sparked a heated debate when he asked Muslim women in his constituency to remove their veils to promote better relations between people.

Turkey last year lifted a ban on women wearing headscarves at universities, ruling it violated the country's secular constitution.

More recently, French president Sarkozy said burqas have no place in the country because they are a symbol of the subjugation of women. The issue has divided France, home to Europe's largest Muslim minority, over how to reconcile secular values with religious freedom.

A 2004 French law bans students from wearing "conspicuous" signs of their religion in state schools, prompting Sikhs to launch a protest to allow them to keep their turbans on.

Sikhs have also fought in some countries for the right to carry the "kirpan", a dagger mandated by their religion and have called on the U.S. Army to end a ban on men with turbans.

How about India, a secular country which allows its citizens the right to follow any religion of their choosing? Can a college or a workplace impose its own rules about religious symbols? And who gets to determine what's conspicuous or not?

Some book titles are too good to pass up. “How God Changes Your Brain” is neuroscientist Andrew Newberg’s fourth book on “neurotheology,” the study of the relationship between faith and the brain. All are pitched at a popular audience, with snappy titles like “Born to Believe” or “Why God Won’t Go Away.” Anyone reading the latest one, though, might wonder if the title shouldn’t be “How God Meditation Changes Your Brain.” As he explains in an interview with Reuters here, the benefits that Buddhist monks and contemplative Catholic nuns derive from meditation and intense prayer are also available to atheists and agnostics. The key lies in the method these high performing believers use, not in the belief itself. But that would have made for a more awkward title.

That’s not to say Newberg doesn’t have some interesting points to make in this book. His brain scans of meditating monks and praying nuns show that the frontal lobe — the area that directs the mind’s focus — is especially active while the amygdala — the area linked to fear reactions — is calmed when they go through their spiritual experiences. His studies show these brain regions can be exercised and strengthened, like building up a muscle through training. And his treatment of a mechanic with a faltering memory showed that a traditional Indian meditation method, even when stripped of its spiritual trappings, could bring about these changes in two months.

The book goes on to ascribe a list of positive results from meditation and offer advice on caring for the brain. Newberg’s “number one best way to exercise your brain” is faith. As he puts it, “faith is equivalent with hope, optimism and the belief that a positive future awaits us. Faith can also be defined as the ability to trust our beliefs, even when we have no proof that such beliefs are accurate or true.” Critics, especially clerics, would probably protest that this is not really theology, but psychology. If we’re talking about God, where’s the religion?

That brings up another interesting aspect. While he is clearly favourable to faith and spirituality, Newberg remains a scientist eager to study the religious feelings he calls “among the most powerful and complex experiences people have.” He studiously avoids promoting any one faith or closing the door to atheists who might be reading the text. The tone is upbeat, the approach inclusive and the conclusion optimistic. There’s a touch of Eastern mysticism, too, with sections on how widely practiced meditation could foster compassion and understanding among people and peoples. Thanks to this open-minded approach towards both religion and science, Newberg teaches radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and speaks frequently to church groups or in religious media.

Newberg gave me a few SPECT brain scan images that illustrate the changes he finds in his subjects’ brains. The image above left shows the brain of a Buddhist monk before and during meditation. The increased yellow in the lower right of the right-hand image shows reduced activity in the parietal lobe, the brain area responsible for orientation in space and time. Below right, the image shows a nun before and during prayer, with increased activity in the frontal lobe, the area for concentration and analytical thinking, and in areas linked to language.

Newberg, a cheerful and optimistic man who was brought up in a Reform Jewish family and says he is still exploring his own beliefs, told me his next book will be an academic work on neurotheology. He stresses that the field is in its infancy and its brain scanning methods are still “incredibly crude. We really don’t know which neurons are firing in that little three-millimeter space” captured in fMRI scans. “If we can ultimately say something epistemologically interesting, then that’s great,” he told me. “But it’s going to take me a long time before I get to saying something like that.”

UPDATE: After some failed attempts at editing this, here is a video clip of Newberg explaining his views during our interview:

What do you think about “neurotheology”? Do you think brain scans and neuroscience can tell us anything significant about religion?

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In Israel, the death count for the H1N1, or swine flu, outbreak reached 7 yesterday, and for some citizens, fighting the virus has taken on some religious dimensions.

Israel's leading paper, Yedioth Ahronoth, wrote an article about health concerns raised by Israel's Ultra Orthodox media: kissing mezuzahs. A mezuzah is a tiny encasement holding a piece of parchment with a Jewish prayer enscribed on it. Mezuzahs are nailed to most doorways inside a Jewish home, and traditionally, Jews will touch the mezuzah and kiss their fingers when entering a house.  An ultra-orthodox journalist decided to ask seven doctors their opinion on whether this tradition could be dangerous in the Swine flu era.

According to Yedioth Ahronoth, "The doctors unanimously agreed that bacteria leave high levels of residue on such objects, but six of them refused to comment on mezuzot in particular, 'so as not to get in trouble with the rabbis'."

Only one doctor in the article affirmed that their could be a direct link between kissing a mezuzah and contracting the virus.

The results lead some rabbis to make suggestions for how to preserve the practice in light of potential health hazards. Israel's Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar said, "If a specific order is given in the matter, the mezuzah must be kissed from the air, to ensure that the custom is not forgotten."

It's not the first problem there's been concerning the disease and local beliefs. When it arrived in Israel earlier this year, the Ultra-Orthodox deputy health minister insisted on respect for the kosher dietary traditions that ban the eating of pork: he banned references to the illness as "swine" flu...

Earlier this week, we wrote about the "flying rabbis" trying to combat the flu: "Dozens of rabbis and Kabbalah mystics armed with ceremonial trumpets have taken to the skies over Israel to battle the H1N1 flu virus."

After the flight, Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri said "we are certain that, thanks to prayer, the danger is already behind us."

According to an article in Ha'aretz, there have been  2,148 cases of verified swine flu in Israel and half of them have been under the age of 30.

PHOTO:Israeli doctor at the health clinic in Ben Gurion Airport, Israel. The clinic was opened as part of an effort to combat the virus' spread from high-risk countries. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

Is diversity of opinion boon or bane for Islamic finance?

Market participants gathered for a conference at Thomson Reuters’ London headquarters earlier this week discussed the need for more convergence in the industry estimated to be worth $1 trillion.

Of particular focus was the role of sharia scholars who rule on whether investment products are in line with Islamic teachings.

“Sharia scholars who sit as advisers have a crucial role to play in retaining public confidence,” Rifaat Ahmed Abdel Karim, secretary general of the Islamic Financial Services Board, an international standards-setting body for the industry, told the forum.

Beyond commonly agreed principles such as the emphasis on shared profit and the prohibition on usury, divergent opinion has emerged among these scholars on issues ranging from financial derivatives and deferred payment contracts.

Last year, the issuance of sukuk or Islamic bonds was hit when the top scholar of an influential industry body declared that about 85 percent of sukuk was un-Islamic.

“(In this case), the market was kept in the dark, unaware of how to respond. The industry needs a sharia governance system that is reliable and effective,” said Karim.

But whether authorities can or indeed, should, move towards some common regulatory ground remains to be seen.

One sharia fund manager I spoke to pointed out that diversity of opinion is seen as a blessing within Muslim tradition.

“Even when it comes to religious customs, there are differing Muslim interpretations, so I don’t see how this would be any different," he said.

"We accept that the FSA (Financial Services Authority) in the UK and the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) in the U.S. are different regulatory regimes so why can’t we accept this in Islamic finance as well?”

Until not too long ago, most people believed human morality was based on scripture, culture or reason. Some stressed only one of those sources, others mixed all three. None would have thought to include biology. With the progress of neuroscientific research in recent years, though, a growing number of psychologists, biologists and philosophers have begun to see the brain as the base of our moral views. Noble ideas such as compassion, altruism, empathy and trust, they say, are really evolutionary adaptations that are now fixed in our brains. Our moral rules are actually instinctive responses that we express in rational terms when we have to justify them.

(Photo: Religious activist at a California protest, 10 June 2005/Gene Blevins)

Thanks to a flurry of popular articles, scientists have joined the ranks of those seen to be qualified to speak about morality, according to anthropologist Mark Robinson, a Princeton Ph.D student who discussed this trend at the University of Pennsylvania’s Neuroscience Boot Camp. “In our current scientific society, where do people go to for the truth about human reality?” he asked. “It used to be you might read a philosophy paper or consult a theologian. But now there seems to be a common public sense that the authority over what morality is can be found by neuroscientists or scientists.”

This change has come over the past decade as brain scan images began to reveal which areas of the brain react when a person grapples with a moral problem. They showed activity not only in the prefrontal cortex, where much of our rational thought is processed, but also in areas known to handle emotion and conflicts between brain areas. Such insights cast doubt on long-standing assumptions about reason or religion driving our moral views. “A few theorists have even begun to claim that that the emotions are in fact in charge of the temple of morality and that moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as the high priest,” University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of the leading theorists in this field, has written.

Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory argues that morality is based on five concepts that evolved in all cultures: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authorty/respect and purity/sanctity. Those concepts have real-life consequences, he says — political liberals and conservatives disagree so much on so-called “culture war issues” because liberals base their moral views on the first two concepts while conservatives use all five. Other theorists such as Marc Hauser of Harvard and John Mikhail of Georgetown suggest humans have a universal moral grammar akin to the universal grammar that linguist Noam Chomsky claims underlies all the world’s languages.

For more on these ideas, see review articles such as “The Moral Instinct” (Stephen Pinker, New York Times), “Do The Right Thing” (Rebecca Saxe, Boston Review), “The Emerging Moral Psychology” (Dan Jones, Prospect), “The Roots of Morality” (Greg Miller, Science) and “The End of Philosophy” (David Brooks, New York Times). Hat-tip to fellow boot camper Tamar Gendler for pointing them out.

(Photo: Mark Robinson at the boot camp,10 Aug 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Does this mean that public opinion will turn away from seeing reason or religion as the bases for morality, in favor of the brain? Robinson doubts that. “I don’t know that they will shift to a completely neurobiological view of morality (and) I don’t think this is a fundamental shift away from religion. But it will mean that religion will have to come to terms with the public’s perception.

“I think there will be a greater acceptance of biology as an accepted domain within which to ask certain types of questions. That isn’t to say that people will understand morality completely differently in the future, or won’t have any morality. But they will at least know that (neuroscience) is another domain to go to for answers. The question of authority is a big one. Who is the ultimate authority on these issues about the fundamental nature of human morality?”

Robinson stressed that the authority issue is different from the question of personal belief. In future, he says, people could have moral positions similar to those today, but based on different authorities than in the past. “Think of it in search terms. Where will people go? What kinds of questions will they ask?” he said. “If they will lead to different beliefs, who knows? But the process of looking has changed.”

What do you think? Do you sense that science is taking over from reason or religion as the preferred way for people to justify moral decisions?

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Knowing what not to report is just as important for journalists as knowing what to write. We’re inundated with handouts about some pioneering new scientific research or insightful new book. Should we write about it? It’s refreshing to hear experts who can dazzle you with their work but warn against falling for any hype about it. This “let’s not overdo it” approach has been a recurrent theme in the Neuroscience Boot Camp I’m attending at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

(Photo: The “official” boot camp T-shirt, 8 Aug 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Andrew Newberg’s “no God spot” message to boot campers has already been noted here on FaithWorld. Other lecturers added similar reality checks to their presentations. Cognitive science has already begun to influence religion studies (as John Teehan explained here) and we’re bound to hear more in the future about what neuroscientific research has to say about faith, morals, altruism and other issues of interest to readers of this blog. Much of this will be fascinating. But before the next “gee-whiz” report comes out, here’s the advice the neuroscientists are giving us about speculative claims based on brain research.

(Photo: Geoff Aguirre, 5 Aug 2009/Tom Heneghan)

After two days of explaining fMRI brain scanning, the sexiest procedure in current neurological research, Geoff Aguirre poured cold water on some of the exaggerated conclusions that researchers or journalists draw from it. When shown brain scan images, he said, “people immediately start thinking about trying to catch terrorists and being able to screen people as they pass through metal detectors.” This is “science fiction, science fantasy,” he said, but it comes up regularly. Why? Aguirre, who is an M.D and assistant professor of neurology at Penn, listed several reasons:

• scientific awesomeness — “This is an incredible technology. Neuroimaging is not phrenology. It really is a scientific discipline that has reproducible results that makes valuable predictions that explain larges areas of cognition and cognitive neuroscience that previously had been inaccessible.”
• image properties — “There’s definitely an esthetic in the presentation of this data. People see this as a natural aspect of the brain, not the result of tests. Some groups made a very wise investment in the display technology for how neuroimaging results were reported. Those were the images that got displayed on the covers of the top scientific journals and made a splash.”
• thresholding — The brain images leave out data outside the main focus. “This contributes to the overly localised view of brain function. So we say, ‘ah this is the spot for love’ or whatever, because it’s all that we see.”
• overinference — “It’s very easy to believe a lot of things about these images that might not be true… It’s also implied that when you’ve found activisation in a region, you’ve found the region ‘for’ something. But what does that mean?”
• chicken versus egg problem — “Just because you find a difference between groups in some brain imaging measure does not mean that structural difference was genetically determined.” But the brain also develops according to its owner’s environment and experience, so this is too narrow a focus.
• lurking Cartesian dualism — “In the way we think about people’s actions and describe the effect of diseases or drugs, there is frequently a lurking dualism there. We say, ‘oh it wasn’t his fault, his brain did that.’ Well, who else could it have been? Where else could those thoughts and feeling or plans have come from, except in the brain? This idea that the brain and the mind are separate is part of what makes these images so remarkable. Wow look! Here’s a part of the brain that’s more active when you’re feeling romantic love or not! That’s just astounding to folks who would have thought romantic love was outside the brain, in the heart or the soul and far away.”
  

  (Photo: Near infrared spectroscopy imaging slide/GK Aguirre)

• illusion of inferential proximity — “It doesn’t automatically follow that a brain imaging technology is going to give you greater inferential leverage on a question than just talking to somebody. There’s an illusion that somehow you’re getting much closer to the behavior you want to measure, just because you’re measuring a brain image. That might not be the case.”
  
• ease of imaging — Many hospitals have brain scanners and researchers can use them and free imaging software to create impressive images. “If you have an internet connection and a scanner, you can be a cognitive neuroscientist and publish a paper. Lots of the variance in the lousy scientific papers over these years can be explained this way. What will come out will be a well-formed brain image that will give the impression you must be a very good scientist because you created something that looks very polished.”

Aguirre said that brain scans might be able to identify pedophiles by showing they are excited by pictures of children. “Does having that response to seeing kids in underwear lead to an increased risk of you actually going out and molesting kids?” he asked. “It could be the case that this population of people now divides into two subgroups, one that can control that impulse and one that cannot.” It would be hard to base a policy on who to put in jail on the basis of such brain images, he said.

(Photo: Reward responses slide/Joe Kable)

Another example would be a study into people who lose their temper. “So I do a study of people who are enraged and can find that activity within the right insula is associated with a sense of rage. I have explained the sense of rage,” he said. “But since we all strongly suspected that the sense of rage was derived from events taking place in our nervous system, what have we learned?” The study could say what happens in the brain during rage but still not explain why the person flew off the handle.

Penn law professor Stephen Morse said that “neuroscience can gives us tons of data that teaches us about our capacities and our propensities, but ultimately it’s up to us to decide. Neuroscience might have a lot of information for us, but ultimately deciding what to do won’t be decided by neuroscience, it will be decided by us.”

In a well-attended session on “the chemistry of love,” Mike Kaplan, director of Penn’s Neurolab, said “a lot of people think that, as soon as you’ve come up with a physical explanation for something, you’ve taken the magic out of it. I don’t think that. If they find a peptide that’s released when you fall in love, some people would say love is just another brain function. If this was reported next week, how many of you would stop buying Valentine’s Day cards? Saying something is a brain function is not an insult. The brain is the most interesting object in the universe.”

(Photo: Mike Kaplan in the Neurolab with boot campers Jennifer Drobac and Sita Kotnis, 5 Aug 2009/Tom Heneghan)

For more on the daily lectures, check out Francis X. Shen’s Bloggin’ the Boot Camp blog.

What do you think about what brain science is telling us about the relationship between the brain and religion, morality and behavior?

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