A New Yorker Cartoon
December's Christmas edition of The New Yorker, with the silhouette of Santa and his reindeer scampering under the tracks of an elevated train on the cover, included one of those cartoons for which that magazine is famous. Many New Yorker cartoons are not laugh-out-loud funny as much as delightful in ways that are thought-provoking. The cartoon in question pictures three bearded men, all of whom are dressed in attire that we associate with biblical scenes. The fellow in the middle has a halo above his head and has lifted his hand in the direction of the fellow on the left. That fellow has just tossed his crutches aside and appears to be dancing with delight. The humor arises from the third fellow's comment to the halo-bedecked holy man: "Yeah, but good luck getting it peer-reviewed."
That's not a bad way to capture some of the important cognitive differences between religion and science. Probably the most obvious and most celebrated way that science and religion differ here concerns their responses to apparently miraculous events. At least with regard to religion, the underlying forms of cognition at stake, because they are so common, are less obvious and less celebrated.
The Non-Miracles of Modern Science
Loose talk about "the miracles of modern science" obscures the fact that miracles are precisely the kind of free pass that scientific inquiry never allows. As the holy man's friend hints, science's take on such events is demanding. Peer-review is only one of many scientific practices aimed at rendering as candidates for critical scrutiny every claim, every procedure, every experiment, every measurement, every finding, and every analysis of every scrap of evidence available. Moreover, science constantly presses for more evidence and prizes its replicability. Scientific proposals and research about the universe and its contents must be available, either sooner or later, for public inspection. Some, including Copernicus, did not publish their crucial works during their lifetimes, but it was only the publication of those works that secured their positions in the history of science.
Much of the cognitive processing that science requires, especially in this critical mode, involves careful, conscious reflection. Scientists deploy all sorts of abstract, radically counter-intuitive notions when articulating their hypotheses. Scientific arguments routinely involve sophisticated forms of inference (logical, mathematical, probabilistic, etc.) that are hard to learn and that require years of education to master.
Why Did All of those People Go to Conyers, Georgia?
Miracles enhance religion's appeal. Religious stories are filled with miracles. Joshua circled Jericho and those walls "came a tumblin' down." Both Moses and the Buddha parted the waters, and Jesus walked on them. Whether Muhammad performed any miracles is a point of controversy amongst Muslims, but miracles abound in the histories of the Muslim saints just as they do in the histories of the Christian and Buddhist saints.
Such events are not confined to the distant past. The Virgin Mary regularly appeared on the thirteenth of each month for a few years in the 1990s in Conyers, Georgia, occasioning a variety of miracles from healings to setting the sun spinning in place. (That the sun does, in fact, spin on it axis was, of course, another matter.) One of her visits coincided with Atlanta's snowstorm of the century. With a foot of snow falling, tens of thousands of people were stranded in buses in and around Conyers for a couple of days.
Why did crowds, sometimes estimated at a quarter million, repeatedly flock to a quiet little town outside of Atlanta? One of the reasons is that what was supposedly happening is easy for human minds to understand. A beneficent agent with special powers was periodically showing up and doing things that benefitted those present. None of this requires any conscious reflection or deliberation. All of this, save, perhaps, some of her special powers, accords with the way that human beings intuitively understand the events that they find significant. The ideas of popular religion rely overwhelmingly on intuitive capacities, introducing but minor variations of the sort employed in folk tales, fiction, and fantasy and in comics, cartoons, and commercials. Developmental psychologists have produced evidence that in the first two years of life, infants and toddlers ascertain that we live in a world of agents and that those agents do things on the basis of their beliefs and desires. This is the framework by means of which we make sense of our world, our stories, and our selves.
The cognitive processing involved in religious accounts of miracles is largely unconscious, intuitive, and automatic. Dealing with religious beliefs and actions requires no fancy inferential capacities. Intuitively available, default assumptions about the workings of agents' minds that enable us to negotiate on the streets as drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians are every bit as suitable for our negotiations with the rulers of the universe.