Review: Experimenting with religion: the new science of belief

This review appeared in Sofia magazine issue 150, ‘Utopia’

Experimenting with religion: the new science of belief, by Revd. Jonathan Jong, Oxford University Press (Oxford 2023) Hbk. 159 pages.

Why do people believe in gods, souls and rituals? The answers are trivial to some: either  god has revealed it, or, this nonsense gets taught to children. People who are interested would hope that these questions can tell us about humanity. Rev. Jonathan Jong doesn’t claim that experimental psychology has all the answers, but he explains how it can get us closer to them.

Revd. Jonathan Jong is an experimental psychologist and an Anglican priest in rural Chichester. He was previously an assistant priest at the very high church St Mary Magdalen in Oxford, where he is still editor of their ‘School of Theology’ site at www.theschooloftheology.org  Jonathan first converted to Christianity as a teenager in Malaysia, spending several years with evangelical Methodists and at a Pentecostal church.

The book presents seven psychology experiments but describes many others in passing. One such highlight is an experiment which gave seminarians either psilocybin or a placebo before their Good Friday service. The ‘shroomed’ seminarians were more like to report transcendent, ineffable experiences – but perhaps surprisingly, were no more likely to report experiencing the presence of God. I wonder if any Sofia readers have their own insights to offer here?

The topics of these experiments are summarised pithily in the chapter titles: Does thinking cause atheism? Are children creationists? Is God like Superman? Do children believe in souls? What does God know? What makes an effective ritual? And, Does death anxiety drive religion?

When I opened the book, I was most looking forward to seeing the experiment results. I am the type of person who normally skips or at best skims the methodology section of a paper.  By the time I closed it, I found I was just as fascinated by how the experiments were run.

Taking one question as an example: Are humans predisposed to think of the world ‘teleologically’ that is, as being designed or created? Working with doctors, I’m aware that knowing the science does not make teleological explanations disappear: ‘the virus wants to hide’, ‘we have gut flora to help our digestion.’

The experimenters tested this in children, using a puppet that asked them questions about objects, people and animals, for example, ‘What is the clock for? What is the mountain’s peak for?’ with children responding either that it was a ‘silly question’, offering an explanation, or that they didn’t know. The experiment has been adapted and repeated: in different countries, with adults, with scientists, asking in different ways and under time pressure.

Children often gave teleological explanations to natural objects (60% of the time) as well as biological parts and human-made items (80%). Adults were a bit better, but still offered animals and natural objects functional explanations 30-40% of the time. Scientists were better again, but even they, under time pressure, would slip up on 30% of answers. People in less religious countries seemed a bit less inclined to teleological answers, but the effect was still there.

As with all the experiments in this book, the results pose their own questions. If humans instinctively see the world as created, is that why we then imagine a creator? Is the experiment right, would we get the same results if we ran it again?

This last question runs throughout this book, because the field of experimental psychology has been undergoing its own crisis of faith: ‘the replicability crisis’. Over the past decade, attempts to replicate the most famous psychological experiments have failed to produce the same results, calling the original findings into question. Jong delves into these problems throughout the book but without leaving the reader discouraged. There is serious work to be done, but we shouldn’t give up on psychological understanding entirely.

According to Jong, it isn’t just the psychologists who have work to do, but all of us. While physicists can tell us about observations and theories about the universe, and psychologists can tell us what they observe about the mind – we can’t ‘outsource’ the work of interpreting these deliverances of science. We all must dabble in philosophy to work out what the science means for our own world view.