Noted philosopher Daniel Dennett recently published a book entitled Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, arguing for the necessity of engaging in the scientific study of religious and spiritual phenomena.

The John Templeton Foundation shares with Dennett the conviction that the scientific study of religious and spiritual phenomena is a wholesome and worthwhile endeavor and has done much in the last decade to promote such research. However, for Dennett the assumption at the outset is that there is no truth-value in religion and that the result of this inquiry will be the disenchantment of religion. The Templeton Foundation’s approach is to assume, indeed, that there is truth and other value to religion. God, by whatever name, exists. Humans can learn a lot more about themselves and also something more about ultimate reality by appropriately studying and interpreting religious traditions with the help of science, including the human sciences.

The Templeton Advanced Research Project (TARP) is one such endeavor. This new $4.6 million initiative managed by the Metanexus Institute challenges prospective researchers to develop new methodologies.

Most people study religion from the inside, as believers committed to a particular tradition. And there is a lot to study — the traditions, authorities, scriptures, languages, interpretations, histories, legal systems, theologies, philosophies, saints and sages, rituals, liturgies, practices, daily life, and one’s own lived experience — all with reference to some concept of the Sacred.

In our global civilization, we are also confronted with the challenge of understanding other peoples’ religions from the outside, as we attempt to appreciate those who are different from us. Studying religion from the outside utilizes the tools of religious studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and history, most obviously, but also new tools from the cognitive neurosciences, linguistics, physiology and health, behavioral genomics, evolutionary psychology, game theory, political science and economics.

Inside out, outside in — there is nothing to fear from either side in this encounter. Much can be gained, so long as we approach the scientific study of religious and spiritual phenomena with a touch of humility and reverence. True science evokes altruistic fidelity toward the phenomena, whether those phenomena be particles, proteins, or people. True science is always about “going native,” as well as maintaining critical distance, not easy things when it comes to the diversity of world faiths and practices.

The scientific study of religion will never capture the core reality behind the phenomena. We are not going to learn anything significant about God with the use of an fMRI or a gene-sequencer. We are not going to capture God in a pill to sell at the pharmacy. What we will learn is something new and useful about human beings.

Most scientific studies of religion focus on specific faith communities and utilize a single social scientific paradigm. What is unique about TARP, and the John Templeton Foundation in general, is the attempt to do broad comparative studies of religion and spirituality using multiple methods spanning disciplines as diverse as economics and the neurosciences.

For TARP, Metanexus began by commissioning 8 field analyses which were downloaded by more than 200,000 scholars in the last year. Then Metanexus assembled a team of 12 distinguished judges and over 60 external peer reviewers to determine which projects would utilize the most innovative methodologies and promise the most significant results. Ultimately, 11 research projects were funded from over 400 qualified proposals, broken down into 3 topical areas with different levels of funding.

Two awards of $1 million each were made on the theme of “Religion, Spirituality, Healing and Health Outcomes.” In one, Brenda Cole at the University of Pittsburgh will lead a three-year study of The Health Effects of Spiritually-focused Meditation for People with Acute Leukemia. “While meditation is often prescribed for stress management,” notes Dr. Cole, “the spiritual dimensions of various practices have not been adequately distinguished. We have an innovative, multifaceted and clinically sound study to probe a variety of secular and spiritual meditation practices.”

The other funded project in this area is led by Michael Boivin at Michigan State University, who will conduct a three-year study of Breast Cancer Disease and Treatment: Modeling the Relationships Among Spiritual and Emotional Well-Being, Quality of Life, Neuropsychological Function and Immunological Resilience.

Research on the theme of “Religion, Spirituality and Human Flourishing” commanded two awards of $1 million each. Petr Janata at the University of California, Davis will lead a three-year study of Music, Spirituality, Religion, and the Human Brain. “This is the first large-scale scientific research project that critically examines what seems to be a universal link between music and spirituality,” said Dr. Janata, who previously conducted studies of auditory object representations in the brains of barn owls and songbirds, along side his studies of music perception in the human brain. “We hope to understand how different types of music facilitate human social and emotional well-being in diverse religious contexts.”

The other funded project in this area is a three-year study of Spiritual Experience, Pro-Social Emotion, and Human Flourishing, led by Dacher Keltner at University of California, Berkeley.

Seven awards varying from $50,000 to $150,000 were made on the theme of “Competitive Dynamics and Cultural Evolution of Religions and God Concepts.”

One such project led by Tom Smith at the National Opinion Research Center will test basic theories and models of religious change through the International Social Survey. “The project will be the most comprehensive review to date of what people believe about God and other transcendental matters across cohorts, nations and time,” said Dr. Smith at the University of Chicago.

Other awardees include:

Pascal Boyer at Washington University, St. Louis, who will conduct a two-year study of Ritual Behavior and the Dynamics of Religious Commitment;
David Sloan Wilson at SUNY Binghamton, and William Scott Green at University of Miami, who will lead a team studying Religious Conceptions of the Afterlife from a Cultural Evolutionary Perspective;
Adam Cohen at Arizona State University, who will consider the differences in “religions of ascent” and “religions of descent” through an innovative survey study involving U.S. and Sri Lankan Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims;
Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Principal Investigator at the University of Texas at Austin, who will lead a two-year study of Faces of God in Latin America;
Michael Graves, Principal Investigator at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who will lead a two-year study of The Ecological Evolutionary Dynamics of Hawaiian Ritual and Social Complexity;
Scott Garrels at the School of Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary and an international team, who will consider René Girard’s mimetic theory of religion along side new insights about the function of “mirror neurons” in the human brain.

Each of these studies is a strategic beginning designed to open new research horizons on complex human phenomena. Religions represent millennia of human experimentation with the Divine. Scientific reexamination — inside out and outside in — of the many small truths and great profundities of these received wisdom traditions and lived spiritual experiences may also transform science and take us all into a better, more humane and creative future.

Links of Interest
For more information please go to:: www.metanexus.net/tarp.

William Grassie is founder and executive director of the Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science and manages the Templeton Advanced Research Project.

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