Author: Tom Rees

It’s a truism that conflicts often flare up around religious fault lines. The Balkans, Israel/Palestine, and Northern Ireland are just a few of the best known in the world today, but there are many more. However, it’s often hard to say whether religion is actually responsible for inflaming or even causing the conflicts or whether …

Intelligence is a bit of a slippery eel—it’s pretty tough to get it pinned down precisely. And yet, cognitive scientists do think there is something they call “general intelligence,” which describes an individual’s ability to perform well on a broad range of different kinds of intelligence tests. Put simply, someone who does well on one …

The putative link between religion and happiness is fiercely contested. Richard Dawkins is on record as calling it “dangerous nonsense,” while Christopher Hitchens opines that religion does “not make its adherents happy.” And yet if you take a broad cross section of Americans and ask them if they are satisfied with their lives, you’ll find …

The typical American really does not like atheists—and is not afraid to say so. According to a Gallup poll in June of this year, only 49 percent of Americans would vote for an atheist for president. Atheists are at the bottom of the pile, below gays and Mormons, and so it’s hardly surprising that few …

Ten years ago, sociologist Robert Putnam wrote a book that had the rare distinction—for a book by a sociologist—of causing shock waves in the mainstream media. In the book, Bowling Alone, he described how all the little social interactions that define a community—meeting with friends, knowing our neighbors, belonging to active organizations, and discussing local …

Let me introduce you to Mr. Smart and Heroman. Mr. Smart is really, really clever—so clever that he knows everything, like what’s inside a closed box. Heroman is not so smart, but he does have a special power: Heroman has X-ray vision—he can see inside the closed box. Mr. Smart and Heroman played a starring …

If a pollster asked how much you give to charity, what would you say? Some pretty exhaustive analyses from Arthur Brooks (a professor of business and government policy at Syracuse University) suggest that if you’re nonreligious, the figure you’ll report to the pollster will likely be smaller, on average, than the numbers claimed by the …

What happens to the soul when the brain is split in half? Well, if you define the soul as a person’s essential personality, then science can give an answer. Remarkably, patients whose brain hemispheres have been surgically separated act as though they have two separate consciousnesses residing in the same body. What’s more, it seems …

In February, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a report showing that although American youth have lost the church-going habits of their parents, they retain strong religious beliefs. In other words, they believe in God but don’t belong to a church—a pattern long associated with European society. Meanwhile in Europe, we’ve learned …