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Q&A
From the March AD 2005
Our Lady of the Rosary
Parish Bulletin
Update:
After last month’s
article on the “the Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science
at Oxford” it may seem that we were picking on that venerable University.
The very day that the Bulletin was printed, the University issued an
announcement that proved our point to the proverbial “T.” Now
that the “string-pullers” have determined torture to be appropriate in the
war to impose their values on the less compliant peoples of the world, Oxford
University has announced a study of
how
religious faith affects experiences such as pain, whether there is a detectable
physical difference in the brain between religious and secular faith.... The
Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind (OXCSOM) will be a multidisciplinary
program of research into the physical basis of beliefs and subjective
experience.... led by Oxford neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield. The
John Templeton Foundation has given $2 million to fund a two-year pilot of the
Centre, with the possibility of long-term funding if it is successful....
One of the first projects to be undertaken will be an investigation into whether
people cope with pain differently depending on their faith, using volunteers who
will have a small amount of chili gel applied to the back of their hand and will
be asked about their response to the sensation, whilst having their brain
activity monitored.[i]
The Oxford description of
the pain sounds fairly tame—tame enough to attract volunteers without
recruiting them from Guantanamo—but a London Times interview with the
Oxford researchers suggests something more sinister:
The pain experiments will be conducted under the
direction of [Dr.] Toby Collins, who.... said that many people in pain turned to
faith for relief. Some looked to religious or secular healing systems.... As
they suffer, the human guinea pigs will be asked to access a belief system,
whether religious or otherwise....“We will simulate a burn sensation to see
how people, through distraction or by accessing different strategies, can
modulate and reduce the levels of pain.”
John Stein, a neuroscientist from Oxford’s
physiology department, said: “Pain has been central to a lot of problems that
religious and other thinkers have concentrated on.” Professor Stein said
that people differed widely in the extent to which they felt pain. “What we
want to do is correlate that with their underlying beliefs.”
The study is considered of vital importance in the
present world climate, given the role of religious fundamentalism in
international terrorism. A better understanding of the physiology of belief, the
conditions that entrench it in the mind and its usefulness in mitigating pain
could be crucial to developing counter-terrorist strategies for the future.[ii]
The Times
article, by Ruth Gledhill, dated 13 January 2005 was carried by a number of news
outlets and included the observation that:
Top neurologists, pharmacologists, anatomists, ethicists and theologians are to
examine the scientific basis of religious belief and whether it is anything more
than a placebo.
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