Science and Religious Conflict

The past decade has seen an explosion in empirical work on moral reasoning. We are coming to understand how people's moral judgments are shaped by interactions with others in their society. There are good reasons for thinking that people's moral judgements are mostly intuitive (recent empirical work by Jonathan Haidt and his collaborators supports this view) and that people's intuitions are powerfully shaped by the institutions around them, including religious institutions. There is also evidence that deeply religious societies may conceive of morality in ways that more secular societies find difficult to understand, making the process of overcoming moral differences very challenging.

We will investigate this recent work, in cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary biology and social psychology to try to understand the behaviour of people involved in disagreements about religious matters, including disagreements between distinct religious groups, disagreements within particular religious groups and disagreements between religious groups and a broader society.

We will try to understand whether moral differences reflect religious disagreements, or whether they are independent of them. Our aim is to help develop policies that can enable religious disagreements to be resolved before conflicts are generated. In order to achieve this goal we need to understand how religious perspectives give rise to moral views that lead to conflicts and how there might be scope to resolve those conflicts while allowing religious differences to be tolerated.