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In fact, you can argue that religious belief as we now conceptualize it is an entirely modern phenomenon. As the comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out, when the King James Bible was printed in 1611, “to believe” meant something like “to hold dear.” Smith, who died in 2000, once wrote: “The affirmation ‘I believe in God’ used to mean: ‘Given the reality of God as a fact of the universe, I hereby pledge to Him my heart and soul. I committedly opt to live in loyalty to Him. I offer my life to be judged by Him, trusting His mercy.’ Today the statement may be taken by some as meaning: ‘Given the uncertainty as to whether there be a God or not, as a fact of modern life, I announce that my opinion is yes.’ ”

secular Americans often think that the most important thing to understand about religion is why people believe in God, because we think that belief precedes action and explains choice. That’s part of our folk model of the mind: that belief comes first.

that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches. I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold.

If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church. It is understandably hard for secular observers to sidestep the problem of belief. But it is worth appreciating that in belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place.

then there is the mishandling of time. The physicist Lee Smolin's recent book, Time Reborn, links the crisis in physics with its failure to acknowledge the fundamental reality of time. Physics is predisposed to lose time because its mathematical gaze freezes change. Tensed time, the difference between a remembered or regretted past and an anticipated or feared future, is particularly elusive. This worried Einstein: in a famous conversation, he mourned the fact that the present tense, "now", lay "just outside of the realm of science".

Recent attempts to explain how the universe came out of nothing, which rely on questionable notions such as spontaneous fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, the notion of gravity as negative energy, and the inexplicable free gift of the laws of nature waiting in the wings for the moment of creation, reveal conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication. They demonstrate the urgent need for a radical re-examination of the invisible frameworks within which scientific investigations are conducted.

we should reflect on how a scientific image of the world that relies on up to 10 dimensions of space and rests on ideas, such as fundamental particles, that have neither identity nor location, connects with our everyday experience. This should open up larger questions, such as the extent to which mathematical portraits capture the reality of our world – and what we mean by "reality".

Back in the 1980s, Judith Smetana and colleagues discovered that very young kids could discriminate between genuinely moral principles and mere social conventions. First, the researchers asked about everyday rules—a rule that you can't be mean to other children, for instance, or that you have to hang up your clothes. The children said that, of course, breaking the rules was wrong. But then the researchers asked another question: What would you think if teachers and parents changed the rules to say that being mean and dropping clothes were OK? Children as young as 2 said that, in that case, it would be OK to drop your clothes, but not to be mean. No matter what the authorities decreed, hurting others, even just hurting their feelings, was always wrong. It's a strikingly robust result—true for children from Brazil to Korea.

in the new study, Dr. Rhodes asked similar moral questions about the Zazes and Flurps. The 4-year-olds said it would always be wrong for Zazes to hurt the feelings of others in their group. But if teachers decided that Zazes could hurt Flurps' feelings, then it would be OK to do so. Intrinsic moral obligations only extended to members of their own group.

The 4-year-olds demonstrate the deep roots of an ethical tension that has divided philosophers for centuries. We feel that our moral principles should be universal, but we simultaneously feel that there is something special about our obligations to our own group, whether it's a family, clan or country.

you don't have to be taught to prefer your own group—you can pick that up fine by yourself. But we do have to teach our children how to widen the moral circle, and to extend their natural compassion and care even to the Flurps.

a human life is not just a means to produce outcomes, it is an end in itself. When we evaluate our friends, we don’t just measure the consequences of their lives. We measure who they intrinsically are. We don’t merely want to know if they have done good. We want to know if they are good.

We live in a relentlessly commercial culture, so it’s natural that many people would organize their lives in utilitarian and consequentialist terms. But it’s possible to get carried away with this kind of thinking — to have logic but no wisdom

That the use of standard algorithms isn’t merely mechanical is not by itself a reason to teach them. It is important to teach them because, as we already noted, they are also the most elegant and powerful methods for specific operations. This means that they are our best representations of connections among mathematical concepts. Math instruction that does not teach both that these algorithms work and why they do is denying students insight into the very discipline it is supposed to be about.

There is a moral here for progressive education that reaches beyond the case of math. Even if we sympathize with progressivists in wanting schools to foster independence of mind, we shouldn’t assume that it is obvious how best to do this. Original thought ranges over many different domains, and it imposes divergent demands as it does so. Just as there is good reason to believe that in biology and history such thought requires significant factual knowledge, there is good reason to believe that in mathematics it requires understanding of and facility with the standard algorithms.

there is also good reason to believe that when we examine further areas of discourse we will come across yet further complexities. The upshot is that it would be naïve to assume that we can somehow promote original thinking in specific areas simply by calling for subject-related creative reasoning

You're here because you're smart, but you're smart because you're fortunate.

The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.

Whatever life may have in store for you, each of you has a grand, lifelong project, and that is the development of yourself as a human being.

Those most worthy of admiration are those who have made the best use of their advantages or, alternatively, coped most courageously with their adversities.

Speaking as somebody who has been happily married for 35 years, I can't imagine any choice more consequential for a lifelong journey than the choice of a traveling companion. 

that memory is not a video recorder [but that] it’s a constructive activity that is in many ways accurate but prone to interesting errors and distortions. It’s the constructive side of memory that is most relevant to historians.

Is it the case then that our memories constantly change every time we access them?

That certainly can happen depending on how you recount a memory. What you emphasize. What you exaggerate. What you don’t talk about. All of those things will shape and sculpt the memory for future use. Certainly the potential is there.

Research on memory shows that the more distant in time the event, the more prone to inaccuracy the memory. There are several experiments when subjects recorded impressions of an event soon afterward, then a year later and then a few years later, and the memory changed.Yes. It’s not that the information is lost but, as the memory weakens, you become more prone to incorporating other kinds of information or mixing up elements of other events. This has been seen, for example, in the study of flashbulb memories. Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Where were you when you heard about 9/11?

Isn’t there a tendency to add details or information that may make the story more convincing or interesting later?Yes. That’s more a social function of memory. It may be that you draw on your general knowledge and probable information from your memory in a social context where there may be social demands that lead you distort the memory.

What are the different memory systems?

What is the difference between working memory and permanent memory?Working memory is really a temporary memory buffer where you hold onto information, manipulate information, use it, and it’s partly a gateway to long-term memory and also a buffer that you use when you’re retrieving information from long-term memory and that information temporarily resides in working memory, so to speak.

Your discussion of the testimony of White House Counsel John Dean about Watergate is illuminating. There was a perception that Dean had a photographic memory and he testified in rich detail about events. Yet later studies of White House tape recordings revealed that he was often inaccurate.

He was perceived because of all the detail with which he reported events and the great confidence to be something analogous to a human tape recorder. Yet there was interesting work done by psychologist Ulric Neisser who went back and analyzed what Dean said at the hearings as compared to available information on the White House taping system and basically found many and significant discrepancies between what Dean remembered and what was actually said. He usually had the gist and the meaning and overall significance right, but the exact details were often quite different in his memory than what actually was said.

That seems to get into the area of false memories and how they present problems in the legal system.We know from DNA exonerations of people wrongfully convicted of crimes that a large majority of those cases -- one of the more recent estimates is that in the first 250 cases of 2011 DNA exonerations, roughly 70 to 75 percent of those individuals were convicted on the basis of faulty eyewitness memory.

One of the interesting recent lines of research that my lab has been involved in over the past few years has been looking at similarities between what goes on between the brain and mind when we remember past events on the one hand and imagine events that might occur in the future or might have occurred in the past. What we have found, particularly with brain scanning studies, is that you get very similar brain networks coming online when you remember past events and imagine future events, for example. Many of the same brain regions or network of structures come online, and this has helped us understand more why, for example, imagining events that might have occurred can be so harmful to memory accuracy because when you imagine, you’re recruiting many of the same brain regions as accessed when you actually remember. So it’s not surprising that some of these imagined events can actually turn into false memories under the right circumstances.

One reasonably well accepted distinction involves episodic memory, the memory for personal experience; semantic memory, the memory for general knowledge; and procedural memory, the memory for skills and unconscious forms of memory.Those are three of the major kinds of memory and they all have different neural substrates.

One of the points from that Ross Perot study is that his supporters often misremembered what they felt like at the time he reported he had dropped out of the race. The nature of that misremembering depended on their state at the time they were remembering and what decisions they had made about Perot in the interim affected how they reconstructed their earlier memories.Again, that makes nicely the point that our current emotions and current appraisals of a situation can feed back into our reconstruction of the past and sometimes lead us to distort our memories so that they better support our current emotions and our current selves. We’re often using memories to justify what we currently know, believe and feel.

memory doesn’t work like a video camera or tape recorder.That is the main point. Our latest thinking on this is the idea that one of the major functions of memory is to support our ability to plan for the future, to imagine the future, and to use our past experiences in a flexible way to simulate different outcomes of events.

flexibility of memory is something that makes it useful to support this very important ability to run simulations of future events. But that very flexibility might be something that contributes to some of the memory distortion we talked about. That has been prominent in the last few years in my thinking about the constructive nature of memory.

The historian Daniel Aaron told his students “we remember what’s important.” What do you think of that comment?I think that generally holds true. Certainly, again, more important memories tend to be more significant with more emotional arousal and may elicit “deeper processing”, as we call it in cognitive psychology

They were right about control but wrong about the controllers. Our Internet handlers, not government, are using operant conditioning to modify our behavior today.

we now know how to design cue, activity, and reward systems to more effectively leverage our brain chemistry and program human behavior.

The beauty of the Internet is that by combining big data, behavioral targeting, wearable and mobile devices, and GPS, application developers can design more effective operant conditioning environments and keep us in virtual Skinner boxes as long as we have a smart phone in our pockets.

Operant conditioning techniques will and are currently being used to program the behavior of susceptible Internet users -- young men who play MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) for forty hours a week, women who commit hours to social networks, shoppers seeking the thrill of a deal, and poker players.

As smart devices become integrated into our lives, retailers who will know where we are standing in stores and fast food restaurants and bars will find ways to provide us with cues to trigger behaviors.

The real question is how many hundreds of millions of us will become susceptible to what I believe will prove to be history's most potent marketing techniques.

This suggests that we imagine a complex reality in which things might be true — materially, spiritually, psychologically

Westerners, by contrast, not only tolerate fantasy play but actively encourage it, for adults as well as for children. We are novel readers, movie watchers and game players.

“Inventive pretend,” in which children pretend the fantastic or impossible (enchanted princesses, dragon hunters) “is rarely — if ever — observed in non-industrialized or traditional cultures,”

Science leads us to draw a sharp line between what is real and what is unreal. At the same time, we live in an age in which we are exquisitely aware that there are many theories, both religious and scientific, to explain the world, and many ways to be human.

Probably fiction does for us what the vision of Aslan did for Bob: it helps us to learn what we find emotionally true in the face of irreconcilable contradictions.

fiction teaches us how to think about what we take to be true. In the cacophony of an information-soaked age, we need it.

The history of Europe since the 18th century has been the story of successive attempts to find alternatives to God as an object of worship, among them the nation state, race and the Communist Manifesto. After this cost humanity two world wars, a Cold War and a hundred million lives, we have turned to more pacific forms of idolatry, among them the market, the liberal democratic state and the consumer society,

This is what a society built on materialism, individualism and moral relativism looks like. It maximises personal freedom but at a cost.

This freedom, energising and exciting as it is, is also profoundly disintegrative, making it very difficult for individuals to find any stable communal support, very difficult for any community to count on the responsible participation of its individual members. It opens solitary men and women to the impact of a lowest common denominator, commercial culture.’

In one respect the new atheists are right. The threat to western freedom in the 21st century is not from fascism or communism but from a religious fundamentalism combining hatred of the other, the pursuit of power and contempt for human rights.

But the idea that this can be defeated by individualism and relativism is naive almost beyond belief. Humanity has been here before.

The barbarians win. They always do.

The new barbarians are the fundamentalists who seek to impose a single truth on a plural world. Though many of them claim to be religious, they are actually devotees of the will to power. Defeating them will take the strongest possible defence of freedom, and strong societies are always moral societies

That does not mean that they need be religious. It is just that, in the words of historian Will Durant, ‘There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.’

I have not yet found a secular ethic capable of sustaining in the long run a society of strong communities and families on the one hand, altruism, virtue, self-restraint, honour, obligation and trust on the other

A century after a civilisation loses its soul it loses its freedom also. That should concern all of us, believers and non-believers alike.

People with heart failure-related difficulties could monitor blood flow and body temperature; those with central nervous system issues, including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, could take the pills to monitor vital signs in real time.

Future generations of these pills could even be convenience tools.

Once that pill is in your body, you could pick up your smartphone and not have to type in a password. Instead, you are the password. Sit in the car and it will start. Touch the handle to your home door and it will automatically unlock. “Essentially, your entire body becomes your authentication token,

“The wonderful is that there are a great number of things you want to know about yourself on a continual basis, especially if you’re diabetic or suffer from another disease. The terrible is that health insurance companies could know about the inner workings of your body.”

And the implications of a tiny computer inside your body being hacked? Let’s say they are troubling.

After it has done its job, flowing down around the stomach and through the intestinal tract, what happens next?“It passes naturally through the body in about 24 hours,” Ms. Carbonelli said, but since each pill costs $46, “some people choose to recover and recycle it.”