Not strictly on social sciences, Stijn Ruiter discusses The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Especially the origin of (human) morality caught his interest. Dawkins quotes brain researcher Hauser, who “does statistical surveys and psychological experiments, using questionnaires on the Internet, for example, to investigate the moral sense of real people […] the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them.” That’s interesting – isn’t it – doing statistical investigations to morality? The way people responded to the moral tests given, did not correlate with their religion or religious beliefs. Dawkins builds upon this finding, by arguing that people do not require the existence of a God to be or become good: if the human body can do it for itself, no external force is required.

This line of reasoning reminded me of a post I wrote a while ago, about a Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel who wrote a book about near death experiences. This book was based on findings he published a few years earlier in the Lancet. In that publication, the occurrence of near death experiences during cardiac arrest is cross-tabulated with several variables, such as used medication, but more interesting also with the patients’ religion. Since it was shown that these variables did not relate to the occurrence of near death experiences, the article rejects many existing theories about the experience of an afterlife. Very interesting, but in the book this finding is extended to argue that since the body cannot sustain consciousness during cardiac arrest, the consciousness apparently exists independent of the body. In that, the line of reasoning is quite the opposite of the from Dawkins: since the human body cannot do it, it must lie outside the human. In my contribution I argue that these findings are quite likely to be due to lack of measurement accuracy.

Finally, a warm welcome to a new participant of this blog carnival. Bram Hengeveld discusses (in Dutch) quite some literature from a behavioristic school of research, which he elegantly applies to his own discipline: geriatric nursing. The behavioristic study is basically a replication of the classic Milgram experiments (the one in which participants were stressed to obey authority to administer electrical shocks to others, despite their (seeming) objections). Bram applies the findings from these kind of studies to his nursing profession. Interestingly, he does not focus on the patients (which probably could initiate some more posts), but on the nurses themselves. Most people working in health care, according to Bram, are not satisfied by the conditions under which they work and how these dictate (read: restrict) the level of care they can provide. However, as the experiments showed, in certain circumstances people readily seem to accept their situation and ‘go along’.

That’s it for today’s edition. I hope you’ll enjoy the posts gathered here, and please keep the new posts coming! Next edition will be on March 3rd.