Playing God or just unnatural? Religious beliefs and approval of synthetic biology

Abstract

Using evidence from a 2010 survey of 32 European publics, this article argues that belief in God increases disapproval for synthetic biology through two different mechanisms, depending on the strength of the individual’s belief. Among weak believers, belief in God appears to be associated with the increased availability and accessibility of the idea that genetic manipulation interferes with nature. Strong believers, in contrast, appear to also engage in an explicitly theological evaluation of synthetic biology, with opposition to synthetic biology resulting from the perception that the creation of new types of organisms encroaches on a domain of activity (creation) that has traditionally been considered to be a divine prerogative. Overall, our findings suggest that value predispositions can influence public attitudes towards synthetic biology even when individuals engage in explicit deliberation about the technology in question.

Keywords

Europe public attitudes religious beliefs synthetic biology values

If there is a common theme that heralds any new technology that pushes back the boundaries of the possible, it is the accusation that the creators of that technology are ‘playing God’. For the emerging technology of synthetic biology, whose vaunted – and explicit – aim is to synthesize life or to make artificial life, the question of ‘playing God’ has assumed center stage to a greater extent than for previous biotechnologies. Not only does the phrase as applied to synthetic biology provide the basis for headlines (see, for example, Pollack, 2001) or news stories (Gschemeidler and Seiringer, 2011); it has also been the locus of philosophical debates (Dworkin, 2000; Vriend, 2006) and has also received focused attention from expert advisory commissions (Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, 2010) and scientific societies (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2008). Even synthetic biologists themselves recognize the issue, both to dismiss it (Endy, 2008) and to give it serious consideration (Bedau et al., 2009; Serrano, 2007).

Although there remains conceptual confusion about what counts as synthetic biology, a shorthand description of the field as ‘engineering biology’ (Endy, 2005) has found general use, a formulation that has then been extended to the idea of ‘engineering life’ (Chopra and Kamma, 2005; Royal Society of Chemistry, 2008). This approach to describing the technology not only prompts the accusation that scientists are ‘playing God’, but also raises questions about the extent to which the products of synthetic biology are ‘unnatural’. Indeed, this type of language has been used by synthetic biologists themselves, as suggested by the following excerpt from a scientific website on synthetic biology:

There are two types of synthetic biologists. The first group uses unnatural molecules to mimic natural molecules with the goal of creating artificial life. The second group uses natural molecules and assembles them into a system that acts unnaturally. In general, the goal is to solve problems that are not easily understood through analysis and observation alone.¹

Discussions about the potential impact of the arguments that synthetic biologists are ‘playing God’ or that the products of their research are ‘unnatural’ have so far featured little empirical evidence pointing to how these ideas might play out in public debates on emerging technologies. It is this broad question that this article considers, focusing on unpacking the nature of religiosity and the mechanisms through which it impacts evaluations of the emerging technology of synthetic biology.

1. Values and attitudes towards emerging technologies

A large body of work shows that people’s religious beliefs influence their attitudes towards a wide variety of emerging technologies, including both biotechnological applications (Bainbridge, 2003; Costa-Font and Mossialos, 2006; Ho et al., 2008; Nisbet, 2005; Scheitle, 2005) and nanotechnology (Brossard et al., 2009; Scheufele et al., 2008), though some studies have admittedly failed to find a clear link (Vandermoere et al., 2010). This also includes synthetic biology, with a recent study showing that public perceptions of the technology in the USA are influenced by individuals’ religiosity (Kahan et al., n.d.). Much of this work is motivated by a desire to understand the limits of the ‘scientific literacy model’ (Ho et al., 2008), with several of these studies, for example, finding that religious beliefs operate as ‘perceptual filters’ – that is, that religious individuals engage in what Druckman and Bolsen (2010) refer to as motivated reasoning. Specifically, Brossard et al. (2009), Nisbet (2005), and Ho et al. (2008) all find that support for nanotechnology or stem cell research among highly religious individuals is not sensitive to the amount of technology-specific information available to them.

While motivated reasoning is an important dynamic, the mechanisms through which religious beliefs initially lead individuals to oppose emerging technologies are less clear. By and large, scholars have conceived of ‘value predispositions’ as heuristics (Ho et al., 2008, 174; Nisbet, 2005: 94; Scheufele et al., 2008: 91; Vandermoere et al., 2011: 197) that may influence attitudes by triggering negative affective reactions to proposed technologies (Kahan et al., n.d.: 2; Nisbet, 2005: 93; E.M. Peters et al., 2004). This perspective is explicitly framed in terms of the ‘cognitive miser’ model of the public (Fiske and Taylor, 1991), which posits that individuals who lack the motivation or ability to explicitly consider the pros and cons of a specific technology (due to limited cognitive resources) will instead use judgmental shortcuts – such as the affect or availability heuristics (Keller et al., 2006) – to form their opinions.

The fact that values influence people’s attitudes towards emerging technologies need not imply a heuristic mechanism, however. As evidence from focus groups shows, individuals often explicitly refer to concerns that technologies like synthetic biology interfere with ‘God’s creation, natural selection, or what is human’ (Pauwels, 2009: 44). Indeed, most of the work cited above describes in detail the potential areas of conflict between the technologies in question and religious or other values, and some studies note the effect of religious beliefs (Brossard et al., 2009) and related values such as ‘attachment to nature’ (H.P. Peters et al., 2007) on technological attitudes without ascribing their effect to heuristics. This suggests that while the use of religious or moral concerns may not be ‘rational’ from a risk–benefit perspective, at least some individuals who use their value predispositions to form attitudes towards emerging technologies are doing so in the context of explicit deliberation.

In this article, we argue that religious beliefs – specifically, the belief in God – have an impact on the European public’s attitudes towards synthetic biology through both implicit and explicit mechanisms. We outline our theoretical framework in the next section, proposing a set of hypotheses about how belief in God and opinion about synthetic biology should be related. We then test these hypotheses using data from a recent Eurobarometer survey. The article contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it demonstrates the empirical link between belief in God and attitudes towards synthetic biology in a European context, which, to our knowledge, has not been shown to date. Second, it develops a new model describing the impact of religious beliefs on attitudes towards emerging technologies that may prove useful in understanding public perceptions of other controversial areas of science, such as embryonic stem cell research.

2. The value expectancy model of attitudes and the impact of religious beliefs

Political psychologists frequently conceptualize attitudes using the expectancy value model (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975). As Nelson, Oxley et al. (1997: 225) note, this model suggests that attitudes are ‘summary evaluations based on a weighted average of a sample of beliefs about the attitude object’, which is the same basic formulation used by John Zaller in his model of survey response (Zaller, 1992; Zaller and Feldman, 1992). From this perspective, two principal factors determine the extent to which a specific consideration or belief influences an attitude: (1) the ease with which the consideration is retrieved from an individual’s memory (Tulving and Watkins, 1975) – i.e. its accessibility – and (2) the weight that is assigned to that consideration, which is often conceptualized as its perceived ‘relevance’ (Pligt and Eiser, 1984) or ‘importance’ (Anderson and Zalinski, 1991).

Factors that influence the accessibility of a consideration – such as priming (Iyengar, 1990; Iyengar and Kinder, 1987; Nelson, Clawson, et al., 1997) – influence the attitude by increasing the probability that the consideration will appear in the ‘top of the head’ sample of considerations (Zaller, 1992) used to formulate the attitude, and have the strongest effects on individuals who do not engage in explicit deliberation when forming their attitudes, relying instead on a rough average of whatever considerations are accessible at the time.² This reliance on accessible considerations rather than on the entire set of relevant facts about an issue can be considered to be a type of heuristic (see Iyengar and Kinder, 1987; Keller et al., 2006; Miller, 2009, for example), and is likely what many of the scholars cited in the previous section mean when they state that individuals use values as heuristics. Although a wide range of heuristics have been identified (Sniderman et al., 1991), we focus on the accessibility heuristic in this study for the sake of clarity.

While a consideration must be accessible for it to influence an individual’s attitude, however, accessibility is not a sufficient condition because a consideration’s influence also depends on the ‘weight’ that is assigned to it in during the individual’s deliberation, which is usually conceptualized as the ‘relevance’ (Pligt and Eiser, 1984) or ‘importance’ (Anderson and Zalinski, 1991) of the consideration to the issue at hand. While some of the foundational work on framing in political communication (Iyengar, 1990; Iyengar and Kinder, 1987) viewed both priming and framing from an accessibility perspective, subsequent work has argued that these two forms of ‘knowledge activation’ (Price and Tewksbury, 1997; Price et al., 1997) operate through different mechanisms (Nelson, Clawson et al., 1997; Scheufele, 2000). Specifically, frames have an effect on individuals’ attitudes by influencing which considerations are perceived to be applicable (Price et al., 1997) and most relevant to the issue at hand, with inapplicable considerations being largely ignored in elaborating the attitude. Notably, individuals who are motivated and able to engage in explicit deliberation about the issue – a variable that is frequently operationalized using constructs such as ‘political awareness’ (Zaller, 1992) – are most likely to engage in the ‘particularly effortful processing’ (Price et al., 1997, 486) required to discriminate between applicable and inapplicable considerations, and are therefore most likely to be influenced by framing effects.

This basic framework can be applied to understanding the impact of religious beliefs on attitudes towards synthetic biology. Before laying out a model, however, it is important to consider which beliefs are likely to matter most. Given that one of the stated goals of synthetic biology is to create new forms of life, we would generally expect people with a religious worldview to be more likely to view synthetic biology as ethically objectionable than those with a secular worldview. As Kahan et al. (n.d.: 2) put it, ‘[m]ore than any other form of science, synthetic biology highlights the injection of human agency into the creation of particular forms of life’, a prospect that among some people triggers ‘a profound unease, a sense that human beings are interfering with a more fundamental cosmic ordering – or “playing God,” thereby denigrating divine agency’. The concerns expressed by focus group participants in an American context strongly support this perspective (Pauwels, 2009).

In contrast to the majority of studies in this area, which operationalize ‘religiosity’ using frequency of attendance at religious services (e.g. Nisbet, 2005) and self-reports of the general importance of religion in respondents’ lives (e.g. Brossard et al., 2009; Ho et al., 2008) or of their general religiousness (e.g. Costa-Font and Mossialos, 2006), we choose to focus on belief in God, specifically, to test our expectation that religious beliefs and approval for synthetic biology should be linked. We do so because the theological concern about scientists ‘playing God’ flows from a specific belief in a personified God that will be offended by humanity’s efforts to ‘create’ life. Measures that capture general affiliation with organized religion and measures of general religious orientation do not necessarily indicate the content or strength of specific beliefs.³ Belief in God, however, is directly related to the principal theological basis for opposing synthetic biology (a personal God that would resent a usurpation of His prerogatives), and is the most precise measure available in the Eurobarometer dataset. Note, moreover, that the one study that examines the impact of belief in God as well as other measures of religiosity on attitudes towards biotechnology (Scheitle, 2005) finds that belief in God is a better predictor. We should therefore expect to observe the following in our sample of the European public:

Hypothesis 1: Opposition to synthetic biology should be greater among individuals who believe in God than among those who do not believe in God.

While it has a clear theological origin, however, the concern about scientists ‘playing God’ can be interpreted as having a second, more general meaning. This distinction can be thought of as taking two forms, modeled on Bainbridge’s (2003) distinction between ‘literalistic’ and ‘figurative’ religion. According to this framework, literalists consider ‘God to be real in the sense that a chair is concretely real’ (Bainbridge, 2003). Those who ascribe to a figurative view of religion, in contrast, view God as a metaphor that, as Bainbridge (2003) argues, is frequently conflated with other metaphorical personifications such as ‘Mother Nature’. Both of these groups are likely to harbor the unease with the manipulation of existing organisms that Kahan et al. (n.d.: 2) describe, but the unease experienced by figurative believers is likely to result more from a general attachment and positive valuation of ‘the natural’ – a sentiment that has been shown to impact opinion on a wide range of technologies (Boer, 2009; H.P. Peters et al., 2007; Sjoberg, 2000; Vandermoere et al., 2010, 2011, to list just a few studies) – than from a fear of offending God . In short, we can reasonably expect that literalists are more likely to couch their unease in explicitly theological terms than individuals who espouse a figurative view of religion. Moreover, literalists are likely to view moral concerns as more relevant and applicable to their opinions of emerging technologies than those with figurative religious beliefs. As Bainbridge (2003) puts it, literalists are motivated to ensure that their ‘other beliefs must harmonize with the central tenets of [their] faith’.

Overall, then, we can differentiate between two distinct considerations that are likely to occur to individuals who espouse a belief in God when forming an opinion about synthetic biology – namely, that synthetic biology is ‘unnatural’ (a consideration that is likely to appeal to individuals with a figurative image of God, but that is also likely to be shared by many literalist believers as well as those who do not believe in God), and that synthetic biology violates God’s preeminence as the Creator (which is likely to be most relevant to those with a literalist image of God). Returning to the value expectancy model of attitudes, we can conceive of an individual’s attitude towards synthetic biology using the following equation:

(1) A_SynBio = ∑ (v_i * w_i) + (v_U * w_U) + (v_T * w_T), for i = {1 to n-2}

In this equation, the attitude towards synthetic biology (A_SynBio) is the weighted average of ‘n’ considerations, where v represents the valence of a specific consideration (positive or negative) and w is the weight associated with that consideration. v_U – the unnaturalness consideration – and v_T – the theological consideration – may also appear in this set.

The literature cited earlier suggests two ways in which an individual’s belief in God may shape the extent to which v_U and v_T influence A_SynBio. First, it is clear that they cannot influence the attitude if they do not appear in the ‘top-of-the-head’ sample of considerations used to elaborate the attitude, the likelihood of which depends on their accessibility in memory. While accessibility often depends on the communications environment (priming), the chronic accessibility of a specific consideration also depends on individual traits. As Iyengar (1990) puts it, because accessibility depends in part on the recency and frequency of activation of the memory ‘bin’ in which a specific consideration is stored (Wyer and Srull, 1986), ‘“chronic” differences in accessibility may be caused by various personal experiences or motives … [including] cultural values, religious upbringing, or the intensity of particular attitudes’ (Iyengar, 1990, 4; see also Price et al., 1997). This suggests that the explicitly theological consideration (v_T) is likely to be more chronically accessible among individuals who espouse a literalist belief in God (who we refer to as strong believers from now on), because they will tend to access their schema of God more frequently than those who espouse a figurative belief in God (weak believers) and those who do not believe in God (non-believers). Similarly, we would expect the ‘unnaturalness’ consideration to be more chronically accessible among weak believers than among strong believers, since figurative conceptions of God often rely on personifying ‘Nature’. This leads to an observable implication: to the extent that these two beliefs are the principal intervening variables through which belief in God influences approval for synthetic biology, we should expect that if we control directly for the ‘unnaturalness’ consideration, the relationship between belief in God and approval should weaken among weak believers but persist among strong believers, because the theological consideration would not be controlled for.

Hypothesis 2: When the unnaturalness consideration is controlled for, belief in God should be more strongly associated with approval of synthetic biology among strong believers than among weak believers.

Assuming that the two considerations are in fact accessible and appear in the equation, the second factor that determines the extent to which v_U and v_T influence A_SynBio is the perceived applicability of the consideration in question (Price and Tewksbury, 1997; Price et al., 1997), the relative impact of which will vary depending on the extent to which an individual engages in explicit deliberation on the issue. This has two implications for our analysis. First, it is reasonable to expect that strong believers (literalists) will judge the theological objection to synthetic biology to be more applicable to their attitude towards the technology than either weak believers or non-believers. The applicability of the theological consideration will only come into play, however, to the extent that the individual in question is in fact engaging in explicit deliberation, which is most likely among individuals who are motivated and able to engage in deliberation of scientific issues. Taking our cue from Zaller (1992), we measure individuals’ ‘cognitive engagement’ using a variable that measures what we call scientific awareness, capturing the extent to which individuals are interested in and have a background in scientific issues. Individuals with higher levels of awareness should engage in a greater amount of deliberation when elaborating their attitude towards synthetic biology. This leads us to expect the following:

Hypothesis 3: Among strong believers, the negative association between belief in God and approval for synthetic biology should be greatest when scientific awareness is high and weakest when scientific awareness is low.

3. Data and variables

In this section, we use data from a recent Eurobarometer survey (Gaskell et al., 2011; Gaskell et al., 2010) to test the hypotheses presented above. The survey was fielded in February of 2010 in 32 European countries, yielding a total sample of 31,238 respondents. Half of the sample received a questionnaire that included a number of items relating to synthetic biology, which leaves a total of 15,588 respondents for our purposes. Crucially, the introduction to the topic received by respondents notes that ‘[t]he aim of synthetic biology is to construct completely new organisms to make new life forms that are not found in nature’ (Gaskell et al., 2010: 120). Given that the majority of respondents were unfamiliar with the technology, this phrasing is likely to have prompted moral concerns among individuals who believe in God, as described above.⁴

Approval

Our key dependent variable is approval for synthetic biology. It is a five-point ordinal variable based on an item that asked respondents to indicate their general support for synthetic biology, ranging from ‘do not approve under any circumstances’ at 1 to ‘fully approve and do not think that special laws are necessary’ at 5. ‘Don’t know’ responses were coded as a 3.⁵

Belief in God

We use a combination of two items to measure the strength of belief in God, which is the key independent variable in our analysis. The first asks respondents whether they believe in God or ‘some sort of spirit or life force’, or whether they do not believe in either type of entity. Just under 50% of the sample indicated that they believed in God, which is the religious belief we are investigating in this article.⁶ To estimate the strength of this belief, we break this group down into four subgroups, based on a second item that asked respondents to indicate the frequency with which they attended religious services. While this variable on its own is likely not a very good measure of religious beliefs (since the Eurobarometer data suggests that there are a non-trivial number of Europeans who attend religious services regularly despite not believing in God), it should provide a reasonable measure of the strength (literalist vs. figurative) and the likely perceived relevance of religious belief among those who do express a belief in God. Accordingly, we assigned believers into the weakest category if they never attended services, into the second weakest category if they attended services about once a year or less frequently, into the third category if they attended services every quarter or only on special holy days, and into the strongest belief category if they attended services every month or more frequently.⁷

Scientific awareness

The awareness variable is meant to capture individuals’ motivation and ability to think about science and technology issues, which will allow us to test Hypothesis 3. We measured motivation by means of an additive index using seven items that asked respondents how frequently they engaged in four types of activism related to science and technology issues (volunteering for a non-governmental organization (NGO), making donations, taking part in petitions or demonstrations, and attending public meetings) and to report their level of interest in new medical discoveries, environmental problems, and new scientific discoveries. The first four items were measured on a four-point scale ranging from ‘No, never’ (‘don’t know’ responses were folded into this category) to ‘Yes, regularly’. The second set of items was coded on a three-point scale ranging from ‘Not at all interested’ (‘don’t know’ responses were folded into this category) to ‘Very interested,’ but were then rescaled to a 1 to 4 scale. To create the Motivation Index, we added these seven items and rescaled the index to set its minimum at 1, yielding a variable ranging from 1 to 22. To create an Ability Index, we multiplied an additive index of three items – in which respondents were asked to indicate how well informed they felt about environmental problems and medical and scientific discoveries (responses ranged from ‘Poorly informed’ to ‘Very well informed,’ with ‘don’t know’ responses folded into the first category) – and a variable indicating respondent’s level of scientific education.⁸ The rationale behind multiplying the two variables is that if two people receive the same scientific information, those with a higher level of science-related education are more likely to be able to process and retain this new information, leading to them being more informed than the less educated individual that received the same information. The procedure resulted in a variable, Ability Index, which we rescaled to fit a range (1 to 23) roughly equivalent to that for Motivation Index, and which indicates respondents’ overall base of scientific knowledge and their ability to integrate new scientific information. Finally, to create the Scientific Awareness variable, we multiplied Motivation and Ability, rescaled it into a 2 to 507 scale, and, because of the heavily right-skewed distribution of the resulting variable, took the natural logarithm of the product.⁹ This yielded a variable with a roughly symmetric distribution ranging from 0.69 to 6.23.

Unnaturalness consideration

In order to control for the unnaturalness consideration, we created an additive index variable (Bio-Conservatism) using five items that measured respondents’ general attitudes towards genetic manipulation. The first three items measure approval for inserting human genes into animals, human gene therapy, and cognitive enhancement using five-point scales like the one used to measure approval for synthetic biology. These three items were reverse-coded to indicate disapproval of these technological applications. The last two items asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed (using a five-point scale, where ‘Don’t know’ responses were coded as the midpoint) that mixing animal and human genes is ‘unacceptable’ and that genetically modified food is ‘fundamentally unnatural’. These five variables were then combined into an additive index. Our rationale for selecting these variables is that they indicate discomfort with genetic manipulation in multiple domains, and should therefore capture respondents’ generalized aversion to interfering with nature and the likelihood of the unnaturalness consideration appearing in their ‘top of the head’ sample of considerations.¹⁰

Control variables

In addition to the three variables above, we use three sets of control variables shown by previous research to influence support for emerging technologies. On a demographic level, we control for age (Age) and gender (Female). On a cognitive level, we include a dummy variable indicating whether respondents had ever heard of synthetic biology before the survey (Familiarity), and a 0 to 10 scale measuring respondents’ political orientation (Ideology), with higher values indicating more conservative views (‘don’t know’ responses and refusals were coded at the midpoint of the scale). Finally, we also include dummy variables for each country sampled in the regression models reported below.

4. Analysis

As Table 1 indicates, respondents who believe in God show significantly reduced approval for synthetic biology compared to both those who believe in a spirit or life force or those who do not believe in any divine entity (chi-squared = 204.75, p < 0.0005), with 35.5% of those who believe in God approving of synthetic biology while 41.7% of those believing in a life force or spirit and 43.4% of non-believers approved of the technology. At a broad level, then, it appears that belief in God is linked to opposition to synthetic biology, which is consistent with Hypothesis 1. In order to test our three hypotheses in a rigorous manner, we conducted a set of ordered logistic regressions, where approval for synthetic biology is regressed on our disaggregated indicators of belief in God, our control variables, bio-conservatism, and interactions with scientific awareness. Table 2 presents the results. Note that because the sample used is quite large (over 15,000 respondents), we ascribe the greatest significance to effects that are statistically significant at the 0.001 level as a way of minimizing the possibility of making Type I errors. That said, effects at lower levels of significance are reported and some of these are strongly suggestive.

Table 1.

Approval for synthetic biology by religious belief.

	Does not believe	Believes in spirit or life force	Believes in God	Total
Always disapprove	476	785	1,507	2,768
%	15.27	16.9	19.26	17.76
Disapprove, with some exceptions	655	1,109	1,514	3,278
%	21.01	23.87	19.35	21.03
Don’t know	634	813	2,016	3,463
%	20.33	17.5	25.77	22.22
Approve, with strict regulation	1,234	1,816	2,546	5,596
%	39.58	39.09	32.54	35.9
Approve, with no special laws	119	123	241	483
%	3.82	2.65	3.08	3.1
Total	3,118	4,646	7,824	15,588
%	100	100	100	100

Note: Categories of belief were drawn from an item in which respondents were asked: ‘Which of these statements comes closest to your beliefs?’, followed by four response categories: ‘You believe there is a God’, ‘You believe there is some sort of spirit or life force’, ‘You don’t believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force’, and ‘Don’t know’. We folded the latter category into the non-belief category for the purposes of analysis.

Table 2.

Effect of belief in God on approval for synthetic biology.

	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4
Believes in God (Q1)	−0.271***	−0.150	0.010	-0.070
	(−3.34)	(−1.84)	(0.11)	(-0.33)
Believes in God (Q2)	−0.246***	−0.174**	−0.048	-0.357*
	(−3.94)	(−2.75)	(−0.75)	(-1.98)
Believes in God (Q3)	−0.262***	−0.177***	−0.038	-0.369
	(−5.12)	(−3.41)	(−0.70)	(-0.49)
Believes in God (Q4)	−0.496***	−0.357***	−0.130*	-0.171
	(−10.13)	(−7.05)	(−2.51)	(-1.44)
Believes in spirit or life force	−0.122**	−0.078	−0.039	-0.090*
	(−2.86)	(−1.81)	(−0.90)	(-2.08)
Age		−0.007***	−0.006***	-0.006***
		(−8.50)	(−7.06)	(-7.41)
Female		−0.279***	−0.166***	−0.274***
		(−9.39)	(−5.46)	(−9.23)
Heard of synthetic biology		0.615***	0.529***	0.534***
		(15.35)	(13.05)	(12.98)
Political ideology		0.032***	0.024**	0.032***
		(4.15)	(3.00)	(4.20)
Bio−Conservatism			−0.199***
			(−49.61)
Scientific awareness				0.137***
				(6.79)
Awareness × belief (Q1)				−0.013
				(−0.20)
Awareness × belief (Q2)				0.062
				(1.20)
Awareness × belief (Q3)				−0.036
				(−0.94)
Awareness × belief (Q4)				−0.055
				(−1.69)
N	15,588	15,588	15,588	15,588
Pseudo R^2	0.011	0.021	0.080	0.023
Log-likelihood	−22270.0	−22042.6	−20711.5	−22003.2

Note: Ordered logit coefficients. Country dummies and cut-off constants are omitted.

z statistics in parentheses, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. Levels of belief in God are defined based on frequency of attendance at religious services. Q1 includes respondents who never attend services, Q2 those who attend about once a year or less frequently, Q3 those who attend every quarter or only on special holy days, and Q4 those who attend every month or more frequently.

Focusing first on Models 1 and 2 in Table 2, we find that respondents who believe in God are in general less supportive of synthetic biology than non-believers (who are the reference belief group in all four models). In Model 1, the coefficients for the dummy variables indicating each strength quartile of belief in God are all negative and statistically significant at a 0.001 level. When age, gender, familiarity, and political ideology are controlled for (Model 2), coefficients for the three strongest sets of believers remain statistically significant, with the two strongest categories showing p-values of less than 0.001. Finally, it is worth noting that the coefficient magnitudes in both models increase as the strength of belief in God increases. Overall, this provides strong evidence in support of Hypothesis 1.

As predicted by Hypothesis 2, however, this association appears to be reduced for most individuals when Bio-Conservatism is controlled for. In Model 3, the z-statistics associated with the coefficients for the four dummy variables indicating belief in God are all substantially reduced relative to Model 2. The coefficient for the strongest believers (fourth quartile of belief strength), however, is statistically significant at a 0.05 level, and the coefficient magnitude and z-statistic are reduced to a much lesser extent than for the other quartiles. This suggests that when the unnaturalness consideration is controlled for by including Bio-Conservatism in the model, belief in God maintains a significant relationship with synthetic biology opinion only among the strongest believers, who presumably are more likely to have the theological consideration in their sample of considerations. This pattern of results, then, while suggestive, is consistent with Hypothesis 2.

To test Hypothesis 3, we explore the interaction effects between each strength quartile indicating belief in God and Scientific Awareness (Model 4).¹¹ While only one of the belief variables is marginally significant in this model, the significance of interaction effects as a whole cannot generally be inferred from the direction and significance of the interaction’s component terms (Brambor et al., 2006), particularly in limited dependent variable models (Ai and Norton, 2003). In order to determine whether an interaction between belief in God and awareness exists, we follow Brambor et al’s (2006) suggested approach, using the Clarify software package for STATA (King et al., 2000; Tomz et al., 2001) to estimate the predicted effect of each strength quartile of belief in God on approval for synthetic biology for a range of values of awareness, as well as the associated 99.9% confidence intervals (which indicate significance at the 0.001 level). We set continuous control variables at their means and categorical variables at their mode.

Figure 1 shows the key result: the predicted change in the probability of holding a specific attitude towards synthetic biology that is associated with belief in God for the strongest (Q4) level of belief. As predicted by Hypothesis 3, we find that scientific awareness moderates the impact of belief in God on synthetic biology attitudes. While we find a marginally significant negative effect of belief in God on approval at the lowest level of awareness, this effect increases substantially with awareness. Specifically, among individuals with the highest levels of awareness, belief in God is associated with an increase of about 10 percentage points in the probability of never approving of synthetic biology and a decrease of about the same magnitude in the probability of approving of the technology in the context of effective government regulation. This is a substantively significant effect, implying that 1 in 10 Europeans with a strong belief in God and a high degree of scientific awareness can be expected to disapprove of synthetic biology as a result of their religious convictions. The fact that the 99.9% confidence interval for this effect does not include zero, moreover, implies that the effects are statistically significant at the 0.001 level. Given the substantive and statistical significance of these predicted effects, then, they are unlikely to represent Type I errors despite the large sample used in deriving the estimates. This result strongly supports Hypothesis 3, although we do not find similar effects for the other belief quartiles (figures for each quartile can be found in the online appendix), which suggests that the theological objection to synthetic biology is perceived as relevant primarily among the strongest believers (those who have a literalist image of God).

Figure 1.

Predicted effects of belief in God (Q4), full sample.

Finally, in order to test the generalizability and robustness of our findings, we explore the possibility that the prominence of religion in a respondent’s national environment might influence the accessibility and the perceived applicability of theological objections to synthetic biology in that respondent’s consideration set independent of their level of personal belief in God. This could plausibly lead to cross-national differences in the strength of the observed relationship between belief in God and opposition to synthetic biology. To test for this possibility, we ranked the countries in our sample based on the percentage of respondents who expressed a belief in God (see Table A2 in the online appendix at http://pus.sagepub.com), performing a rough median split to classify countries into ‘high’ and ‘low’ belief jurisdictions. We then estimated Model 4 separately for these two subsets (Table A3) and estimated the predicted effects for strong belief in God (Q4) on approval for synthetic biology. As Figures A5 and A6 in the online appendix show, the pattern of results in both subsamples is similar to that shown in Figure 1 for the full sample, which suggests that the overall effects reported in this article are not masking substantial cross-national variation, and that the relationship we have identified between belief in God and opposition to synthetic biology is common to different European publics.

5. Discussion and conclusion

This study contributes to the existing evidence base regarding the dynamics of debates in which synthetic biologists are accused of ‘playing God’. Overall, the results presented above support our model, with a clear finding that belief in God is in fact associated with reduced approval for synthetic biology across a variety of model specifications. Moreover, our results point to the mechanisms through which belief in God influences synthetic biology attitudes. On the one hand, we find that the association between belief in God and support for synthetic biology is attenuated to a greater degree among weak believers than among the strongest believers when bio-conservatism (which we define as the pre-disposition to view genetic manipulation as ‘unnatural’) is controlled for. This is consistent with the proposition that belief in God influences approval for synthetic biology among weak believers primarily by increasing the accessibility of concerns such as the unnaturalness consideration (i.e. it operates through an implicit mechanism). The fact that the association between belief in God and disapproval of synthetic biology persists among strong believers even when bio-conservatism is controlled for, moreover, is consistent with the idea that strong believers (who we assume are more likely to have a literalist interpretation of their beliefs) are more likely to feature a theological consideration in the ‘top of the head’ sample of considerations used to elaborate their attitude towards synthetic biology. Finally, we find that, among strong believers, the influence of belief in God on approval of synthetic biology increases with scientific awareness. This pattern of effects suggests that stronger believers are more likely to view theological considerations as applicable to their attitude towards synthetic biology, and that the effect of religious beliefs on strong believers’ opinions of synthetic biology is primarily a result of conscious deliberation and does not simply reflect the use of values as a heuristic device.

Our findings have two major implications for our understanding of how members of the public use religious values to form their attitudes towards synthetic biology in particular, and emerging technologies in general. First, our findings help to explain the limited utility of the ‘scientific literacy’ (Ho et al., 2008) model. Specifically, we not only argue that individuals tend to use values-based considerations as heuristic devices, but also that even when they do attempt to evaluate all the arguments for and against a given technology, some individuals may nevertheless weight moral objections higher than the potential risks or benefits. Second, our findings suggest that while the impact of religious beliefs may largely be mediated by more proximate beliefs, such as views of nature and optimism about science and technology (Vandermoere et al., 2010), highly religious individuals may use explicitly theological objections to a given technology that are unlikely to be mediated by other values. In this respect, this study has helped to clarify some of the nuances around values-based objections to one emerging technology. Admittedly, theological objections may be less prevalent in most areas of science and technology than in synthetic biology or, for example, embryonic stem cell research, so the generalizability of these findings is unclear, and would be worth exploring in future research. In particular, future research might consider how different characteristics of biotechnological applications (the type of donor organism for genetically modified organisms (GMOs), for example) may influence the role that values play in shaping attitudes towards that application, particularly given a context of associated risk–benefit trade-offs.

At the same time, we already have evidence of policy choices being determined by social-cultural values. The policy landscape in the area of stem cells and specifically on human embryonic stem cells illustrates how a difference in the interpretation of an embryo’s status – whether it is simply ‘a cluster of cells’ or whether it is akin to a human being – is reflected in rather different governance policies world-wide (Isasi and Knoppers, 2006), with the latter interpretation resulting in more restrictive policies. These policies are also generally unanimous in drawing a line on human reproductive cloning. We make this point merely to stress that viewpoints that aim to put limits on what or how science ought to be carried out – depending on how widespread they are – can be manifested in policy choices. Publics that express concerns about unbridled science – whether religiously or philosophically motivated – and who prefer narrower boundaries on scientific exploration are no more ‘irrational’ than those who express optimism and enthusiasm for scientific and technological innovation, in that both groups use implicit and explicit mechanisms of deliberation to form their opinions. Thus, interpretations required for risk–benefit trade-offs may either need to be broadened to accommodate value-based ‘risks,’ or considerations of the criteria along which judgments are classified to be ‘rational’ versus ‘irrational’ may need to be adjusted. For some, the boundaries for policy attention and risk regulation are to be limited to risk–benefit considerations (Garfinkel et al., 2007; Kaebnick, 2009).

The ‘double-sidedness of promethean determinism’ (T. Peters, 2003: 17) –that is, the balance struck between creativity and the hesitation driven by the fear of ‘playing God’ – will always underline revolutions in life science technologies generally and ‘synthetic life’ in particular. The governance challenge may not be in adjudicating the standard risk–benefit trade-offs but in accounting for the broader metrics found in social values.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Agnes Allansdottir and Nick Allum for useful comments on earlier drafts of this article. This research was supported by PhytoMetaSyn, a Genome Canada-funded project for which Dr Einsiedel serves as co-Principal Investigator.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biographies

Nick Dragojlovic is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary, Canada. His research focuses on understanding how cultural worldviews influence public preferences for the regulation and funding of emerging biotechnologies. More broadly, he is interested in how scientists and policymakers can engage in effective communication with stakeholders that do not share their values or worldview.

Edna Einsiedel is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada. Her research investigates public and stakeholder views and deliberations on emerging technologies including biotechnology and genomics, stem cell research, and synthetic biology.

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