Why We Believe in God(s) - Andy Thomson - Atheist Book Read online

  My aim is to have the reader quickly up to speed. Within the brief time it takes for you to read this slim volume, you should be able to grasp how the mind and brain work to generate and sustain religious belief. (And if you have questions, I welcome your correspondence.)

  Finish the book. Refer to it often. Give it to a friend. Donate it to a library or school. We now know why and how our minds manufacture and spread beliefs in god(s), and new research continues to add on to what we know. This knowledge can free us. Anything we can do, no matter how small, to loosen fundamentalist religion’s grasp on humanity strikes a blow for civilization and boosts the chances for a truly global civil society—and perhaps even for our species’ long-term survival. If you’re religious, and you’ve picked up this book, it’s probably for a reason. So read on.

  Acknowledgments

  Richard Dawkins deserves special thanks for his kind foreword to this book, for his work, and for giving me the opportunity to serve as a trustee with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Knowing him and working with his foundation have been an immeasurable privilege. A portion of the royalties from the sale of this book are assigned to the foundation. If you purchased this book, you made a donation to the foundation. Thank you.

  I will always be deeply grateful to Robin Elisabeth Cornwell, the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. She has been a great friend and colleague in this work. She gave earlier versions of this book careful scrutiny and assistance and provided me with unparalleled opportunities to present my ideas to audiences around the country.

  My fellow trustees at the Foundation, Greg Langer and Todd Stiefel, reviewed earlier versions of the manuscript and have been great supporters of this endeavor.

  Our publisher, Kurt Volkan, deserves high praise for his enthusiasm from the first moments of our collaboration and his wise editing and guidance throughout the process.

  Willis Spaulding opened the doors for me to evolutionary psychology with his gift of Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal. His son Tristan gave the book’s first draft an invaluable critique.

  Scott Atran, Justin Barrett, Jesse Bering, Paul Bloom, Pascal Boyer, Stewart Guthrie, Lee Kirkpatrick, and Richard Sosis stand out among the researchers who have discerned the cognitive architecture of religion.

  Paul Andrews, Martin Brüne, David Buss, Joe Carroll, Leda Cosmides, Martin Daly, Robin Dunbar, Josh Duntley, Anne Eisen, A. J. Figueredo, Helen Fisher, Russ Gardner, Edward Hagen, Sarah Hrdy, Owen Jones, Rob Kurzban, Geoffrey Miller, Randy Nesse, Craig Palmer, Steven Pinker, John Richer, Nancy Segal, Todd Shackelford, Wulf Schiefenhovel, Frank Sulloway, Randy Thornhill, John Tooby, Paul Watson, Carol and Glenn Weisfeld, Andreas Wilke, and all those involved in evolutionary psychology and human ethology have enriched my thinking beyond measure through their writings and my conversations with them each year at the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society and the biannual meetings of the International Society for Human Ethology. I miss Linda Mealey, John Pearce, and Margo Wilson, who warmly welcomed a neophyte and are no longer with us.

  Although he will disagree with me on some of the views in this book, I am most grateful to my University of Virginia colleague Jonathan Haidt, who guided my thinking on the psychology of morality.

  Many of my psychiatrist friends and colleagues have helped with articles or by challenging my thinking on religion, especially Salman Akhtar, Ira Brenner, and Bruce Greyson. Salman and the Margaret Mahler Foundation invited me to present at the annual Mahler Symposium in Philadelphia and the chapter in the volume of those papers is the first time my attempt at synthesis of the by-product theory of religion saw print. My mentor Vamýk Volkan gave me an opportunity to work at his unique center at the University of Virginia, work that took me to traumatized and conflict-ridden societies throughout the world. He also coedited a volume on terrorism that included my first article with my formulation of suicide terrorism.

  Hawes Spencer, editor of The Hook, in Charlottesville, Virginia, published my article on suicide terrorism for a general audience. The piece, which Clare Aukofer and Rosalind Warfield-Brown had polished, generated controversy due to the ideas on religion also found in this book.

  Jim Simmonds supplied me with crucial books and articles. Miles Townsend questions everything, thank god(s). Russ Federman, the senior author on a book I wrote with him for young adults with bipolar illness, gave me the confidence to do this book. June Cleveland, my irreplaceable forensic secretary, typed the first draft of this book.

  William “Bill” Ober, my medical school classmate, has been a biology textbook and medical illustrator extraordinaire since I have known him. His drawings will help the reader see how religion originates in our brains.

  Richard Potts, the director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, reviewed the book’s summary of human evolution. If you have not yet visited the museum’s magnificent Hall of Human Origins, do so soon.

  Michael Persinger kindly checked my summary of his brilliant work with the “God Helmet.”

  Amanda Metskas and August Brunsman gave the final draft a rich and useful critique.

  American Atheists, Atheist Alliance International, Virginia Atheists and Agnostics, New York City Atheists, Atheists United of Los Angeles, Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia, and the Secular Student Alliance at George Washington University, George Mason University, and Carnegie Mellon University have all heard talks with this material. I so appreciate the opportunities and their questions and suggestions.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Four Horsemen—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—hold a special place in my heart for their writings, their debates with believers, and their fierce courage when they give religion and its apologists no diplomatic free pass.

  This work has been a labor of love, love for the science and admiration for the scientists who map the mind’s religion-making mechanisms. If I have made their ideas shine for you, thank them. Where there are errors, take me to task.

  why we believe in god(s)

  Our Propensity to Believe

  It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. . . . It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

  —Charles Darwin

  There are those who say that evolution conflicts with faith, or that the natural wonders of evolution were kick-started by some sort of sentient, omniscient being. Yet if an all-powerful, all-seeing god does exist, he designed into the creation and evolution of man something powerful: the propensity to believe in a god.

  Throughout recorded history, from the ancient Egyptians to the Aztecs to the Romans and beyond—Polytheist, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Pagan, Satanist, Scientologist—all known cultures have revolved around some concept of at least one god and/or central mystical figure, with or without a corresponding supernatural world. Why? Why is religion an apparently universal feature of humans and the cultures we create?

  We are beginning to understand. Over the past two decades there has been a revolution in psychology and the cognitive neurosciences. Out of it has come an evolutionary explanation of why human minds generate religious belief, why we generate specific types of beliefs, and why our minds are prone to accept and spread them.

  We now have robust theories with empirical evidence, including evidence from imaging studies—pictures of the brain itself—that supports these explanations. The pieces are in place; we can now look to science for a comprehensive understanding of why human minds produce and accept religious ideas and why humans will alter their behavior for, die for, and kill for these ideas.

  Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection remains one of the most important ideas that ever occurred to a human mind, and the evidence proves him right. Natural selection is the sole workable scientific explanation for the variety and design of all life—plant, animal, and every other form�
�on this earth. It is also the only workable explanation for the design and function of the human mind, which is the real birthplace of gods.

  Look around. We are all the same species, Homo sapiens. Yet we come in all shapes and sizes and with varying capacities. But for all the variation, many traits are heritable. We tend to resemble our parents and close kin, sharing strengths and weaknesses with those ancestors who came before. We are all descendents of success.

  The term “survival of the fittest” is often misunderstood. In the Darwinian sense, fitness is the ability to adapt, to survive, and to reproductively thrive. The struggle for survival winnows out organisms lacking that ability.

  Of course, Darwin did not have the advantage of knowing precisely how traits passed from one generation to the next. That had to wait until 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick unraveled the structure of DNA, and in so doing instantly saw its possible copying mechanism and identified the means of inheritance.

  Combining Darwin with Watson and Crick, natural selection with genetics, creates the modern Darwinian synthesis. To survive, we adapt over evolutionary time, just as Darwin’s Galapagos creatures adapted to their unique environments. Nowhere else do iguanas live in the ocean, the obvious solution to the problem of finding food and surviving on a tiny island. Even from island to island, each with its own isolated ecosystem, creatures in the Galapagos faced slightly different problems and solved them differently. They adapted. But more importantly, they passed those adaptations on.

  Every organism, including the human one, is an integrated collection of adaptations—problem-solving devices—shaped by natural selection over the vast stretches of evolutionary time. Each adaptation promotes in some specific way the survival of the genes that directed the construction of those adaptations.

  At every level, from molecules to minds, we see Darwinian natural selection at work.

  Look at yourself. To survive, you need oxygen. As a developing organism, you needed to evolve a way to efficiently extract the oxygen from the air and distribute it throughout your body.

  The structure of your heart solves the survival problem of pumping blood. The protein hemoglobin solves the problem of transporting oxygen to our brain and other organs. The oxygen in the hemoglobin pumped by the heart comes from lungs that solve the problem of extracting oxygen from the air. And so on. We simply call that whole process “breathing.”

  This modern synthesis applies also to the human mind and the human brain. The brain is an organ, and as Harvard psychologist and researcher Steven Pinker notes, the mind is what the brain does. And the brain, like every other piece of living tissue, is an elegantly integrated collection of devices designed through natural selection to solve specific problems of survival over vast stretches of evolutionary time. These adaptations, including social adaptations that helped us survive in small groups, evolved within the brain to promote in some way the continuation of the genes that directed their construction.

  When you look at a face, the image on your retina actually is upside down and two dimensional. Your brain converts that image into an upright three-dimensional face using a myriad of visual adaptations: color detectors, motion detectors, shape detectors, edge detectors—all working symbiotically, silently, and seamlessly.

  Our ancestors evolved a myriad of equally complex social adaptations. When you see that face, you also make abstract judgments about sex, age, attractiveness, status, emotional state, personality, and the contents of that individual’s unseen mind, including intentions, beliefs, and desires. These judgment-forming adaptations are largely outside of awareness, many forever unconscious. Your snap judgments are millions of years in the making.

  The mind/brain is relentlessly complex. Consider the Apollo spacecraft, a packed array of engineering devices, each dedicated to analyzing a constant stream of information and solving a particular problem, all while the astronauts are consciously aware of only a select few. We work the same way. Consider all of the things you are conscious of; they are a very small part of an entire system, the tip of the iceberg of what goes on in your mind.

  This is important to understand because religion, while not an adaptation in itself, derives from the same mind-brain social adaptations that we use to navigate the sea of people who surround us. These adaptations formed to solve specific social and interpersonal problems as humanity evolved. Almost incidentally, but no less powerfully, they come together to construct the foundation of every religious idea, belief, and ritual. Religious beliefs are basic human social survival concepts with slight alterations.

  That religion is a by-product of adaptations that occurred for other reasons does not negate its incredible power. As we’ll explain in chapter 9

  , reading and writing are not in themselves adaptations; they also are by-products of adaptations designed for other purposes.

  All religions—as sets of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe—begin with belief in one or more central holy figures or teachers. Most also involve a deity or deities capable of interacting with us, able and willing to intervene in our lives, to hear our silent wishes, and to grant them, and capable of doing literally anything. For our purposes, we’ll discuss just one, and designate it as male, though some religions have multiples with differing powers and a few have snuck in female personalities. Still, they are all remarkably similar. Certainly the god of the three major Abrahamic religions is the same, so we’ll use “him” for our examples.

  That god is paternal and, like a good father, loves us unconditionally. Usually, though, he only hears our prayers if we worship him hard enough, make sacrifices of some sort, acknowledge that we are highly imperfect and thank him profusely (whether or not he grants our wishes), and believe that we are all born bad. This god makes decisions based on not only our prayers but also the prayers of every other human being, or at least every other human being who shares the particulars of our beliefs. Even when he refuses our wishes or needs, we continue to believe that whatever occurs is in our best interests, even if it doesn’t seem that way, and that this invisible god has a purpose for everything. And all of this goes in our mind even when we’re not thinking about it.

  If, when you were a teenager, your mother had set you up on a blind date and assured you that your date was extraordinarily good looking, wealthy beyond measure, kind, loving, willing to do anything for you even though you’d never met, and wanted nothing more than for you to have the best of everything, would you have believed her? Well, maybe when you were a teenager. For a few minutes.

  So why are we so willing to believe in an invisible god that does all of that, and more?

  Compared to what really goes on in our minds, the concept of one holy supernormal entity seems easy. Just to believe in a god, our mind bounces off of no fewer than twenty hardwired adaptations evolved over eons of natural selection to help us coexist and communicate with our fellow Homo sapiens to survive and dominate the planet. In the pages that follow, we’ll show you exactly how and why human minds not only accept the impossible but also have created cults of it.

  We will show you how and why humans came to, among other things, believe in a god, love a god, fear a god, defer to a god, envision a god like us, pray to a god and assume prayers would be answered, create rituals to worship a god, and even die and kill for a god. And we will show you why these hardwired social traits make it extraordinarily difficult to depart from those beliefs, even if and when you are so inclined.

  But let’s start with a crash course in evolution.

  2

  In the Image and Likeness

  Evolution 101

  To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

  —Charles Darwin

  We are risen apes, not fallen angels—and we now have the evidence to prove it. Our vanity might make it difficult to accept, and those who believe in divine creation find the whole concept outrageous. The mere contemplation
that humanity could have developed from the “lower” animals has caused many to reject evolution outright, from the moment Charles Darwin promulgated his theory. But the evidence overwhelmingly shows that we evolved along with all other living things from the primordial ooze, where life on earth really began.

  Along the east side of the African continent, the Great Rift Valley runs from Ethiopia to Mozambique. Think of this valley as the birth canal of the human species, the true Garden of Eden. This is where our particular species began its unique evolutionary trail.

  We did not descend from apes. From a purely scientific viewpoint, we are apes. We share 98.6 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. We also share with them a common ancestor that lived some 5 to 7 million years ago. From that common ancestor, the human line diverged and developed along many different paths, like the varied branches of a bush. Eventually all but one, the one from which you and I evolved, died out.

  We are the last surviving example of a specific African ape, the hominid. As evolutionarily recently as 50,000 years ago there may have been four species of closely related but distinct hominids sharing the planet with us. We alone among the hominids survive.

  We have now met many of our ancestors. We possess fossils of Ardipithecus, probably one of the closest species to the distant ancestor we share with chimps. They seem to have been a pair-bonded species with low levels of aggression.

  The Australopithecus, meaning the southern ape of Africa, is best known through its most famous fossil, Lucy, found in Ethiopia nearly forty years ago. Fossils of Paranthropus (meaning “beside human”) found in southern Africa in 1938 and 1948 show it to have had a brain about 40 percent the size of ours; it likely died out because it could not adapt to changes in environment and diet.