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

  A devout Christian, Emma likely was distressed by his ideas, and certainly by his lack of faith. At the bottom of that letter he inscribed, “When I am dead, know that many times I have kissed and cryed over this. C. D.”

  Not only is the attachment system a crucial part of religious faith, it is probably one of the adaptations that makes departure from it difficult. Carl Giberson, in his book Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, wrote: “I have a compelling reason to believe in God. My parents are deeply committed Christians and would be devastated, were I to reject my faith. My wife and children believe in God . . . abandoning belief in God would be disruptive, sending my life completely off the rails.”

  But our loved ones don’t need to tell us outright that departure from what had been a shared belief, or the unwillingness to share their beliefs, will make them unhappy. We know this intuitively, because other uniquely human adaptations—now parts of the basic design of our brain—allow us to infer their reactions to our decisions, even if they say nothing. It begins with our ability to mentally separate their minds from their bodies, which in turn circles back to our ability not only to believe in what we cannot see but also to interact with the invisible. We are born with the ability to read what others' may be thinking even when they are not there to tell us. In a way, all of those to whom we are attached sometimes become imaginary friends.

  4

  All That Is Seen and Unseen

  Conceiving Souls

  The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

  —Charles Darwin

  The Mind-Body Split

  Because we need to work with other people to survive, our brains evolved the ability to make assumptions about others, to create conjecture to help us coexist in social settings. We are born accepting that others are like us, intentional agents with minds like ours, even though we are unable to literally see their minds.

  One aspect of this is called the mind-body split or dualism, the view that the mind and body function separately, without interchange. We cannot conceive of souls unless we see mind as separate from body. And we do, because our brains are wired that way.

  The medial frontal area of our brains, just behind the space between the eyes, contains the circuits for introspection, awareness of our own nonphysical attributes, our emotional states and traits, and our own wishes and desires. It is also the part of our brain with which we reflect on the abstract: other people’s minds, their intentions, beliefs, desires, and feelings—their nonphysical attributes.

  This ability is not learned; it is innate, hardwired. The brain represents mind and body in separate neural circuits. This allows us to separate minds from bodies, to experience and believe that they are entirely different categories

  The lateral part of the brain is where we recognize concrete, visible things such as our own faces and bodies and the movements of others in relation to them. It is also where we note out-of-the-ordinary aspects of our situations, such as something moving that should not.

  Religious ideas are influential and endure because they fit neatly with this structure, this mind-body split.

  Like many of the concepts so crucial to religion, the split between animate and inanimate can be seen in infants and children. A five-month-old who sees a box move on its own will startle. But a moving person is a normal part of everyday life and causes not a ruffle from that same child. It is natural in the child’s brain to think of animate intentional agents, but an inanimate physical property—the box—should not move like an intentional agent—the person.

  In a revealing experiment with children, Jesse Bering, a psychologist at Queens University in Ireland, created a puppet show. In the show, a puppet alligator swallows a puppet mouse. Bering then asked the children various questions about the mouse. Does the mouse still eat? Does the mouse miss its mother? The children knew the mouse could no longer eat, but they thought it missed its mother. These young children attributed to a dead mouse a mental state that they were unable to conceive no longer exists.

  This concept often shows up in debates about abortion rights as some variant of the question, “How would you feel if you had been aborted?”

  Bering’s simple but brilliant experiment shows that even children demonstrate the mind-body split; this means that belief in the supernatural is not something learned from our culture as we grow from infants into toddlers and more cognizant children. It is original equipment, requiring no social prompting.

  Children also demonstrate another aspect of this foundation of religious belief. Almost half of all four-year-olds have imaginary friends. It turns out that those who do generally grow up to be more socially competent. In many ways, a god is our imaginary friend.

  Whatever version of the supernatural our culture imparts to us, it lands on a mind already biased to accept that human mental life and capacities float free of a living or dead body. The supernatural beliefs of religion merely pirate the way our brain is designed to think about other people, their minds, and their intentions. The mind and all that fills it remains separate from the body.

  Understanding the attachment system and the mind-body split is just the beginning of understanding the ways in which the mind can be tricked into belief.

  5

  Because the Bible Tells Me So

  Believing in the Invisible

  Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can hardly be denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.

  —Charles Darwin

  Decoupled Cognition

  Imagine that the only way you could think about what might be going on in another person’s mind was for that person to be sitting in front of you. Human relationships as we know them would be impossible, and the same was also true for our ancestors. We need to evaluate the likely thoughts and feelings of others, even when those others are nowhere to be seen.

  For this reason, human beings are uniquely adapted to accept the presence of disembodied entities and to assume they will behave in certain ways. Most of us do it every day.

  Have you ever thought of a perfect response to a conversational challenge when it was too late to use it, and mentally replayed how the conversation could have gone? Lain awake at night agonizing about fixing a social or career misstep? Mentally rehearsed a marriage proposal, or a request for a raise?

  We humans have the remarkable ability to create and implement a complex interaction with an unseen other—boss, spouse, friend—in our minds, regardless of time or place, in the past or in the future. You had an argument. You were wrong. You want to apologize but you need to plan how. You mentally rehearse it, envisioning how the other person will respond. And all of this occurs while you go about your daily life.

  This is called decoupled cognition, and it is key to religious belief.

  We can decouple our cognition from time, place, and circumstance. This ability arises in childhood and is seen vividly in play. A child might say a bottle cap is a flying saucer. The child knows what it really is but can choose to ignore the reality and think of it as a flying saucer, with the attributes imagined and related to as such. The child is decoupling his or her cognition.

  Theater and filmgoers use such “suspension of disbelief” all the time. They know that what is happening on the stage or screen is not real. Yet, when watching, they choose to believe that the people on the stage or screen really exist, that they live in another place and time, that the car really was blown to smithereens, that a character came back to life.

  As adults, this mechanism is crucial to memory and planning. We can go back and forth in time, place, and circumstance as we think how to manage the relationships in our lives. We remember the meeting with the boss. We plan a conversation for the future. All this interaction is with others who are not there at the moment.

  Interacting in our minds with unseen others is natural. Many people mentally con
verse with recently departed loved ones. A natural extension of this—a leap of faith, if you will—can become ancestor worship and belief in gods. Our mind’s ability to create a complex relationship with unseen others simply expands.

  Theory-of-Mind Mechanisms

  Closely related to decoupled cognition is an amazing mental capacity, systems in our brain called theory-of-mind mechanisms, an understated name for an amazing gift. Before we can imagine how someone might react, we have to somehow understand what and how that person probably thinks. And, for the most part, we are able to do that. We have an innate ability to “read” what another person may think, believe, desire, or intend, in remarkable detail and with remarkable accuracy, and make assumptions based on that.

  Think of people you know well. You can probably fairly accurately imagine what issues they might be considering at this very moment. You can make an educated guess as to what they think of you. This ability likely helped our ancestors determine who was friend and who was not, interact socially, and plan accordingly for survival.

  This ability for joint attention may be the key to human uniqueness. Alone among the apes, we engage in complex cooperation with others, not only reading others’ minds but also reading others reading our minds. We take it for granted because it seems so simple. But it is not.

  For example, you and I plan to meet at a theater for the 9 p.m. movie. We have constructed a plan to cooperate in a joint venture. Each knows of the other’s commitment to the task. But you know I can be late. So you told me to be there on time, and I know you are frustrated with my tendency to be late. And you know I know of your displeasure with my tardiness. When I arrive in plenty of time for the movie, you smile. I know you are pleased at my punctuality, and you know I see and understand your pleasure. Not a single word need be said.

  It is just one small step to imagining an amorphous humanlike mind with ideas, feelings, and intentions about you and your fellow man. We can imagine this humanlike mind and engage in a joint venture. We’ll build a cathedral with and for him. He’ll be pleased. We’ll know he’s pleased if good fortune comes our way.

  Intensionality

  A closely related phenomenon is intensionality, spelled with an “s.” This is another extraordinary, taken-for-granted mental capacity. It goes like this:

  First Order

  “I think.”

  Second Order

  “I think you think.”

  Third Order

  “I think you think that I think.”

  Fourth Order

  “I think you think that I think that you think.”

  Let’s try it this way:

  First Order

  “I hope.”

  Second Order

  “I hope you like this book.”

  Third Order

  “I know you are aware that I hope you like this book.”

  Fourth Order

  “You can be certain that I know that you are aware that I hope you like this book.”

  These can, of course, be colored by circumstance. Imagine a social situation. A woman is talking to a man she thinks is boring. But the man thinks the woman considers him very attractive. In a corner of the room, watching, is the woman’s husband, who suspects that his wife is flirting with the other man, because he knows she is angry with him and believes she is retaliating—which, in fact, she may be doing, knowing that it will annoy her husband.

  This kind of awareness of what other people think, and what other people think about what we might think, is something that is utterly indispensable for social relationships.

  Religions easily utilize intensionality.

  First Order

  “I believe.”

  Second Order

  “I believe that God wants.”

  Third Order

  “I believe that God wants us to act with righteous intent.”

  Fourth Order

  “I want you to believe that God wants us to act with righteous intent.”

  Fifth Order

  “I want you to know that we both believe that God wants us to act with righteous intent.”

  Psychologist Robin Dunbar notes that third-order intensionality is “personal religion.” But, for you to be convinced, there must be fourth-order intensionality—someone else adds to your mind state, asking you to believe. That produces “social religion.”

  Even if you accept the truth of social religion, it commits you to nothing. If you add the fifth order, you accept the claim, become a believer, and have created “communal religion.” Together people can invoke obligations and demand that others behave in prescribed ways.

  You see this capacity for shared intensionality develop in infants long before they can speak. Take a young child, sit him on the floor, and roll or bounce a ball back and forth with him. He easily joins in the game. Then bounce the ball so that it lands out of either of your reach. The child will retrieve the ball, put it in your hand, and gesture to resume the game. He knows you know the game and that you know that he wants to play again.

  This shared intensionality on joint action may even be the basis of language. If you and I are English speakers, we each know the other knows that the arbitrary term “book” signals what this is. If we are French, then we each know, and know the other knows, that the arbitrary convention is “livre.”

  Making relatively accurate assumptions about others can play a part even when we encounter people we don’t know, or don’t know well. We evolved separate, dedicated adaptations to assess eye gaze, perhaps one of the reasons eyes are called “windows to the soul.” We can pick up much information about others from their eyes, which may have allowed our ancestors to determine hostility in others within or outside of their tribes, or to know friend from enemy in chance encounters. If you’ve ever encountered the steady gaze of a baby who doesn’t know you, you have seen this in action.

  This mental ability has been demonstrated by Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University, who showed in startling detail our mental ability to read, with a fair degree of accuracy, several hundred discrete emotional states in other people simply from looking at their eyes. In short, we can make complex judgments about a person we don’t know and a mind/brain we can never directly see.

  Transference

  Calling a god our father taps not only into our wiring for attachment but also into an adaptation called transference, which is particularly useful in understanding certain aspects of religion.

  All of us unconsciously base life relationships on earlier relationships. Just as we learn to walk and talk early in life, we learn strategies for dealing with others. These early relationship strategies form enduring personality characteristics, for better or for worse becoming the grammar we use to conduct later relationships.

  For example, as adults, we relate to authority figures in the same ways we did in our formative years. We assume these new authorities will respond to us as such people did in our past, and we base our attitude toward present figures on those earlier experiences. If those earliest experiences were harsh, we make the assumption that current authorities will treat us badly. We adjust our relationship to them accordingly, even when that is not the case and the present authority is actually kindly disposed toward us.

  But why did the capacity for transference evolve in the human mind? What problems does it solve? What adaptive function does it serve?

  We use the shorthand of transference to assign to others feelings and attitudes we originally associated with important figures in our early lives. In the best of circumstances, basing present relationships on past relationships—real, imagined, or wished for—is an efficient way of anticipating outcomes. Imagine what it would be like if we had to relearn how to relate to people with each new social relationship.

  Every day, psychotherapists see the many ways that disturbed early relationships distort present relationships. When that transference is repeated in psychoanalytic therapy, the details of the transference itself become the are
na for treatment.

  But what does this have to do with religion? Think of all the potential transferences mobilized by religious belief. Christians look to God the Father, Mary the Mother, and so on. Then think of how those beliefs can combine with personal transference: human parents, siblings, and significant others. Psychotherapeutic treatment of religious individuals often unmasks early relationships that transfer and contribute to the patient’s religious beliefs.

  6

  And Deliver Us from Evil

  Anthropomorphizing God(s)

  The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.

  —Charles Darwin

  Another uniquely human attribute that favors religion is our predisposition to ascribe humanlike power or influence (agency) to nearly everything we encounter.

  Why is it you mistake a shadow for a burglar but never a burglar for a shadow? If you hear a door slam, why do you wonder who did it before you consider the wind as the culprit? Why might a child who sees blowing tree limbs through a window fear that it’s the boogeyman come to get him? For that matter, where did the nearly universal childhood concept of a “boogeyman” or monsters under the bed come from? Some psychologists think the monster under the bed may be a legacy of our early life as australopithecines. We spent the night in trees with predators lurking below and retain that vigilance to dangers below.