Subtitled: “The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life”
(Norton, hardcover, 2011, 252pp, including 47pp notes, additional reading, and index.)
(UK title The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life, also 2011)
I have a short shelf of eight or ten books that I’ve read over the past decade or more that I’ve never gotten around to writing up here, mostly because they’re very substantial books and I took *lots* of notes on them, so the chores of boiling them down to blog posts has been daunting. But these are some of the books that have most influenced my thinking, and so I’m making a new resolution to get these posted by the end of the year. Aside from the present book, they include two by Pinker, and others by Dawkins, Hitchens, Coyne, and Harris. (Then there are even older ones that I took notes on back in the ‘90s and 2000s, long before I began posting such notes on this blog. I’ll see what I can salvage from them too.)
This book by Bering I bought when it came out in early 2011. I think the author was unknown to me, and I may or may not have read reviews of the book. It followed books in the 2000s by the “new atheists,” including Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett, that pointed out various things non-believers had noticed about religion that the religious apparently had not considered. Critics found the strident, and found reasons to dismiss them. (After all, they had *grown up* with their religions.) Bering, coming along a few years later, provided a new perspective, answering *why* people are subject to beliefs in souls and supernatural beings. Short answer: human nature, just as we had read about in Wilson’s ON HUMAN NATURE and later in Pinker’s HOW THE MIND WORKS and THE BLANK SLATE. And not just human nature, but human nature as evolved by natural selection to promote survival. That is, there’s survival value to believing things that are not true. Cool, huh?
Anyway, my approach to this book and the others will be to read through my notes and clean up their readability, without necessarily trying to condense them, and post them. But along the way I’ll extract some key points, and list those first, as a summary ahead of the full notes.
Summary
- Author is generous with personal incidents from his past, and with literary anecdotes
- The difference between this book and the earlier books by the ‘new atheists’ is that this author draws on cognitive psychology, especially clinical experiments with children, to detect evidence for ‘innate’ unlearned beliefs, which in turn form the bases for superstitions and perceptions of the supernatural.
Ch1, A key notion is the ‘theory of mind,’ the perception by young children — though not at first — that other people have minds of their own, with different perceptions than themselves. Humans even ascribe minds to nonhuman things. And so God may be simply a product of our overactive theory of mind. This understanding applies to many of life’s big questions.
Ch2, The entire notion of a ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’ of life may just be our theory of mind acting up. The idea of purpose, that things exist for reasons, is how children perceive the world. This is why principles like natural selection are difficult; children instinctively assign creationist answers. Similarly, destiny is a cognitive illusion; beware those who presume what God has in store for us. Similar is the naturalistic fallacy, that what is natural is good or right. Evolution shows we arose through nonintentional means. It’s the theory of mind, and undisciplined teleological reasoning, that leads us to think otherwise.
Ch3, We see signs everywhere, e.g. God’s intent in a hurricane. This bias has inspired much of religion. People without theory-of-mind abilities, like some autistics, are better at perceiving the world as it actually is. On the opposite end, the schizophrenic perceives signs in everything. Ordinary people respond to events in the environment as signs, attributing noises to animals or ghosts, especially when there’s no penalty for false alarms. Any random event can be taken as a sign of something. Author did an experiment, his “Princess Alice Studies,” with children primed to perceive the intervention of said princess. People are convinced God is on their side. Humans associate order with intentional agency, thus the creationist argument from design.
Ch4, Why do all cultures believe in an afterlife? We appeal to conscious experiences because that’s all we have. Children imagine death is like sleeping, feeling peaceful, or being dizzy. Infants learn that people don’t cease to exist just because you can’t see them; the idea of ‘person permanence.’ Still, it may take intellectual labor, but the conclusion is unavoidable that the mind is what the brain does, and the brain stops working at death, so the idea that the mind survives death is a psychological illusion. And the ideas of these last three chapters help resolve the question of why bad things happen to good people.
Ch5, When catastrophes happen, like people dying of a bridge collapse, people want to know *why?* as if everything that happens is for a reason that personally involves them. Misery invokes God; people who survive catastrophes, oddly, find their faith strengthened. We search for explanations because understanding things helps you survive, and sometimes a pseudo-explanation is better than having none at all. This function will not go away as scientific knowledge expands to gradually replace the “god of the gaps.” Similar is the perception that the world must be just. Thus people construct narratives about their lives, stories that make sense.
Ch6, God is thus an adaptive illusion. It’s built on top of even earlier psychological parts; that’s how evolution works. Our theory of mind cautions us to reign in our impulses, because what others learn they can tell to other people. Language, and theory of mind, are what makes humans different from other species. Children tattle and adults gossip, because bringing others down enhances one’s own survival. Damaged reputations lead to being ostracized. God fits into this picture by being able to see inside the hearts and souls of individuals, thus reigning them in. The result were behaviors that were adaptive in the ancestral past: supernatural thinking curbs selfish behavior.
Ch7, Creationists believe that Darwin recanted, but whether he did so or not has no effect on the theory of evolution. Anyone can have doubts, especially on their deathbed. Human nature is unlikely ever to be ‘cured’ of God by scientific reasons. The issue is: can we trust our evolved sense of reality, or do our evolved biases lead us away from reality? [[ Yes to the latter ]] Being able to shatter this illusion is a significant turning point in human history. But is it good, for our reproductive interests, to do so? As the illusion unravels, we can appreciate ourselves for what we really are. Unlike the dead, we have a decent answer to the question of what it’s all been for.
Full Notes
Introduction
God came from an egg. Author recounts a childhood incident about an ersatz Faberge egg belonging to a neighbor that he accidentally crushed. The damaged egg was discovered – but author swore to God he hadn’t done it.
And felt great guilt over doing so. He hadn’t been raised religious, but still feared a vindictive god striking him down for his sin. Later his mother lays dying, and he dismisses the idea of punishment from god. The notion occurs that god is like the mafia, offering protection for a kind of payment. Yet he still wonders where those childhood ideas came from. Something innate?
This book will cover the innateness of god beliefs, souls, the afterlife, destiny, and meaning. The usual reasons to believe in god – to feel like there’s something bigger out there; to have a sense of purpose – just beg the question. Why do we have those feelings? Do other animals have such feelings?
Will draw on findings from cognitive sciences. Many of these scholars regard religion as an accidental byproduct of mental evolution – not adaptive in itself. Dawkins said as much. But this may be hasty. There might have been problems in human evolution that religion did solve. Language brought about gossip. The idea of a watchful god may have inhibited temptation to behave badly, by spreading news through gossip. God doesn’t have to be real for the effect to work.
So the god question may be better answered by psychologists than by philosophers, scientists, or theologians. God, souls, destiny may be cognitive illusions accounted for by the evolution of the brain. People may be hopeless pawns in natural selection’s hoax. Start with the ability to think about other minds at all.
1, The History of an Illusion
A Greek orator named Gorgias was renowned in using rhetoric—to bamboozle listeners with seductive wordage. Yet he realized that you can never know another person’s mind, or precisely transfer a thought to another’s mind. Nicholas Humphrey has similar ideas – each of us is separate. Each of us carries the universe in our head. Others exist as representations in our heads. In a sense we can’t know if others have minds—since we can’t directly perceive them.
The same principle is true today. The film Being John Malkovich sorta attempts a merging of mind, but really only shows one existing inside the other.
We have only reason to dismiss solipsism. On the contrary, we’re more apt to imbue the entire world with conscious intent. Example of Fernando Pessoa, 1916. According to Paul Bloom, we’re commonsense dualists. We see others as having ‘souls’… though this attitude can be diminished when ‘dehumanizing’ enemies. Less severely, people tend to view members of other groups as having blunter, less subtle emotions than their own. (p16)
We assume others are doing things intentionally. Daniel Dennett: evolution crafted our brains to have an ‘intentional stance’ when reasoning about others. When we see someone doing something, we tend to figure out what their motives are. At the same time, human gathered knowledge of other animals – chimps, orangutans, gorillas. There in Rwanda was … Nicholas Humphrey. Perceiving that maybe gorillas, like us, are ‘natural psychologists’, whose survival depends on second-guessing what other members of their species are thinking.
So maybe what makes humans special, ‘above’ other animals, is the capacity to think about minds. Experiments into ‘theory of mind’ began in the late ‘70s.
For example, when we see something wearing bizarre clothes and we ask, ‘what were they thinking?’ – that’s exercising our theory of mind. Is this the one special thing that makes humans unique? Large prefrontal cortex. There’s been a trend to dismiss claims of human uniqueness… to see a commonality among humans and the chimps, etc. Is the question then, do other animals have a theory of mind? It’s been 6 million years since we split from the chimps. Evidence suggests Neanderthals may not have had such a theory.
A Louisiana researcher named Daniel Povinelli is a hardliner on focusing on differences between humans and other animals. He did an experiment with chimps where they failed to distinguish between a human who was blindfolded vs one that was not, for purposes of getting food. But his methods were later criticized. The result went the other way when chimps competed with other chimps. Example of a clever experiment with dominant and subordinate chimps. But Povinelli sticks by his conclusions.
Anyway, humans are certainly better at theory of mind than all other animals. In fact, we can’t turn it off; we ascribe minds even to nonhuman things. The red balloon [the 1956 French movie]. We imbue inanimate things with intentions, beliefs, desires. We get angry at malfunctioning computers. Other examples.
So: what of God’s mental states are also just in our minds.? … A psychological illusion, produced by an overactive theory of mind. With intentions and desires that we perceive, even he doesn’t actually exist. This theory of mind applies to many of life’s big questions.
Ch2, A Life Without Purpose, p38
Even Darwin found it hard to imagine the universe was the result of blind chance. But maybe his sense that existence seems purposeful—intelligently designed—was a product of theory of mind.
Sartre had one brush with God as a child (before becoming a renowned atheist). He railed against the idea of God creating people with precise purposes in mind. Meaning of life is a mirage. Not to despair – now we can determine our own purpose. He thought that—even if god does exist—people can choose their own fates, and would choose good over evil. (Of course Sartre didn’t appreciate the degree to which biology and genes constrain our behavior…)
Still, the notion of God the Creator is still rampant. Rick Warren tells you about God’s mind.. using his theory of mind.
Today’s atheists rely on science (rather than philosophy).
Dawkins’ The God Delusion attacked creationist ideas, like Warren’s. There is no answer to, what is the purpose of life?. It’s not a valid question.
Yet, natural selection hasn’t made the question go away, even among those who understand it. People still wonder about purpose. The real question is why the purpose-of-life question persists. We still have feelings of fulfilling a ‘purpose’ in life. Even Sartre did…. From Simone’s diaries. Similarly the character in Camus’ The Fall.
But culture is polluted by residue of creationist beliefs; the idea that people are ‘ensouled’, e.g., goes back to Hebrew scriptures. Ideas spread like viruses. But do children get religion from outside sources? Or are they born believers?
There are cases of deaf-mutes who create their own cosmologies before becoming linguistic. They had the same questions… one such account is from 1892, a boy who made up stories about the moon, the sun being thrown into their air every day… He wrote 40 years later. William James commenting.
Later, Jean Piaget identified ‘artificialism’ as a stage of development where children see everything in the world as serving human purposes. And adults never entirely shed this tendency. Our minds are biased toward thinking that things are designed. [à] in fact, findings suggest that religious belief and behavior would emerge even on a desert island… p54m.
Teleo-functional reasoning is imbuing purposes to objects, whether man-made or natural – and children do this all the time, regardless of parents’ religious beliefs. It shows up in uneducated adults too. Such reasoning applies to artifacts … but children do it to everything (p57t), even entire kinds of animals.
This is why grasping principles like natural selection is so difficult; creationist thinking comes more easily to the human mind than evolutionary thinking… 8yr old children give exclusively creationist answers to questions about where animals come from. By age 10 or 12, their answers reflect whether their parents are evolutionary-minded or evangelical.
There’s still the issue of ultimate origins. Our theory of mind can mislead. If there is a creator, creation might have been accidental, or malicious. Many endow purpose even to individual people… the concept of destiny. To see how odd this teleo-functional reasoning is, apply the same reasoning to every horsefly in the meadow.
Yet most people do this thinking naturally. Singers; Bill O’Reilly. (excerpt from his book.) In contrast, Darwin wondered if deaths are similarly pre-designed.
This reasoning can be applied to getting military recruits. The young Muslim whose mission will destroy old women and children. Bin Laden claimed destiny for his terrorist missions.
But the concept of destiny isn’t always a bad thing. … Obama quote.
Misunderstanding that destiny is a cognitive illusion can help us resist those who presume to know what God has in store for us. We can beware the notion that we need to ‘discover’ ourselves to find what we are ‘meant’ to do with our lives. It can result in later feelings of missed opportunities.
And it can damage self-esteem. Author’s attitudes about gays, from society, inhibited his own coming out. Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that makes it difficult to ‘think outside of the box’, constrained by what we think the designer meant an object to be used for. Jean Genet lived up to his charge as a criminal, to the point of rationalizing the necessity of criminals as existing to support various industries of people…
Related to this is the naturalistic fallacy, assuming that what is natural is also good or right. This problem plagues evolutionary psychology, which has to stress that what is ‘natural’ isn’t necessarily justifiable or good. Also, homosexuality — 2009 miss America. What the Bible says. But antigay attitudes aren’t necessarily anti-religious; example of how the UK treated Turing. Not because of the Bible; his treatment was inspired by science of the time. Biological purpose doesn’t mandate moral behavior…
Similar thinking prohibits medically assisted suicide—by those who believe our essence belongs to god.
To see purpose means to see creative intent. Yet evolution shows we arose through nonintentional means. It’s the theory of mind, and undisciplined teleological reasoning, that leads us to think otherwise. Due to our species’ unique cognitive evolution.
Ch3, Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs
We tend to see meaning in natural events – signs or clues or messages.
The most laughable are when hurricanes, say, are attributed to God’s unhappiness about something. Katrina; the Indonesian tsunami; example comments. They’re all about theory of mind – i.e., deducing what God’s mind is thinking. It’s triggered by any kind of unconventional behavior – a person’s, or the weather’s.
This bias to see messages in natural events is what has inspired much of religion. Signs from God, or ancestors, gives us the sense that we matter.
People without theory-of-mind abilities – autistics, for instance – may be better at ‘folk physics’ than the rest of us (p81f) – concerned with *how* things work rather than *why*. Thus autistic children’s odd hobbies and obsessions. (and in such families there are higher percentages of engineering, physicists, etc. -!) Several autobiographies offer insights – Temple Grandin’s. Edgar Schneider’s. To them any beliefs about God are intellectual, not emotional; an ordering force; and no sense of interpersonal relationships between them and God. No ‘conscious feedback from the divine’…
On the other side is paranoid schizophrenia – paranoid indicating that the theory of mind has gone completely wild. Signs in everything.
Even ordinary people see their minds making decisions for them without consulting knowledge and beliefs. Author experiences flashes of the presence of his dead mother, even though intellectually he’s sure her mind is gone—e.g. hearing wind chimes as a message from her that she’s OK. ‘Alief’ is a term coined to mean a mental state triggered by environmental factors – because it would have had adaptive use. Or, it’s the hyperactive agency that detects potential dangers, attributing noises, say, to agencies – animals, or ghosts. There’s no penalty for false alarms. This idea overlooks theory of mind though… which is always about intent. (Never mind how God cures cancer, say; people don’t worry about how these things work.)
New Age gurus exploit the same tendencies to see meaning. Doreen Virtue teaches how to detect the angels. A woman sees a sign in a feather that sticks to her car. Random events can be taken by anyone as ‘signs’…
Author did experiment himself – ‘Princess Alice Studies’, involving 3-9yo children. Each child was asked to pick which box had a hidden ball. Actually, both boxes had balls, and they controlled who was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. In one group they told them an invisible princess alice would help them choose – and then arrange to flicker a light or something just as the child chose.
Sure enough, the older children did change their minds when a suspect event occurred, having been primed to interpret the event as a sign from princess alice [or god, one’s dead mother, whatever].
The younger children perceived princess alice behind the events – but didn’t relate that to having a meaningful connection to their behavior. They didn’t change their minds. The youngest children actually gave the most rational answers…
The 5-6 year olds didn’t make the connection either. It’s not until age 7 or so that children are able to reason about multiple orders of mental states – what person a thinks person b believes, e.g. Most people can handle four orders; but not children. Young children aren’t ripe enough to be superstitious thinkers.
The same idea of looking for signs is a common religious behavior… God doesn’t answer directly, but signals through an infinite number of potential natural events…
Each of us is convinced that God shares our opinions and points of view. Westboro Baptist Church sees every catastrophe as signs of God’s disapproval of gays. Most people believe God is on their side. Even when we change our minds. [[ this is the kind of thing that makes religion so implausible from first principles, for anyone smart enough to perceive this inescapable paradox. ]]
Take home point is that we reason inside our head about external events – but this reasoning doesn’t actually tell us anything about that reality.
Similarly, there’s no intrinsically ‘bad smell’ – our perceptions derive from evolution. Same for beautiful sunsets. Dogs love lots of smells humans find disgusting.
Author recalls seeing odd name ‘orby’ on the wall of his bathroom. Actually, it was just dribbles of paint.
Humans associate order with intentional agency. Children perceive inanimate forces lead only to disorder, but intentional agents can cause either order or disorder…. Thus the “ineradicable plague of religious creationism”… the argument from design. Naturalists throughout history don’t use order just to prove God, but try to detect meaning in that order. E.g., a group of books published in the 1830s…to detect God’s plan through nature. The same idea informs some scientists who see no conflict with faith; facts discovered through science are how we perceive God. Natural theology is the motive of the Templeton Foundation… “these contemporary scholars are, in all probability, using their mindlessly evolved theory of mind to make meaning of the meaningless.” p107b
Of course natural selection accounts for our existence without an intentional God, nor is our theory of mind. Or our perception of good and evil. There’s no reason to believe God frets about humans any more than any other animal. All the divine wild goose chases begin and end with theory of mind.
Ch4, Curiously Immortal
Example of a French novel in which a man about to commit suicide is deterred by the thought of the loud noise it will make. How theory of mind tricks us when we think about death. We reason about our future selves in the same way – and what we’ll be in the afterlife.
The question is why the assumption of an afterlife is so common, not just in religion. Stories of ghosts and heaven abound. Why is there any mystery at all? When we die, the brain dies.
But all cultures believe in an afterlife, or at best are unsure about it. Research suggests these beliefs are by-products of our theory of mind. In social psychology there is ‘terror management theory,’ in which people have a variety of defenses against the anxiety of death. However, research finds no connection between such anxiety of death, and belief in afterlife. In contrast, researchers like the author propose that theory of mind gives the illusion that minds are immortal. Consider that you will never know you have died—you’re not around to be aware of it. For as long as you’re alive, you’re immortal.
Cotard’s syndrome is the condition of believing that one has already died but is immortal…
A study by the author asked undergrads about a man who had just been killed. Most answered as if the man was still aware, despite his death – including some who had earlier answered that the ‘soul’ ceases upon death. Some distinguished between perceptual states and ‘spiritual states’… we can’t escape the trick of the mind; e.g. a Sartre short story.
Author suggests ‘simulation constraint hypothesis’; we appeal to conscious experiences because that’s all we have. Sleep isn’t the same thing. And even the epoch before our birth is conceived by some as being a period when they were an entity awaiting life.
How do children think about what happens after people die? Most answers refer to everyday experiences –sleeping, feeling peaceful, being dizzy. The tendency is *stronger* in younger children; they understood death biologically, but still speculated about a dead mouse’s mental states.
From evolutionary standpoint, understanding that ‘agency’ ceases – a dead animal is no danger – is vital; but not necessarily the idea of cessation of mind.
So do religion and culture play into this at all? It seems that exposure to ideas of afterlives enriches this natural cognitive stance. Culture reinforces it through language. In the mouse experiment, older Catholic kids were more likely to talk about mental states after death, than secular students. So education has some influence, but the default belief is still there. Or tendency to endorse such concepts.
Distinct is the common belief that the soul floats off invisibly into eternity. This can be explained too. Infants learn that people don’t cease to exist just because you can’t see them, the idea of ‘person permanence’.
A typical example is the case of five teenagers who disappeared in Florida in 1979 – and were found in a canal in 1997, having drowned. But relatives said things like ‘he’s been with God the last seventeen years’. As if he was literally in another place.
Our ‘person permanence’ doesn’t easily switch off when someone dies. Fowler, The Magus. And people tend to imagine departed souls as being embodied somehow… probably the way you last saw them. Commonsense obliges us to think of departed souls in physical bodies.
Findings so far suggest afterlife beliefs are more than just ‘wishful fulfillment’. Many things we may wish to be true, we don’t necessarily believe. “Indeed, it’s only through intellectual labor…..” that it should be obvious the mind dies with the brain.
So these three ideas – illusions of purpose, signs, and the afterlife – help resolve the theological question, why do bad things happen to good people?
Ch5, When God Throws People Off Bridges, p131
In 1845 a showman floated down a river; a crowd gathered on a bridge overhead, which then collapsed, killing about 100 people. No doubt priests wondered why such a thing should happen, presume it due to God’s design; or in one case, blamed it on the townspeople’s excesses.
Such thinking is at the heart of human nature. The question, why do bad things happen to good people? presupposes some intelligence behind the scenes. We want to know *why* it happened. To those particular people.
Similar event in Oklahoma, 2002. A tugboat hits a bridge, 14 die in the collapse. A relative asks, why was she on that bridge at that particular moment?
[[ again, this is the kind of thing that should be obvious early on to anyone of any kind of intelligence. Some things are just random… to think otherwise is almost arrogant superstition ]]
Piaget asked children about a boy and a bridge. Young children said the bridge collapsed only because the boy had stolen apples. Older children said it would have collapsed anyway. Yet there’s still the sense that it was punishment for stealing apples.
Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”; why those particular 5 people? Brother Juniper searches for evidence that they deserved it – and is executed for his troubles by church fathers. Wilder sensed that people read moral lessons into such events. Author has heard fellow hospital patients bargain with god over their misdeeds.
Our cognitive systems are unsatisfied by the amoral vicissitudes of life; when something goes wrong, we search for someone responsible. Even if innocent people are blamed. When the bad event is something abstract, we see the hand of God. Example: a family drowns, with or without a dam worker’s involvement. Did God do it? No and yes.
Misery and belief in god are positively correlated, in states. God is especially invoked by misery, though he can be invoked for positive events too. Thus people who survive catastrophes find their faith strengthened.
Alison Gopnik speculates that people seek explanations for the thrill of it; a feel-good ruse like orgasm, because understanding things helps you survive. Curiosity about exploring everything especially in children.
OTOH, your explanation doesn’t have to be correct to give you that rush…. Thus having a bad or pseudo-explanation is better than having none at all. As long as they’re right sometimes [esp within scientific framework p142] the effect has survival value.
Nonbelievers tend to suppose that the need for God explanations will fade as scientific knowledge expands; the god of the gaps. Richard Feynmann. The problem with this view is that it doesn’t explain the *why*, e.g. in the bridge collapse. Every human society blames calamities on some supernatural agent. 1937 example about collapsing granaries. Knowing how AIDS is transmitted doesn’t end suspicion of witchcraft for the infected—2008 study. Tracy Kidder book about tuberculosis.
There’s the perception that the world must be just. Piaget. Examples of ironic events we perceive as justice, or injustice. Believers rationalize these away. But the Holocaust caused some to believe God had become insane or morally corrupt. Camp resident convicted God of murder—and were then taken off to slaughter themselves. What does that mean?
Story of Katherine Anne Power. She was a Vietnam war protestor was implicated in a bank robbery and murder; she went underground, becoming a model citizen in Oregon. But she felt so guilty that after years, she turned herself in… honoring a ‘contract with God’.
A 2001 article by Dan McAdams wrote about how people construct narratives out of their lives, stories that make sense. He detected two types of people. Some people view traumatic events as ‘contaminative’, ruining their lives thereafter; others see such events as ‘redemptive’, making their lives better. Events were painful, but ‘everything happens for a reason’. Some people concoct lives that are tragedies; others as tv sitcoms. Of course, real life isn’t like that. Most people denigrate their earlier selves, to view their later life as progressing toward some satisfying climax.
In Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, author’s talented 17yo son is taken away by brain cancer. Author ponders the reasons.
We can’t help but feel that life *should* have meaning. Look at the end of “The Sopranos”; it just ends. Fans were furious. Chase tried explaining months later. Children need endings. But even adult viewers were outraged by the ‘lack’ of a conclusive ending.
We portray ourselves living out fictional stories that will lead to some narrative climax. Then who is writing the script? For many it’s god. But even atheists have this sense.
For Harold Kushner [title] God rested and let the world run, thus bad things can happen.
A lead writer for “Sex and the City” says she’s a nonbeliever, but still senses that people have things they are meant to do.
Nonreligious people in the Netherlands still perceived fate in certain situations…
A survey of atheists and believers showed even the former often implied that ‘everything happens for a reason’… though some corrected themselves. Whereas Asperger’s patients didn’t even understand the question… Kundera novel.
Thus atheism is a conscious rejection of one’s intuitions, rather than an exorcism of them.
The reflex makes us human – and perhaps well-adapted in evolutionary terms.
Ch6, God as adaptive illusion
For millions of years before theory of mind evolved, humans have been impulsive, hedonistic, and uninhibited, because that’s what maximized reproductive success. Somewhat like chimps are. You notice they have no shame…. Behaviors at the zoo. We dismiss them as ‘monkeys’ (actually apes) [[ –recurring thought is, how would these principles apply to ‘alien’ sentient beings, so often imagined in SF? Would they necessarily have a similar theory of mind? And therefore possess the same religion/supernatural tastes as humans?– ]] They lack the capacity to care what others think. Whereas humans are plagued by worrying about what others think of them.
Sartre’s play “No Exit”—three people in hell, in a room, forever trapped with each other, made crazy by the ceaseless attention of others.
This is why we take such care making ourselves look good; why we’re terrified of public speaking; etc. We behave differently when we think we’re being observed (even by toys e.g.).
Evolution doesn’t start from scratch; humans are derived from other animals. The human brain is built upon earlier parts. Thus we’re sub optimally designed (p171m). Thus theory of mind is built on top of the older impulses – and these two elements generate psychological friction.
Our ‘old’ brains urge us to let it all hang out; our ‘new’ brains are saying hold on, not so fast. And yet, why does just being watched affect our behavior so much? Because once one person knows—they can tell other people.
Language—that, plus theory of mind, is what makes humans different than any other species. Generates reputations. What one person sees, they can tell others. A bad reputation leads to a decline in reproductive success. Thus patience, restraint, modesty, humility are desirable because they’re pragmatic. (Not heavenly virtues – [[ as always, people everywhere assume such virtues, not because it literally says so in some holy book. Holy books just record what people already ‘believed’ or concluded for various reasons. ]].) Countless examples. The movie Doubt. The priest offers a sermon…p175. Feathers and gossip.
We seem to have a compulsion to spread information when we see someone doing something wrong, or unusual. Children learn to tattle very early on. [because diminishing the reproductive success of others enhances your own?] They rare ‘tootle’. People aren’t good at keeping secrets. Especially when told ‘it’s a secret’ – it makes the information that much more strategic.
Humans sensitive to being ostracized – can happen even by reputation. Guilt by association. More complicated when associated to a family member, e.g. the brother of Jeffrey Dahmer—who’d want to marry him or have his children? Even the children would be ostracized if found out. It seems unfair, but makes sense in the context of natural selection.
Theories for why language evolved are many; one imagines that gossip replaced the literal grooming of other social primates, and that enables all sorts of social interaction that enhances one’s interests. People in conversation are quick to mention things that put them in a positive light (without being a braggart). Even lies can serve are reproductive interests, if they’re believable – thus, actual traits are less important than what we can make other people believe about our traits.
In general, the more information we have about others – even if some of it is dubious – the better we can make adaptive decisions about them. ‘Where there’s smoke there’s fire’ is intuitive to most people; ‘innocent until proven guilty’ takes organized judicial effort.
Sensational news stories key off topics relevant to reproductive success – violence, sex, altruism, cheating, etc. Group sizes get larger as manipulation of social information gets better. (manual grooming as bonding kept prehuman groups relatively small.) Larger groups enhanced the safety of its members. Most conversation are about social topics; gossip serves to police members’ behaviors. Example from Jekyll/Hyde. The good/evil aspects of human nature have been a recurring theme in literature.
So language solved some problems, it introduced others. It meant we had to develop an inhibitory function to regulate our primitive impulses. The tension was even worse when we still lived in small groups. If something bad happened, you couldn’t just move to the next town.
These days most people most can subscribe to morals – “logistical details by which group members can coexist without tearing each other to bits”. But lapses aren’t always the end of the world. And sometimes killing the ‘carrier’ is effective. Karamazov. Killing witnesses.
Of course risk can sometimes pay off… especially if no one’s watching. And we have an ‘optimism bias’ that things will go OK. We underestimate risk. And often lose. We also have this inhibiting sense of being observed. It’s strengthened if we know we can be identified… thus, bank robbers wear disguises; individuality is masked in mobs, who can commit violence against out-group members with relative impunity.
So where does God fit into this picture?
A common feature of religions is the sense that gods know the hearts and souls of individuals. Other people you see may not know you—but god always does. God is the inescapable sense of being watched. The illusion of a punitive God would assist genetic well-being anytime the risk of detection by others was underestimated… thus God became a target of natural selection. (p191m)
[[ so the implication is, without this illusion, complex societies could never have formed…? ]]
Thus all these effects resulted in behaviors that were adaptive in the ancestral past. A set of illusions that helped thwart the ancestral drives, especially as language created the problem of gossip.
Evidence that supernatural thinking curbs selfish behavior include the observation that the larger the culture, the greater the chance it imagines supernatural gods… [[ again, what is happening with large cultures who are becoming less religious? Other inhibitory functions are taking over? Thinking of northern Europe. ]] Priming people with God concepts leads to higher donations. Students told a ghost haunted a room were less likely to cheat. And the Princess Alice experiment.
So: a sense of being watched curtails bad behaviors, meaning fewer scraps for the gossip mill. So ‘religion’ isn’t an adaption per se; the psychological processes that enable it are. The senses of a god watching us, etc etc, are plausible to most people, and transcend religion. This doesn’t necessarily rule out the existence of god – maybe he arranged are mind thus so for his purposes. But that’s grasping at straws. The evolutionary case implies that God’s existence is rather improbable. Natural selection is about survival and reproduction, not truth (p195b). What feels real isn’t a good measure of what is real. And not believing it’s an illusion could mean it’s especially strong in your case.
Ch7, And Then You Die
Creationists believe the Darwin recanted. Long example. Of course whether he did or not has no effect on the theory of evolution itself. Anyone can have moments of doubt—especially on a deathbed. They have human brains too. Skeptics needn’t prove they’re not subject to irrational thought. [[ so—if Darwin did have deathbed doubts, that rather demonstrates the pervasiveness of the illusion, and therefore unlikelihood of god being real…! ]]
So human nature is unlikely to ever be ‘cured’ of God by scientific reason. The issue is—can we trust our evolved sense of reality, or is it our evolved biases that lead us away from reality? –p200.4 [[ yes this is the bottom line point about this and many other issues ]]
Being able to shatter this illusion is a significant turning point in human history. The illusion served its purpose; what now? It may not be a good thing to shed the illusion, for our reproductive interests. Otoh, realizing this illusion probably wouldn’t result in people becoming amoral – society still imposes consequences.
Today’s world has lots of technology for social tracking [[ yes these are the other inhibitory functions ]] the illusion is unlikely to go away—but as it unravels, we can appreciate ourselves for what we are. … the dead are dead, nothing more. We can imagine what the dead thought. Unlike them, we have a decent answer to the question of what it’s all been for.
It’s a false riddle. We can live for each other. If you ignore this tale about illusions, there will be no hell to pay…
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