How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  Brierre de Boismont’s early theories, constructed long before even a crude understanding of brain physiology was realized, have held up remarkably well. And if Ramachandran’s and Persinger’s research is corroborated, we might inquire further about the origin of temporal lobe-stimulated religiosity. Persinger proffers an evolutionary explanation: “The God Experience has had survival value. It has allowed the human species to live through famine, pestilence, and untold horrors. When temporal lobe transients occurred, men and women who might have sunk into a schizophrenic stupor continued to build, plan, and hope.” Maybe, but Ramachandran is more cautious: “Whether the findings imply the existence of a religion or a ‘God module’ in the temporal lobes remains to be seen.”

  In fact, according to neuroscientist David Noelle, “the hypothesis that the neural mechanisms underlying religion form a distinct brain module was not really tested by these experiments. Reports of evidence for a ‘God module’ in the brain are, at best, premature.” When you consider the fact that most studies show that more than 90 percent of the population believes in God, it would take a big stretch of the temporal lobe imagination to suggest that billions of people of all faiths the world over have experienced or are experiencing temporal lobe seizures or transients. A more reasonable hypothesis is that the handful of fanatic religious leaders throughout history, who report hearing the voice and seeing the face of, and even communicating with God, the devil, angels, aliens, and other supernatural beings, can perhaps be accounted for by temporal lobe abnormalities and anomalies. Their followers need a different explanation.

  GOD AS MEME

  In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins proposed a cultural replicator to explain the transmission of ideas through culture: “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.”

  Dawkins did not develop the concept much further and there it lay dormant until mathematician Richard Brodie pushed the meme as a “virus of the mind” in 1996, physicist Aaron Lynch took it in the direction of a “thought contagion” in 1996, and cognitive psychologist Susan Blackmore developed it into a “meme machine” in 1997 and 1999. In countless lectures for the past two decades since his creation of the concept, Dawkins has strongly suggested that God is a meme and religion is a virus, and all of these authors have followed his lead by devoting entire chapters to the subject. Lynch, for example, suggests that the commandment to “honor thy father and mother” is a meme for children to imitate their parents (including their religious beliefs), and that dietary laws and holy days are memes to encourage commitment to one’s religion, to spread other memes within that particular faith, and to protect one faith’s memes against another faith’s memes: “‘I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no false gods before me’ supremely realizes this competition-supressing advantage. Thus arises the archetype of modern monotheism, right at the top of the Ten Commandments.” Blackmore argues that religious memes are like computer viruses that contain a “copy me” program not unlike those irritating chain letters and computer virus “warnings” that command you to “copy and distribute” the document—if you do, happiness and success will be abundant; if you do not, misery and failure will be your fate: “From an early age children are brought up by their Catholic parents to believe that if they break certain rules they will burn in hell forever after death. The children cannot easily test this since neither hell nor God can be seen, although He can see everything they do. So they must simply live in life-long fear until death, when they will find out for sure, or not. The idea of hell is thus a self-perpetuating meme.”

  There may be something to this “God as meme” argument in the sense that all religions employ techniques to increase their membership, to compete against other religions, and to perpetuate themselves into future generations. Of course, all organizations do this—if not, they would quickly go the way of the Neanderthals and eight-track tapes. And it might even be possible to test meme theory through comparing and examining the exceptions. Judaism, for example, has a rather weak “copy me” program: Members are not encouraged to proselytize and recruit new members; converting to Judaism requires considerable time, energy, and commitment; interfaith marriages (where the non-Jewish spouse may or may not convert) are discouraged; and an aura of exclusivity (instead of the usual inclusivity found in most religions) surrounds the faith. As a consequence, the number of Jews worldwide for the past half century (after the Holocaust decimated their numbers) has hovered around thirteen million. By contrast, Catholicism, with one of the most effective “copy-me” memes ever created, boasts of a membership roll in excess of one billion souls. No corporate marketing and advertising program has even come close to the Catholic church’s nearly two-millennium-long campaign of recruitment and conversion.

  This meme’s-eye view is intriguing, but there are a number of logical and scientific problems outlined by cognitive psychologist James Polichak, including not providing a clear operational definition of a meme, not presenting a testable model for how memes influence culture and why standard selection models are not adequate, ignoring the sophisticated social science models of information transfer already in place, and circularity in the explanatory power of memes. Blackmore has addressed these and other criticisms in her 1999 book. The Meme Machine, but what remains especially troubling is the pejorative and hostile spin put on religious memes by the memeticists—corporations employ memes, musicians and authors compose memes, science itself is a meme, but religion is a virus, a disease, a scourge on humanity, which, as with AIDS or some stealthy computer virus that threatens to erase the entire contents of civilization’s hard drive, we must rid ourselves of before it does us in.

  There is, unfortunately, much historical evidence to support this perspective. From the Crusades’ numerous attempts to cleanse the Holy Land of infidels (anyone who was not a proper Christian), to the Inquisition’s efforts to purge society of heretics (anyone who dissented from Christian dogma), to the Counter Reformation’s push to extirpate reforming Protestants from Catholic lands, to the Holy Wars of the late twentieth century that continue to produce death rolls in the millions, all have been done in the name of God and the One True Religion. However, for every one of these grand tragedies there are ten thousand acts of personal kindness and social good that go largely unreported in the history books or on the evening news. Religion, like all social institutions of such historical depth and cultural impact, cannot be reduced to an unambiguous good or evil; shades of gray complexity abound in all such societal structures, and religion should not be treated any differently than, say, political organizations. One could easily build a case that state-sponsored terrorism, revolutions, and wars make even these horrific religion-sponsored catastrophies appear mild by comparison. If God is a meme, so is King and President; and if religion is a virus, politics is a full-blown epidemic replete with copy-me memes such as nationalism, jingoism, and outright racism. Yet no memeticist would propose that we do away with the state. Why? Because the state is a complex social entity with countless nuanced beneficent effects that go along with the pernicious.

  Belief in God may partially be explained through the influence of techniques described by memeticists, but memes do not get to the core of what is going on inside the mind of the believer. To reach into that we must ask believers why they believe.

  SCIENTISTS’ BELIEF IN GOD

  For those atheists who believe that the secularization thesis is more prescriptive than descriptive (that is, even though secular institutions are not replacing religion, they should), there is the problem of explaining why so many scientists believe in God. In 1997, the British science journal Nature published the results of a random sampling of 1,000 scientists (from the latest edition of American Men and Women of Science), compari
ng these findings to a similar study from 1916 by the psychologist of religion, James Leuba. As earlier in the century, approximately 40 percent of scientists proclaimed a belief in a personal God. (Of the 60 percent who said they do not believe, 45 percent were strong in their convictions of “personal disbelief,” whereas 15 percent consider themselves agnostics.) Edward Larson and Larry Witham, who conducted the 1997 study, concluded: “The stereotype of scientists is that they tend to reserve judgment about things they don’t know about. It turns out not only in history but about the same in our time, that scientists seem to know what they believe—or don’t believe. Either they’re a theist or a nontheist. There was not that great sea of doubt I would have expected.”

  Belief in immortality was a different story. Here we see a shift downward in belief by more than 10 percent, as well as a change in belief across fields. Eighty years ago Leuba found that biologists showed the highest rate of disbelief—almost 70 percent—whereas today physicists and astronomers were the biggest skeptics at close to 80 percent. Of all the sciences, Larson and Witham found that mathematicians are the most likely to believe in God, coming in at 45 percent. (See the graph, showing the breakdown of belief between 1916 and 1996.)

  Larson and Witham concluded that “religious Americans will doubtless be pleased to know that as many as 40 percent of scientists agree with them about God and an afterlife.” This study, however, stirred up a hornet’s nest among many scientists, who felt that the 40 percent figure was too high. Gerald Bergman, for example, surveyed the literature on the religious beliefs of scientists and concluded: “The level of commitment and strength of belief is not always easy to determine. Many scientists attend church for the sake of their families, and many are simply following the tradition in which they were raised.” Since scientists do not speak with one voice, in a follow-up study Larson and Witham controlled for “eminence,” or what their predecessor James Leuba called the “greater” scientists—those who held “superior knowledge, understanding, and experience.” Leuba discovered that disbelief in God rose from 60 percent among the general scientific population, to 67 percent and 85 percent in two different samples among these “greater” scientists (defined as members of the National Academy of Sciences, an extremely exclusive body whose members must be voted in based on a stellar body of original research). Eighty years later, Larson and Witham found, even more than Leuba, that when eminence is controlled for, disbelief in God rose to 69 percent among biologists, and 79 percent for physicists. When “doubt” or “agnosticism” is factored in, actual belief in God among eminent scientists (averaged over all fields) drops to a paltry 7 percent. Why? Larson and Witham attribute the difference with Leuba not to the intervening years, but to the fact that their sampling of “greater” scientists was from the National Academy of Sciences, a considerably more “elite” group than Leuba’s, which was taken from the standard (and not so selective) reference work of the time, American Men of Science.

  It should be reemphasized that these figures are for Americans. The United Kingdom, Europe, and other developed nations of the world show lower levels of belief for both the general population and among scientists, and creationism is almost nonexistent outside of the United States (with some isolated pockets, such as in Australia and New Zealand). The University of Cincinnati political scientist, George Bishop, for example, reported that while about 45 percent of Americans reject evolution and accept a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible creation story, only 7 percent do in Great Britain and even less in Germany, Norway, Russia, and the Netherlands. In the seventeen developed nations he studied, Bishop found that Americans were the most likely to accept the Bible as “the actual word of God … to be taken literally, word for word,” and the least likely to read the Bible as “an ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.” In his survey published in The Public Perspective, the journal of the Roper Center, Bishop noted that the groups most likely to endorse biblical literalism and reject evolutionary theory were women, older Americans, the less well-educated, Southerners, African Americans, and fundamentalist Protestants.

  WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD

  For years after the founding of the Skeptics Society in 1992, we were accused by the media and public of being an organization of atheists. Curious to know the level of religious disbelief in the society, I conducted a survey of members in 1995. The society is a highly educated group, a fifth of whom have Ph.D.s and almost three-quarters of whom are college graduates. With most members working in the sciences and other professional careers, I expected the survey to show an extremely low level of belief in God. The results were surprising. While the vast majority of this group reported being skeptical about such things as the paranormal, reincarnation, near-death experiences, immortality, and Satan, over a third thought it “very likely” or “possible” that there is a God. At the other end of the spectrum, to the question Do you think there is a God (a purposeful higher intelligence that created the universe)?, 35 percent said, “Very Likely” or “Possibly,” while 67 percent said, “Not Very Likely,” “Very Unlikely,” or “Definitely Not” (some answered more than one category). Nor were skeptics as oppugnant toward religion as expected. For example, 77 percent said they believe that religion is “always” or “sometimes” a force for morality and social stability.

  In retrospect, those who might best be described as “militant atheists”—whose behavior often resembles in intensity that of the fanatical believers they despise—appear to be a vocal minority. The 35 percent of skeptics who believe that God’s existence is either very likely or possible is not too far off Larson and Witham’s 42 percent of general scientists who profess belief. It is also in the range of a 1969 Carnegie Commission study of 60,000 college professors that revealed that 34 percent of physical scientists considered themselves “religiously conservative,” and 43 percent said they attended church two to three times a month, the latter figure being not so different from the general population.

  So, while the majority of skeptics and scientists do not believe in God, a surprisingly large minority do. The question is, why? Why do scientists and skeptics believe in God? For that matter, why does anyone believe in God? As we have seen already, the question is partially answered by how our brains and genes are wired. But only partially. Although estimates of a 50 percent influence by genes on religiosity sounds like a lot, we must remember that genes do not determine behavior so much as code for a range of reactions to the environment in a complex and always interactive feedback loop between the two. Therefore the environment still plays an extremely powerful role in the expression of genetic traits. What is that role?

  In 1998, MIT social scientist Frank Sulloway and I conducted an empirical study to answer this question, along with the more general one of why people believe in God. We began with a more sophisticated follow-up survey of members of the Skeptics Society, which had doubled in size since 1995. The survey was divided into four parts that included family background, religious beliefs, reasons for belief or disbelief, and an essay question asking why people believe (or disbelieve), and why they think other people believe. We followed up this survey with another that was mailed to a random sample of Americans.

  The Skeptics Survey

  Of the approximately 1,700 respondents to the Skeptics Society survey, 78 percent were men, 22 percent were women, and the average age was 49. Surprisingly, although twice the size of the first study, this group was just as well educated as the 1995 group, with over a fifth holding Ph.D.s and over three-quarters college graduates. (As we shall see, education plays a crucial role in religiosity.) Since the wording of the questionnaire had changed, the answers to the question Do you believe there is a God (a purposeful higher intelligence that created the universe)? varied slightly from the first survey.

  In a similar question, 14 percent called themselves theists and 23 percent agnostics. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, there is a significant difference between having no bel
ief in a God and believing there is no God, and for this reason we asked specifically where nonbelievers fell on this issue. We found 22 percent nontheists (no belief in God), while 32 percent said they were atheists (there is no God). In all, 18 percent, or almost a fifth, said, “Definitely yes” or “Very likely yes” there is a God. However, since only 14 percent called themselves theists, clearly some who think of themselves as agnostics also have some belief in God. In fact, 2 percent who called themselves agnostics also answered, “Definitely yes” or “Very likely yes” to the God question. It would seem possible then to believe in God while simultaneously having some doubts about His existence. All of this shows just how personal and subjective religious beliefs can be.

  Interestingly, although 67 percent of our respondents attended church at least once a week while growing up, a startling 94 percent said they “never” or “almost never” attend church now. How can so many people believe in God yet not attend church? One answer is that although 70 percent of skeptics reported having no religious affiliation at present, 30 percent do, with Jews, Catholics, and Unitarians accounting for 20 of the 30 percent. So, while skeptics as a group are not religious in any traditional sense, a significant minority belong to religious organizations and also have some belief in God.