How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  So what? For Gould, the disappearance of .400 hitting is just one of many examples of how systems change over time and how our bias of progress and complexity has led us to misunderstad historical change. “All of these mistaken beliefs arise out of the same analytical flaw in our reasoning—our Platonic tendency to reduce a broad spectrum to a single, pinpointed essence. This way of thinking allows us to confirm our most ingrained biases—that humans are the supreme being on this planet; that all things are inherently driven to become more complex; and that almost any subject can be expressed and understood in terms of an average.” In baseball there is a bell-curve variation from worst to best players; what has happened in the past century is that while the league average has remained the same, the “spread” has shrunk as the entire system has marched closer toward that outer limit. It is this spread that matters, not the single point on it. As an example of the latter Gould relates his personal battle with abdominal mesothelioma, a rare and usually fatal form of cancer for which he was given eight months to live. That was in 1982. What happened ? The “eight months” was a median that did not describe the variation within the entire system (the spread) which, fortunately for Gould, has a long right tail on which he is located.

  As in baseball and disease prognosis, evolution can be illustrated by a bell curve of organisms from simple cells to complex mammals of today. But what else could evolution have done?, Gould asks. In the spread of life, there is a left wall of simplicity—any simpler and it would not be alive. For life to evolve it could only have gotten more complex—evolution reflects “an increase in total variation by expansion away from a lower limit, or ‘left wall,’ of simplest conceivable form.” It’s the same thing with size: “Size increase is really random evolution away from small size, not directed evolution toward large size.”

  Why is this idea revolutionary? Because change is a result of the whole system (the “full house”) expanding, not a progressive march of an average “toward” something. Evolution is not “going” anywhere in a teleological sense. It is massively contingent, and we are but a minor twig on the richly branching bush of life. “The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity.” With that the full impact of the Darwinian revolution is felt. We are not even special in the impersonal world of materialistic evolution. Where, then, shall we turn?

  CONTINGENCY AND FREEDOM

  In numerous places Dennett accuses Gould of “radical contingency,” particularly with regard to its significance for human freedom: “If we can just have contingency—radical contingency—this will give the mind some elbow room, so it can act, and be responsible for its own destiny, instead of being the mere effect of a mindless cascade of mechanical processes! This conclusion, I suggest, is Gould’s ultimate destination.”

  Nowhere that I know of has Gould modified contingency with “radical” (i.e., to the exclusion of necessity, or to the degree that necessity becomes irrelevant, which is what most philosophers mean by radical contingency). Yet I partly agree with Dennett. Whether it is Gould’s ultimate destination or not, it is the ultimate implication of contingency. But contingency is not in contrast with the algorithm of natural selection—Dennett’s “mindless cascade of mechanical processes.” Contingency interacts with the necessitating force of natural selection. Natural selection is both constrained by contingencies and, in turn, confines them—for example, genetic mutations, chromosomal aberrations, and asteroid-triggered mass extinctions. Natural selection is also constrained by other necessitating forces such as geography, climate, and self-organizing complexity. Natural selection may be Darwin’s dangerous idea, but it is not the only one. (Contingency would also seem to undermine critics’ charges that Gould’s Marxist beliefs have shaped his evolutionary theories: contingency not only subverts evolutionary determinism, it negates socioeconomic determinism, the very foundation of Marxist ideology, because, as Gould himself notes, “when we realize that the actual outcome did not have to be, that any alteration in any step along the way would have unleashed a cascade down a different channel, we grasp the causal power of individual events. Contingency is the affirmation of control by immediate events over destiny.”)

  Contingency helps us think about human meaning and freedom within a scientific perspective. Although all contingencies are caused—and thus determinism lives in the model of contingentnecessity—the number of contingent causes, and the complexity of their interactions with necessities, make the predetermination of human action essentially impossible; but because of this, the determination of human action on history becomes possible. An analogy between the physical and behavioral sciences is helpful: The movement of atoms in space, like the movement of people in the environment, is caused, but their collisions (atomic) and encounters (human) happen by contingent-necessity. Contingency leads to collisions and encounters; necessity governs speed and direction. An effect, dependent upon the activity of one or more causes, may seem to be produced by accident but is really the result of contingent-necessity, or a conjuncture of events compelling a certain course of action by constraining prior conditions. The words compelling and constraining were chosen to convey powerful influence but not omnipotence. Since we cannot possibly understand the innumerable and interactive causes of our actions, and since we will never know the initial conditions of our own personal histories, we feel free. And why not? No cause or set of causes we select to examine as the determiners of human action can be complete, thus they cannot be considered as determining causes, only influencing ones. There will always be other causes left unexamined. Human freedom arises out of this ignorance of causes, and the model of contingent-necessity explains why. And because of the trigger effect of contingency, and its cascading consequences, we are also free to change our history. Therefore: Human freedom is action taken with an ignorance of causes within a conjuncture of events, that compels and is compelled to a certain course of action by constraining prior conditions.

  IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE

  Though the majority of Gould’s focus has been on paleontological contingencies, his exemplar for human historical systems is the 1946 holiday film classic by Frank Capra—It’s a Wonderful Life. Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, a small-town building and loan proprietor who, after decades of hard, honest work feels his life has been a failure because he sees nothing of the results of his efforts, and his youthful dreams of seeing and changing the world have seemingly been lost to age and responsibility. Further, some of his friends have managed to break away from the small town to make more money. Where others have ventured out to see the world. George only fantasized about it. His own brother is a decorated war hero, who saved the lives of many men in battle. But George has done seemingly little. His life seems stalled and stagnant, and when financial and familial pressures finally build beyond control on Christmas Eve, George decides to take his life by leaping into the rapids of a nearly frozen river. Fortunately he is interrupted by his guardian angel—Clarence Oddbody—who, knowing George’s humanitarian disposition, jumps in the river before him, triggering George to follow him in to save his life. In recovery, George unloads his problems on Clarence, and then exclaims that he wishes he were never born. Clarence grants him his wish, taking George out of the historical picture and rerunning the story of what his little town of Bedford Falls would have been like without him.

  Suddenly things are not what they used to be, and the changes are mostly slanted toward the negative. The people George helped financially are instead poor and wretched, the buildings he constructed are nonexistent, his wife is a lonely unmarried librarian, his children unborn, and the town is renamed “Pottersville,” after the treacherous banker whose miserly ways prevented those George had helped from ever owning their own homes. His brother, whom George saved in childhood, is not there to save other lives in that specific battle, with the contingent consequences that the lives the brother saved are now also gone. As Clarenc
e guides George through his now unfamiliar surroundings, he is dismayed and shocked. The history of his town is quite different without the influence of George Bailey. He never realized just how many people were dependent upon his seemingly routine existence. “Strange, isn’t it?,” queries Clarence to George at the appropriate moment of enlightenment. “Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

  In the end, of course, Clarence restores the historical sequence to its original condition, with George’s contingent influence intact, and makes a reassuring pronouncement to him: “You see, George, you really had a wonderful life.” In this sense, then, we are all individuals of power and importance. Whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, every encounter and every action, can and does make some degree of difference, ranging from virtually negligent to powerfully diverting. A seemingly innocuous decision, carefully placed in time and circumstance, may affect uncounted others in multitudinous ways.

  Because of the trigger effect and contingent-necessities, and the fact that at any point in the system it could be early as well as late (since we do not know when our personal system will end), one never knows which actions will or will not make a difference. Only the historian looking back is privileged to so judge. It is this lack of foresight and prognostication that makes the potential for the power of contingency and individuality so puissant. Since we do not know for certain which actions will matter and which will not, it is as rational as not to assume the former than the latter. It may be nothing but wishful thinking to desire one’s place in history to be contingently significant, but since we do not know, why not act as if it does?

  FINDING MEANING IN A CONTINGENT UNIVERSE

  I am often asked by believers why I abandoned Christianity and how I found meaning in the apparently meaningless universe presented by science. The implication is that the scientific worldview is an existentially depressing one. Without God, I am bluntly told, what’s the point? If this is all there is, there is no use. To the contrary. For me, quite the opposite is true. The conjuncture of losing my religion, finding science, and discovering glorious contingency was remarkably empowering and liberating. It gave me a sense of joy and freedom. Freedom to think for myself. Freedom to take responsibility for my own actions. Freedom to construct my own meanings and my own destinies. With the knowledge that this may be all there is, and that I can trigger my own cascading changes, I was free to live life to its fullest.

  This is not to say that those who are religious cannot share in these freedoms. But for me, and not just for me, a world without monsters, ghosts, demons, and gods unfetters the mind to soar to new heights, to think unthinkable thoughts, to imagine the unimaginable, to contemplate infinity and eternity knowing that no one is looking back. The universe takes on a whole new meaning when you know that your place in it was not foreordained, that it was not designed for us—indeed, that it was not designed at all. If we are nothing more than star stuff and biomass, how special life becomes. If the tape were played again and again without the appearance of our species, how extraordinary becomes our existence, and, correspondingly, how cherished. To share in the sublimity of knowledge generated by other human minds, and perhaps even to make a tiny contribution toward that body of knowledge that will be passed down through the ages—part of the cumulative wisdom of a single species on a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary star on the remote edge of a not-so-unusual galaxy, itself a member of a cluster of galaxies billions of light years from nowhere, is sublime beyond words.

  Since we are such a visual primate, perhaps images can help capture the feeling. The Hubble Telescope Deep Field photograph on the following page reveals as never before the rich density of galaxies in our neck of the universe, is as grand a statement about the sacred as any medieval cathedral. How vast is the cosmos. How contingent is our place. Yet out of this apparent insignificance emerges a glorious contingency—the recognition that we did not have to be, but here we are. In fact, compare this slice of the cosmos to two of the most hallowed and sacrosanct structures on Earth—both medieval in age but on opposite sides of the planet, literally and figuratively—Machu Picchu and Chartres Cathedral. Machu Picchu captures the numina through an interlocking relationship between nature and humanity that generated in me an almost mystical connection across space and time with the ancients who had once lived and loved atop this 8,000-foot precipice. This is the “lost city” in so many ways. When I stood inside Chartres Cathedral with my soulmate, lit candles, and we promised each other our eternal love, it was a more sacred moment than any I have experienced. Skeptics and scientists cannot experience the numinous? Nonsense. You do not need a spiritual power to experience the spiritual. You do not need to be mystical to appreciate the mystery. Standing beneath a canopy of galaxies, atop a pillar of reworked stone, or inside a transept of holy light, my unencumbered soul was free to love without constraint, free to use my senses to enjoy all the pleasures and endure all the pains that come with such freedom. I was enfranchised for life, emancipated from the bonds of restricting tradition, and unyoked from the rules written for another time in another place for another people. I was now free to try to live up to that exalted moniker—Homo sapiens—wise man.

  Three views of grandeur: (clockwise from the upper left) A tiny slice of the universe as seen from the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on the Hubble Space Telescope, looking back 10 billion years to reveal hundreds of galaxies all packed into a space 1/140 the apparent size of the full Moon near the handle of the Big Dipper. Machu Picchu, the “lost city” of the Incas, as photographed by the author on the day of the “harmonic convergence” in June 1986, when hundreds of people encircled in a spiritual ceremony. Chartres Cathedral, the most consecrated of all medieval buildings. It is still unsurpassed for sacred sublimity.

  AFTERWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

  God on the Brain

  About a decade ago when I began research on the question of why people believe in God, I asked a colleague in a religious studies program at Occidental College (where I was teaching at the time) to recommend the latest pathbreaking scientific work in this area. “William James’s 1890 Varieties of Religious Experience,” he responded sardonically, explaining that in his opinion the field was largely moribund.

  That’s an exaggeration, of course, but his point was that with the exception of a handful of psychologists teaching at theological seminaries, mainstream social and cognitive scientists had largely ignored the question. This has changed dramatically in the past decade, as the renewed debate on the relationship of science and religion has exploded onto the cultural landscape and scientists from a variety of fields have jumped into the fray. Much of this research, along with my own, appeared in the first edition of this book. In this new chapter for the revised second edition I would like to review, critique, and comment on the research that has come out since the original edition of How We Believe.

  THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF GOD

  I begin with a book with the intriguing title Why God Won’t Go Away, by Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, both medical doctors, with Newberg holding joint appointments in radiology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and D’Aquili, now deceased, a professor of psychiatry at Penn. God won’t go away, the authors argue, because the religious impulse is rooted in the biology of the brain. When Buddhist monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray, for example, their brain scans (these scientists used the single photon emission computed tomography, or SPECT) indicate strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a bundle of neurons the authors have dubbed the OAA, or Orientation Association Area, whose job it is to orient the body in physical space (people with damage to this area have a hard time negotiating their way around a house). When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly there is a sharp distinction between self and non-self. When OAA is in sleep mode—as in deep meditation and prayer—that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the l
ines between reality and fantasy. Is this what happens to monks who feel a sense of oneness with the universe, or with nuns who feel the presence of God?