How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  What we’re really after here in our search for scientific answers to the question of why people believe in God is the undergirding beneath the panoply of religious faiths. For Michael Barnes, a professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, the commonality is to be found in the thinking process itself. In his cleverly argued book, Stages of Thought, Barnes uses Piaget’s stage theory of development to argue that cultures, like individuals, develop in stages from easier cognitive skills to harder ones, and that not only religion and faith, but science and reason have followed this general pattern. Both religion and science evolved from simple to complex because complex cognitive thinking first requires simple cognitive technologies such as writing and formal logic, as well as simple social institutions that reinforce those skills that can then be built into formal religions and sciences. Barnes is certainly correct about science and technology, because they are cumulative and complex and depend significantly on what came before. I’m not so sure about religion. Is monotheism really more cognitively challenging than polytheism, itself more complex than animism? Might it not be the opposite, where the world is so much easier to explain with one God than many, and many gods simpler than the spirit-haunted world of so-called primitive peoples? A stronger case for Barnes’s cognitive model can be made within religions and especially for theology, which has turned the question of God’s existence into a quagmire of syllogism and contorted logic (see Chapter 5).

  On one level it is that very stage of advanced cognitive development that Huston Smith rails against in his book Why Religion Matters, a passionate personal manifesto for why society must return to its more fundamental roots of basic spirituality. While not completely disparaging science (his oncologist did save his life), Smith claims that it has trapped us in a tunnel whose floor is scientism, whose walls are liberal democracy, higher education, and a morally sterile legal system, and whose ceiling is a cowardly media. It is a closed system that excludes old-time religion. To get it back we must exit the tunnel and embrace the sacred. “The sacred world is the truer, more veridical world, in part because it includes the mundane world.” Barnes would describe Smith’s mundane world as an early stage of cognitive development, and that does appear to be the level at which Smith thinks religion should operate. Religion matters, he says, because “there is within us—in even the blithest, most lighthearted among us—a fundamental disease. It acts like an unquenchable thirst that renders the vast majority of us incapable of ever coming to full peace.” Maybe for thee, but not for me. And that’s the problem with Smith’s book. It is, by its nature, personal and anecdotal, and so ultimately can tell us nothing more about why God and religion persist for anyone beyond Smith and those he copiously quotes in support.

  What can inform us about these persistent questions? Science. Although it has its limitations, science is the best method ever devised for answering questions about our world and ourselves. Therefore, Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is a penetratingly insightful scientific analysis of religion because as an anthropologist he understands that any explanation must take into account the rich diversity of religious practices and beliefs around the world, and as a scientist he knows that any explanatory model must account for this diversity. Boyer is at his ethnographic best in describing the countless peculiar religious rituals he and his anthropological brethren have recorded, and especially in identifying the shortcomings of virtually every explanation for religion ever offered. You name it, Boyer has an exception to it. To that end, anyone offering a theory of religion should read this book before transducing thought to ink. As a consequence, however, Boyer himself fails to provide a satisfactory explanation because he knows that religion is not a single entity that is the result of a single cause. “There cannot be a magic bullet to explain the existence and common features of religion, as the phenomenon is the result of aggregate relevance —that is, of successful activation of a whole variety of mental systems.” Here the book bogs down in the jargon-laden field of cognitive science, as the author struggles to unite an array of disparate findings, but comes up empty handed. “Is there some religious center in the brain, some special cortical area, some special neural network that handles God-related thoughts? Not really … religious persons are not different from nonreligious ones in essential cognitive functions.” Then what is the origin of religious faith and belief? For Boyer they “seem to be simple by-products of the way concepts and inferences are doing their work for religion in much the same way as for other domains.” in other words, religion requires no special explanation, an answer many will find unsatisfactory.

  Whatever its origin, what does the future hold for religion? One avenue for the ever-burgeoning religious landscape is cyberspace, the subject of the aptly titled Give Me that Online Religion by Brenda Brasher. It is a delightful romp through spiritual cyborgs, virtual monks, and the new world of cyberspirituality. Global prayer-chains, e-prayer wheels, cybercast seders, and neo-pagan cyber-rituals are all practiced from home, finally making Martin Luther’s proclamation of “every man his own priest” a virtual reality. Even mainstream religions have gone online, offering adherents and potential converts a smorgasbord of doctrines to download (except Scientology. whose lawyers pounced on an ex-member who was posting their religious documents like Torquemada on a relapsed heretic). Much of this book will leave you LOL (for the computer illiterate that’s laughing out loud), my favorite being Brasher’s discussion of the more than 800,000 web “shrines” devoted to Princess Diana and other celebrities. “Scanning fan sites, it is easy to believe that the spiritual discipline of imitato Christus has been replaced by imitato Keanu Reeves.” For those who do not wish to risk choosing the wrong God to achieve immortality. read about the transhumanists. who believe that some day we will be able to download our minds from our protein brains that survive only about a century, to silicon-chip brains that can last hundreds of centuries, by which time they can be downloaded into something more permanent still, ad infinitum to infinity. Is this in any sense possible? The transhumanists think it is, but since the technology is not yet available cryonics is a temporary solution, a quick fix if you will. Recall the brouhaha that developed shortly after baseball legend Ted Williams died, when his son whisked the body away to Phoenix, Arizona, where it was cryonically frozen at minus 320 degrees. The hope is that one day “Teddy Ballgame” would be resurrected to play again. If Williams’s body were reanimated one day, would it still be the cranky perfectionist who was the last to hit .400? In other words, even if future cryonics scientists could bring him back to life, would it still be “him”? Is the “soul” of Ted Williams also in deep freeze along with his brain and body?

  Duke University philosopher Owen Flanagan would probably answer “yes,” if by soul we mean the pattern of Ted Williams’s memories, personality, and personhood, and if the freezing process did not destroy the neural network in the brain where such entities are stored. But as for some ethereal entity that continues past physical death (whether buried, cremated, or frozen), Flanagan would offer an emphatic “no.” In his latest book, The Problem of the Soul, a courageous and daring look into the heart of what it means to be human, Flanagan builds a bridge between two irreconcilable views of the mind: the humanistic/theological versus the scientific/naturalistic. The former includes a place within our brains for nonphysical mind, free will, and a soul, but fails to offer any tangible proof that such things even exist. The latter is grounded in solid empirical data but fails to show how humans as evolved animals can lead moral and meaningful lives. Flanagan’s purpose is to reconcile the two, and he has done so successfully in this crisply reasoned work. “Can we do without the cluster of concepts that are central to the humanistic image in its present form—the soul and its suite—and still retain some or most of what these concepts were designed to do?” Flanagan’s answer is an emphatic “yes.” To that I add “amen.”

  It may simply be that I resonate well with Flan
agan because I am a nonbelieving, nontheistic, naturalistic scientist. After a lifetime spent reading the obfuscating works of philosophers and theologians twisting logic into pretzelian contortions to prove such unprovable concepts as God, the soul, and free will, I want to stand up and cheer when I read passages such as this one from Flanagan’s opening salvo: “There is no point beating around the bush. Supernatural concepts have no philosophical warrant. Furthermore, it is not that such concepts are displaced only if we accept, from the start, a naturalistic or scientific visions of things. There simply are no good arguments—theological, philosophical, humanistic, or scientific—for beliefs in divine beings, miracles, or heavenly afterlives.”

  How then, without such ephemera, can we find meaning in this meaningless cosmos? By broadening the scope of science. Flanagan convincingly demonstrates that the scientific quest to understand our place in the cosmos and our relation to other beings, including and especially our own species, itself generates both awe and reverence—feelings that were previously the exclusive domain of religion: “There is benevolence and compassion expressed by a feeling of connection to all creatures, indeed even to the awesome inanimate cosmos.” This connection comes through knowing something about creatures and the cosmos, and Flanagan spends most of the book discussing the nature of what it means to be human, how brains can create minds (that are not separate from neurons), why free will is not necessarily incompatible with the deterministic assumption behind making free moral choices, how natural selves exist and retain most of the benefits of supernatural selves (souls) with the exception of immortality, and how ethical principles can be derived (and consequent moral behaviors generated) through a purely naturalistic worldview. Here the reading slows a little as Flanagan reviews all the major competing views before delivering his verdict on them along with his alternatives (for example, it takes fifty pages to dispense with the soul and another fifty pages to rebuild it through a natural system). But the effort pays off, as when he delivers this brilliant denouement showing how it is not the answers of science that provide transcendence, it is the quest: “It is becoming, worthy, and noble. It is the most we can aim for given the kind of creature we are, and happily it is enough. If you think this is not so, if you want more, if you wish that your life had prospects for transcendent meaning, for more than the personal satisfaction and contentment you can achieve while you are alive, and more than what you will have contributed to the well-being of this world after you die, then you are still in the grip of illusions. Trust me, you can’t get more. But what you can get, if you live well, is enough.”

  It is enough for Flanagan. And it is enough for me and the (roughly) 60 percent of practicing scientists who, according to a 1996 survey by Ed Larson, have no belief in God or an afterlife. But will it ever be enough for the masses? Can we convince hundreds of millions of people—even billions of souls—that the scientific worldview is good enough? The realist in me remains pessimistic. But the idealist in me wants more—a worldview where science is presented as a humanistic and humane enterprise. Science is constructive, not destructive. A few structures (like the soul) may be demolished to make room for the new edifice, but many of the contents of the old building will be preserved in the new. That is the cumulative and uplifting nature of science.

  IN SEARCH OF SPIRITUAL MEANING

  There is a humorous scene in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, when his unfulfilled and neurotically Jewish character fails to find meaning in alternate religious expressions after visiting a Catholic church and returning home with a loaf of white bread, a jar of mayonnaise, and a crucifix. The reason, of course, is that the trappings and facade of a religion will not get you to that deeper place where so many desire to go. This is the deeper side of the psychology of religion, the exploration of which I found illuminating in Martha Sherrill’s narrative account entitled The Buddha from Brooklyn. There are no grand theories here, no sweeping pronouncements about “what it all means,” but it is a compelling case study in the search for spiritual meaning in an age of materialism. This is the story of Catharine Burroughs, born and raised in Brooklyn as Alyce Louise Zeoli, who was severely abused as a child but found redemption first as a psychic and spiritual counselor in suburban Maryland, then as a Tibetan tulku, or reborn lama (a type of living Buddha—thus accounting for the book’s alliterative title) when she was told by a visiting Tibetan religious leader (His Holiness Penor Rinpoche, who sits just beneath the Dalai Lama himself) that she was the reincarnation of a sixteenth-century Tibetan saint. This conjuncture of events led to her becoming the first American woman to ever achieve such high religious status in this faith.

  Now holding the honorific title of Jetsunma Ahkön Norbu Lhamo, or just Jetsunma, Zeoli/Burroughs (name changes are common in this story) founded a Tibetan Buddhist center in Maryland in 1986 and quickly developed a cast of loyal followers, which we meet one by one in detail through the sensitive and searching eyes of Sherrill, who is herself seeking spiritual balance. The history of how Burroughs turned to the mystical in response to her tragic upbringing (including cigarette burns on her body and beatings with a radiator brush), however, is not where the power of this story is to be found. The downtrodden bootstrapping themselves into happiness is vintage Americana and not especially interesting outside of the particulars of how it was done.

  Where Sherrill’s insight is most valuable is in introducing us not only to the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, but in exploring the fascinating ways it has been modernized for the 1990s. Imagine a Buddha who wears makeup, paints her nails red, and shops at mall stores while also believing that we will all reincarnate “countless times, as bugs and animals, even descend into the ghost realms and hell realms, before you achieved liberation from the endless hamster wheel of death and rebirth.” One of the reasons the characters in this story continue reinventing themselves is that in Tibetan Buddhism “the student progresses toward enlightenment by practicing intense introspection and retraining the mind, learning to see the world differently. The student is taught, sometimes rather painfully, to abandon the notion of self (it is a delusion anyway) and to go in search of his or her own Buddha nature.”

  Tibetan Buddhism, however, is not just focused inwardly; in fact, true enlightenment comes through “being of benefit to all sentient beings,” as Sherrill explains. “Everything in Tibetan Buddhism is about sentient beings—and ending the suffering of sentient beings. You say sentient beings instead of ‘human beings’ because you don’t want to exclude anybody, and sentient is a way of describing all lifeforms that are conscious, sensate—all people, all animals, all bugs and fish, including the invisible realms, the ghost realms and the hell realms.” This is not a religion for the spiritually faint of heart. “There are eighteen different hells in Tibetan Buddhism, and there are countless beings there, too, all hoping to be released.”

  Are people released from their private hells in this religion? This is the subtext of Sherrill’s narrative as she explores the many ways people deal with the slings and arrows of modern life, and the answer is a highly qualified one. Some do, some don’t. Some leave too early, some stay too long. Some are undercommitted, some are overcommitted. The story of Betsy Elgin (aka Elizabeth, aka Alana) is an especially troubling one. Attractive, mid-thirties, happily married with children (but with the usual doubts about the meaning of it all), Elgin first encountered Zeoli (or should it be Alana met Jetsunma?) when the latter was doing psychic readings for twenty bucks a pop. Occasional meetings became regular rituals, time with the Buddha took precedence over time with the family, and before long, she recalls, “I remember laying in bed thinking, Here I am in my perfect town house with my perfect little kids and my perfect little husband and everything … but why do I feel so empty?”

  To find out she consulted a channeled entity named Santu, who told her to divorce her husband, which she promptly did, moving into an apartment with her two daughters. In the sociological study of cults this is what is known as detachment—t
he individual is removed from her traditional reference sources and isolated into the new group that now controls her life. Elgin later confessed as much: “I was needy and compulsively fixated on her and our friendship. I was trying to make that replace what I had given up. I felt a need to have something.” It still wasn’t enough, as Sherrill explained: “She went through a period of promiscuity, becoming sexually involved with several men at the center and others outside. For nearly two years ‘I was either at the temple,’ she said, ‘or out on a date. It was a bit crazy.’ Her daughters were left alone at night. Eventually the older one moved out to live with her father. Her younger girl, just sixteen, was ‘close to the edge.’” Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident, and Sherrill considers the sometimes subtle differences between a cult and a religion.

  Still, a much more common story is like that of Sherrill herself, a successful journalist at a prestigious publication (The Washington Post), who discovers in her self-searching that “aside from the well-trod pleasures of the quotidian—holidays at the beach, dance parties—you could still feel a greater need for something else entirely. You could feel a hunger and emptiness. You could be tormented by unanswered questions. Modern life leaves many people feeling insignificant and a bit lost. If you were living a spiritual life—and believed you were helping to end suffering—that could make you feel quite potent.”

  Indeed, and here we begin to approach that mystery of mysteries of why people believe. Sherrill does not give us the answer, but she does offer one explanation that carries an important qualifier: “There is nobility in sacrifice—any sacrifice. And as much as I didn’t want to admit this, there is in fact a sort of ladder that people seem to ascend in order to be liberated from self-concern and see themselves as part of something larger. And sometimes people do ridiculous things to get there.”