why we believe in god(s)
A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith
J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD with Clare Aukofer
Foreword by Richard Dawkins
Advance Praise
“As an amateur woodworker, I can state from experience that there’s nothing like having the right tools for the job you’re trying to do. Here Andy Thomson and Clare Aukofer have assembled an oh-so-handy tool chest for the layperson who wants to think more clearly about the ever-less-mystical origins of religious belief.”
—August E. Brunsman IV, Executive Director, Secular Student Alliance
“Simply put, this book provides the most compelling scientific explanation for religion ever advanced. Andy Thomson and Clare Aukofer explicate precisely that evolved psychological and brain mechanisms combine to produce religious experiences, and show how religious leaders exploit these mechanisms, sometimes with disastrous results. The book is fascinating from start to finish. It’s at the top of my ‘most highly recommended books’ for 2011.”
—David M. Buss, author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind
“Despite all the advancements we have made in science, technology, and medicine, our Paleolithic psychology continues to drag us down into the abyss of archaic beliefs, blind faith, and tribal conflict. Andy Thomson and Clare Aukofer explain to us not only why the human mind is so susceptible to believing the unbelievable but also why we are willing to not only die for it, but kill for it as well. Read this book, and when you are done—send it to your congressional representative.”
—R. Elisabeth Cornwell, PhD, Executive Director, Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
“As Andy Thomson and Clare Aukofer point out in this compelling little book, our snap judgments are ‘millions of years in the making’ and so is the human propensity to construct and to believe in gods. I know of no clearer or more concise summary of the various preadaptations that cause us to generate and sustain religious belief.”
—Sarah B. Hrdy, author of Mother Nature and Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
“In my life I’ve seen how desperately we need rational thinking in public policy. This book, dealing with the ultimate issues, can be a framework guiding us to a more rational worldview.”
—Sean Faircloth, Executive Director, Secular Coalition for America
“How does the human brain generate belief in an invisible god? Spurred by his study of suicide terrorism, psychiatrist Andy Thomson and Clare Aukofer elegantly describe many innate capacities of the human brain to explain how we can believe in an unknowable phenomenon: god. The writing is clear, fair, deeply knowledgeable, wickedly intelligent, and full of new scientific facts about how the mind works. This topic touches all of us, from those who wait to pass through airport security to those who live under religious tyranny. Know thy neighbor and thyself; Thomson and Aukofer have given us a smart read.”
—Helen Fisher, PhD, Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University, and author of Why Him? Why Her?
“Brain washed? Andy Thomson and Clare Aukofer clearly explain why we are so susceptible to religious belief. Priests, rabbis, and imams ask us to dance, and then seduce us—and it appears we have a hardwired vulnerability to the seduction. Why We Believe in God(s) is easy and fun to read (and it’s got pictures). No wonder so much of the world believes the fairy tales.”
—Woody Kaplan, Chair, Advisory Board of the Secular Coalition for America, and President, Defending Dissent Foundation
“A much-needed summary of current research on a fascinating question. Many theists ask how religion could be so pervasive if it isn’t true, and this book provides a collection of answers.”
—Amanda K. Metskas, Executive Director, Camp Quest, Inc.
“A stimulating and enlightening journey into the mind we all possess, a mind primed to believe. Andy Thomson and Clare Aukofer take us on a fast-paced trek from how the human brain evolved in a primitive world to how religion harnesses those adaptations in the modern world.”
—Todd Stiefel, President, Stiefel Freethought Foundation
why we believe in god(s)
A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith
J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD with Clare Aukofer
Foreword by Richard Dawkins
PITCHSTONE PUBLISHING Charlottesville, Virginia
Pitchstone Publishing Charlottesville, Virginia 22901
Copyright © 2011 by J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD, and Clare Aukofer Foreword copyright © by Richard Dawkins All rights reserved. Published 2011 Printed in the United States of America
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thomson, J. Anderson.
Why we believe in god(s) : a concise guide to the science of faith / J. Anderson Thomson, Jr. with Clare Aukofer ; [foreword by Richard Dawkins].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-9844932-1-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Psychology, Religious. 2. Faith—Psychology. 3. Religion and science. I.
Aukofer, Clare. II. Title.
BL53.T46 2011
200.1'9—dc22
2010053504
For Jack, my grandson, in the hopes that he will grow up in a world freer of religion’s destructiveness
Contents
Foreword by Richard Dawkins
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. In the Beginning Was the Word: Our Propensity to Believe
2. In the Image and Likeness: Evolution 101
3. Our Daily Bread: Craving a Caretaker
4. All That Is Seen and Unseen: Conceiving Souls
5. Because the Bible Tells Me So: Believing in the Invisible
6. And Deliver Us from Evil: Anthropomorphizing God(s)
7. Thy Will Be Done: Submitting to the Law of God(s)
8. Wherever Two or More of You Are Gathered: Harnessing Brain Chemistry through Ritual
9. Oh Ye of Little Faith: Discovering the Physical Evidence of God(s) as By-product
10. Lest Ye Be Judged: Educating Our Minds
Notes
Glossary
Plates
A. Human Brain, Lateral View
B. Human Brain, Midsagittal View
Foreword by Richard Dawkins
In one of the great understatements of history, The Origin of Species confines its discussion of human evolution to a laconic prophecy: “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” Less often quoted is the beginning of the same paragraph: “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation.” Dr. Thomson is one of the evolutionary psychologists now making Darwin’s forecast come true, and this book about the evolutionary drivers of religiosity would have delighted the old man.
Darwin, though not religious in his maturity, understood the religious impulse. He was a benefactor of Down church and he regularly walked his family there on Sundays (then continued his walk while they went inside). He had been trained to the life of a clergyman, and William Paley’s Natural Theology was his favored undergraduate reading. Darwin killed natural theology’s answer stone dead, but he never lost his preoccupation with its question: the question of function. It is no surprise that he was intrigued by the functional question of religiosity. Why do most people, and all peoples, harbor religious beliefs? “Why” is to be understood in the special functional sense that we today, though not Darwin himself, would call “Darwinian.”<
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How, to put the Darwinian question in modern terms, does religiosity contribute to the survival of genes promoting it? Thomson is a leading proponent of the “by-product” school of thought: religion itself need have no survival value; it is a by-product of psychological predispositions that have.
“Fast food” is a leitmotif of the book: “if you understand the psychology of fast food, you understand the psychology of religion.” Sugar is another good example. It was impossible for our wild ancestors to get enough of it, so we have inherited an open-ended craving that, now that it is easily met, damages our health.
These fast-food cravings are a by-product. And now they become dangerous, because, uncontrolled, they can lead to health problems our ancestors likely never faced. . . . Which brings us to religion.
Another leading evolutionary psychologist, Steven Pinker, explains our love of music in a similar “by-product” way, as “auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties.” For Pinker, the mental faculties supernormally tickled as a by-product by music are mostly concerned with the sophisticated brain software required to disentangle meaningful sounds (for example, language) from background bedlam. Thomson’s fast-food theory of religion emphasizes, rather, those psychological predispositions that can be called social: “adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved to help us negotiate our relationships with other people, to detect agency and intent, and to generate a sense of safety. These mechanisms were forged in the not-so-distant world of our African homeland.”
Thomson’s chapters identify a series of evolved mental faculties exploited by religion, each one beguilingly labelled with a line familiar from scripture or liturgy: “Our Daily Bread”, “Deliver Us from Evil”, “Thy Will Be Done”, “Lest Ye Be Judged.” There are some compelling images:
Think of a two-year-old child reaching out to be picked up and cuddled. He extends his hands above his head and beseeches you. Think now of the Pentecostal worshipper who speaks in tongues. He stretches out his hands above his head, beseeching god in the same “pick-me-up-and-hold-me” gesture. We may lose human attachment figures through death, through misunderstandings, through distance, but a god is always there for us.
To most of us, that arms-extended gesture of the worshipper looks merely foolish. After reading Thomson we shall see it through more penetrating eyes: it is not just foolish, it is infantile.
Then there is our eagerness to detect the deliberate hand of agency.
Why is it you mistake a shadow for a burglar but never a burglar for a shadow? If you hear a door slam, why do you wonder who did it before you consider the wind as the culprit? Why might a child who sees blowing tree limbs through a window fear that it’s the boogeyman come to get him?
The hyperactive agency detection device evolved in the brains of our wild ancestors because of a risk asymmetry. A rustle in the long grass is statistically more likely to be the wind than a leopard. But the cost of a mistake is higher one way than the other. Agents, like leopards and burglars, can kill. Best go with the statistically unlikely guess. (Darwin himself made the point, in an anecdote about his dog’s response to a wind-blown parasol.) Thomson pursues the thought—oversensitivity to agents where there are none—and gives us his elegant explanation of another of the psychological biases upon which religiosity is founded.
Our Darwinian preoccupation with kinship is yet another. For example, in Roman Catholic lore,
The nuns are “sisters” or even “mother superiors,” the priests are “fathers,” the monks are “brothers,” the Pope is the “Holy Father,” and the religion itself is referred to as the “Holy Mother Church.”
Dr. Thomson has made a special study of suicide bombers, and he notes how kin-based psychology is exploited in their recruitment and training:
Charismatic recruiters and trainers create cells of fictive kin, pseudobrothers outraged at the treatment of their Muslim brothers and sisters and separated from actual kin. The appeal of such martyrdom is not just the sexual fantasy of multiple heavenly virgins, but the chance to give chosen kin punched tickets to paradise.
One by one, the other components of religion—community worship, obedience to priestly authority, ritual—receive the Thomson treatment. Every point he makes has the ring of truth, abetted by a crisp style and vivid imagery. Andy Thomson is an outstandingly persuasive lecturer, and it shines through his writing. This short, punchy book will be swiftly read—and long remembered.
Preface
This book arose as an echo of 9/11. My son, Matthew, was training for a new job in a building next to the World Trade Center; he witnessed firsthand the nightmare. My response to his brush with death was to study suicide terrorism.
I am no stranger to human destructiveness. My profession as a forensic psychiatrist gives me in-depth contact with violent men. And for many years I was part of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia, a unique interdisciplinary group of mental health professionals, diplomats, and historians founded by psychiatrist Vamýk Volkan that traveled to hot spots thoughout the world to study and mediate intense conflict.
But despite my professional work and experience with traumatized societies, in the course of my study of suicide terrorism I discovered a largely new and ever-expanding world of ideas and evidence about the human mind, specifically as it relates to religion. The books and articles I utilized were academic, some more accessible than others. I discovered there was no single source that laid out these exciting new ideas in a way easily accessible to an interested reader. That is what I’ve tried to do here.
Religion never made much sense to me. But, like most dutiful sons, I went along with my elders’ beliefs. If it seemed right to them, the people I admired and respected, who knew the world and life, then I best join the procession. Even though I said I believed, there was little emotional conviction to those beliefs. Singing in the choir with my buddies provided pleasant time with friends on Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings. Though the Presbyterian hymnal we used seemed like a collection of funeral dirges, good religious music can be spectacular. Handel’s Messiah moves me to this day.
My training as a psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrist exposed me to Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, and Freud certainly contributed to our understanding of why human minds generate religious beliefs. Yet, his is far from a complete explanation.
Already steeped in the new discipline of evolutionary psychology, I found, in my research on suicide terrorism, the work of such scholars as Scott Atran, Jesse Bering, Pascal Boyer, Stuart Guthrie, Richard Sosis, and Lee Kirkpatrick a revelation. They had figured out religion—or were damn close. Their work informed my three-pronged analysis of suicide bombers.
A bare-bones formulation of suicide terrorism, supported by the evidence, reads as follows: male-bonded coalitionary violence, with lethal raiding against innocents, is as old as our species, even older. That capacity is embedded in all males. The potential for suicide resides in all of us, both male and female. The evidence suggests two types of evolved suicide potentials: negative inclusive fitness and retaliation bargaining. The first arises from a sense of burdensomeness and animates female suicide bombers, such as widows or outcasts. The second characterizes male suicide bombers and originates from positions of humiliation and powerlessness. Because religion is a cultural construct, a product of human minds, many of the evolved cognitive adaptations that generate religious beliefs can be exploited to motivate suicide terrorism. This makes religion an astoundingly powerful ideology that can simultaneously hijack the evolved capacities for both lethal raiding and suicide. It all fit together.
Publication of that analysis, aided by Clare Aukofer, and presentations of my suicide-terrorism formulation kept my focus on religion. Reviewer and audience responses expanded my ideas.
By early 2009 I had combined my research and developed a one-hour presentation to explain why we
believe in god(s). Thanks to Richard Dawkins and his foundation, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, the presentation was superbly filmed, edited, and posted on YouTube, where it drew hundreds of thousands of views in a brief span of time. That level of interest told me that there might be widespread interest in a brief, clear, and concise guide to the new science of religion, and that became the genesis of this book.
Clare Aukofer worked her magic on my prose, provided invaluable extensions and examples for many of the ideas, and had the inspired idea to utilize the astounding NASA image of the Helix nebula, the so-called Eye of God, partly photographed using the Hubble telescope. All authors should be blessed with such a colleague.
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