Humans are strongly biased to interpret unclear evidence as being caused consciously by an agent, almost always a humanlike agent. This cognitive ability to attribute agency to abstract sights or sounds may have helped our distant ancestors survive, allowing them to detect and evade enemies. It kept them alert, attentive toward possible danger. Better to jump at shadows than risk something or someone jumping at you.
Hyperactive Agency Detection Device
This ability is always triggered quickly (hyperactive) and easily deployed (hypersensitive). It has been called hyperactive agency detection device. This device contributes to religious beliefs because it allows and even favors inference of unseen agents, almost always human or humanlike agents. Once the mind makes such a connection, it is an easy leap to belief in a ghost or spirit, even an all-powerful one.
This ability was adaptive, so therefore it is natural for us to assume the presence of unseen beings and to believe that such beings can influence our lives. It is equally natural to assume that such a being, if asked, can alter or affect what happens to us. Asking easily becomes praying.
With the assistance of evolved face detectors and other cognitive capacities sensitive to human forms, the human mind can see humanlike figures almost anywhere—the Man in the Moon, the cantankerous apple trees in Oz, Jesus on a potato chip, a smiley face in punctuation marks :-).
People even see the “Eye of God” in a color-enhanced composite photo of the Helix nebula partly taken from NASA’s Hubble telescope, the image on the cover of this book.
Another manifestation may occur when we ascribe agency to known nonagents, such as a storm cloud or the wind. You might say “the sky looks angry today,” or “this wind is brutal.” The ancient Greeks took it a step further: Zeus threw lightning bolts, Poseidon caused storms at sea, and shipwrecks were caused by seductive and destructive Sirens.
Now, you may ask, wait a second, how do decoupled cognition and hyperactive agency lead to supernatural beliefs? How do we move beyond mental conversations with ancestors and jumping at shadows to supernatural belief?
We already attribute agency to very ordinary things and are automatically willing to accept the invisible and even to fear them or it.
As social beings with these adaptations, we are now set up for belief in a divine attachment figure. We can attribute agency to it, transfer some of our early-life emotions to it, and as a result can believe that such a being desires to interact with us. But this being remains invisible and largely imaginary, with clear missing pieces. How does it turn into a god?
Inferential Reasoning and Minimally Counterintuitive Worlds
We fill in blanks. That is inferential reasoning. Filling in the blanks without even thinking about it, operating with certain basic assumptions unstated, is the foundation of minimally counterintuitive worlds.
Look at the below image. There are no lines in the picture, but you see a square. You have inferred the square from the available evidence, filled in the blanks, so to speak. If you text message, you use and see inferential reasoning every day.
Filling in the blanks, combined with other adaptations, helps us create a complete picture from an almost-complete one. If a small element or two is a little different, but not entirely off base, we can still see and accept the picture. It is still minimally counterintuitive. This is the basis for minimally counterintuitive worlds, which are an optimal compromise between the interesting and the expected. One quirk of human minds is that these minimally counterintuitive worlds are attention arresting and memorable.
If you are told that the big oak tree in the park near your home will do your taxes, wash your laundry, fix your car, and tell you what your future stock portfolio will be, you will not even experiment with belief. Why? There are simply too many violations of “treeness.”
However, if you’re told that the tree will hear your prayer during a full moon, you may be vulnerable to believing. It certainly will be an easily remembered description. Why? Because it’s only a hair’s breadth from reality. Although a few human mental capacities, such as the ability to listen and comprehend human speech and to act in response, have been attributed to the tree, it is still a tree. Its primary attribute remains a tree, rooted in the park, subject to all that we understand about and expect of a tree. Yet we find the slight addition of magic intriguing.
Consider the fairy tales you heard as a child: a beautiful queen disguises herself as a wicked witch but easily transforms back; a wicked witch has a cottage made of candy to lure children; a stepdaughter servant girl can become beautiful and marry the handsome prince.
It is our ability to construct and connect to these minimally counterintuitive worlds that lies at the heart of our propensity to generate and accept religious ideas and suspend disbelief. Just as fairy tales are close enough to reality for children to believe, the core architecture of all religions involves a slight twist in some physical, biological, or psychological property of a basic object that otherwise remains the same, and comfortably familiar.
With minimally counterintuitive worlds, the supernatural always remains connected to the ordinary and everyday worlds. This aspect not only makes them memorable, but more important, also allows them to relieve core existential human problems that are rationally intractable, such as death.
Ancient Egyptians worshipped the cat goddess Bastet. It was not much of a stretch to go from sleek creatures snoozing in sunbeams by day and efficiently purging granaries of rodents and reptiles by night to a goddess that traveled across the skies with the sun-god Ra, protected humans from contagious diseases and evil spirits, and fought Ra’s arch-enemy, the serpent Apap. At its core, Bastet is still a cat keeping disease-carrying rodents and poisonous reptiles at bay.
The twist might be more counterintuitive, but the rest is seated in reality. The Virgin Mary conceived Jesus while still a virgin, but everything else about young womanness and motherhood remained intact.
The Judeo-Christian god is physically everywhere. He knows my thoughts. He knows if I have been naughty or nice in my mind. But everything else about god remains simply human. Otherwise he is just a guy, and everything you know about men remains intact. God can be surly, impatient, vengeful, and in most ways a regular fellow.
We fill in the blanks, and we fail to even notice it, much less think about it.
Religions always assign simple, mundane human capacities to gods. Christians believe that Jesus was a man and god. All normal human attributes are there, and we relate to the god accordingly along those dimensions. We are never aware of this unless we actually think about it and catch such contradictions as the need to pray to a mind reader. Gods are assumed to perceive, feel, and act like ordinary folk, and behave like the best and worst of us. These basic operating assumptions about gods are always there, embedded like bricks in the wall of any foundation.
Why would people have to pray? If our god reads and knows our thoughts, why would we need to talk to him? The Bible answers that question: God only hears us if we ask him to. And we are back to rationalizing religion.
Are we deceiving ourselves?
Self-Deception
If we deceive ourselves, we can easily deceive others. Ambitious politicians may genuinely believe that they are running for office to promote a particular cause. In fact, they could be hiding their own ambitions and hunger for power and status even from themselves.
Arthur Miller’s powerful 1947 play All My Sons, which was based on a true story, illustrates the power of self-deception. In the play, a man who runs a war factory knowingly ships out faulty parts, causing the death of twenty-one pilots. For more than three years, he fools others and himself, blaming his jailed partner. When the truth comes out, the man claims he acted for his family, to keep the factory running, and fully believes it. The play is largely about how his self-deception is slowly unraveled, and he is forced to face the truth.
This human ability for self-deception is crucial to religious belief. If many believers could see t
heir own minds more clearly, they would see that self-deception plays a role in their acceptance of faith.
Maybe there are only atheists in foxholes. If the faithful truly and fully believe in a protective deity, why would they dive into a foxhole to protect themselves from the bullets whizzing by? A part of their brains knows damn well that if they do not protect themselves, the bullets will hardly discriminate between those who claim faith and those who reject it. They may say and think they believe, but their instinctive actions expose the lie.
Why do the faithful buy health insurance? House insurance? Most people live their lives as if there is no god. We stop at red lights, we put our children in car seats, and we act responsibly to protect our safety and the safety of those we love. Consider the bumper sticker that reads, “Caution: In Case of Rapture This Car Will Be Driverless!” Even there, the driver is warning other drivers. If a person is religious, he is an atheist in relation to others’ gods and the gods of history. He also will almost invariably live as an atheist in relation to his own worshipped deity.
We expect others to live as atheists too. We want them to stop at red lights and not assume we drive under divine protection. We in the West have become so used to religious people not really, truly, and fully believing what they say they believe that we are startled when, as on 9/11, we encounter people who really do believe their religion and put their beliefs into murderous practice.
Overreading Determination
Just like the husband who thought his bored wife was flirting, we have minds wildly biased to overread determination, especially human determination or purpose. Of course, we are barely aware of it. It is there when we say, “It rained today because I didn’t bring my umbrella.” Even atheists may claim an event happened in his or her life “for a purpose.”
The bias to read purpose and design when it does not exist is most obvious in children. If you ask a child what lakes are for, she might say for fish to swim in. What are birds for? To sing. What are rocks for? For animals to scratch themselves. Millions of parents probably have nearly hit the breaking point when their three-year-old asks, for the billionth time, “Why?”
Children have been described as “intuitive theists.” Children show what is called promiscuous teleology, a basic preference to understand the world in terms of purpose. This contributes to what we now know about children’s belief. Children will spontaneously adopt the concept of God and a created world with no adult intervention. At heart we are all born creationists. Disbelief requires effort.
Even adults are far from paragons of rationality. We too need to see purpose. In fact, the need to see purpose is inherent in the definition of religion. For example, Dictionary.com
defines religion first as “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances.”
Bible literalists believe that animals exist for the sole purpose of serving humanity. That nonhuman animals have played a role of their own in the evolution of our species and the ecosystem of our planet isn’t something literalists consider.
Our problem with purpose is most manifest in our resistance to and difficulty understanding natural selection. Because we expect that “everything happens for a reason,” it is hard for us to wrap our minds around how life evolved. It’s hard for us to accept the gradual and random mutation of genes and the nonrandom survival of the bodies that contain them. Our bias to overread purpose and our baseline inability to comprehend the blind, purposeless mechanics of life’s evolution can make religious belief the path of least resistance.
We have an innate need for order in our lives, and religion fills it.
7
Thy Will Be Done
Submitting to the Law of God(s)
Such social qualities, the paramount importance of which to the lower animals is disputed by no one, were no doubt acquired by the progenitors of man in a similar manner, namely, through natural selection, aided by inherited habit.
—Charles Darwin
Deference to Authority
We are far more deferential to authority than any of us would like to admit. This was revealed in a set of famous experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, beginning in 1961. Milgram demonstrated that about two-thirds of normal individuals will continue to administer an electric shock to a helpless “learner,” against their own wishes, if commanded to do so by an authority. If you are unfamiliar with the Milgram experiments, take a few moments and research them on the Web. You will be shocked by both the original experiments and those that have replicated Milgram’s findings.
The emotions of awe and respect are part of our makeup, designed to motivate our behaviors toward those in authority and higher on the social hierarchy. Those feelings are easy targets for religions. Honor thy father and thy mother. Praise and submit to whatever god(s) rules your particular faith.
Morality
The second part of the first definition of religion given by Dictionary.com
is “. . . and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.” There are those who say that without religion man would be amoral and lawless. They are, quite simply, wrong.
We are born moral animals. We don’t need religion to keep us from being immoral monsters, as some faiths would have us believe. If our ancestors had no sense of right and wrong, however their groups interpreted the terms, they could not long have survived in social groups.
In addition to the presence of mirror neurons, which we will discuss in chapter 9
, other evidence refutes the concept that morality is learned behavior only, without inborn aspects.
Human arrogance leads us to think we alone are moral beings. Other animals demonstrate empathy, compassion, grief, comfort, assistance, forgiveness, trust, reciprocity, and a sense of justice, revenge, spite, and much more. When acknowledged, those traits have been downplayed as “building blocks” of human morality. Instead, they should be seen as composing the evolved moral systems needed for a particular social species’ behavior.
The evolution of moral behaviors goes hand in hand with the evolution of sociality. Social complexity builds moral complexity. And we are one very social species.
In his groundbreaking research, Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom and his team found that infants as young as three months old have some innate sense of right and wrong, good and bad, even fair and unfair.
When shown a puppet climbing a mountain, either helped or hindered by a second puppet, the babies oriented toward the helpful puppet and away from the second one. They were able to make an evaluative social judgment, in a sense a moral response. He notes that “it is often beneficial for humans to work together . . . which means it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals. All this is reason to consider the innateness of at least basic moral concepts.”
The example we gave you in chapter 5
, about a young child playing a game with a ball on the floor, comes from the work of Michael Tomasello, the developmental psychologist who codirects the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He and his colleagues have produced a wealth of research that demonstrates very young children’s innate capacities. He argues we are born altruists who then have to learn strategic self-interest. Tomasello’s group shows children’s ability to assess a situation and engage in complex helping behaviors, replete with a clear sense of fairness. Felix Warneken’s video of toddlers stumbling away from their mothers to help open a cabinet for a tall man brings home the point with sheer delight.
Our moral systems are like our innate grammar; we all have the ability to learn a language, and we learn the language of our culture. All of us have moral systems, and we learn the moral values of our culture. We internalize them, and those values color our intuitive, automatic, and emotional moral responses. We know t
he difference between right and wrong even without religion.
Our morality seems to be a dual system that involves both unconscious and automatic process, as well as an after-the-fact conscious process that has been localized to specific areas of the brain.
It appears that our emotional moral processes reside in the orbitofrontal cortex, at the bottom midsection of our brains. Those areas constantly monitor our environment, particularly our social environment, and our place in it. When there are alterations in that environment, we react automatically. If the alteration is positive, we approach; if it is negative, we avoid. There is an instant, emotional evaluative process.
Several areas trigger our moral responses. Harm and unfairness are the first; if we see violations in those domains, we respond. All people respond to certain cues automatically, though learned cultural differences determine the intensity and shadings of our responses.
Why We Believe in God(s) - Andy Thomson - Atheist Book Page 5