Religion may offer comfort in a harsh world; it may foster community; it may incite conflict. In short, it may have its uses—for good and for evil. But it was created by human beings, and this will be a better world if we cease confusing it with fact.
Notes
Front cover
This NASA photo of the Helix nebula is a color-enhanced composite of images taken from the Hubble telescope and Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. When it first appeared as NASA’s “astronomy photo of the day” on May 10, 2003, it generated a number of e-mail chains designating it as the “Eye of God,” with some claiming that seeing the image had resulted in miracles.
Preface
For my papers and presentation on suicide terrorism, see my Web site, www.jandersonthomson.com
. The idea that anything we do to loosen religion’s hold on humanity is a blow for civilization comes from remarks by the physicist Steven Weinberg at the Beyond Belief Symposium held in San Diego in 2006. That symposium is a rich source for talks, and I especially recommend the presentation on the unintelligent design of the universe by astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Chapter 1
“Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed for the remarkable fact of our own existence, indeed the existence of all life wherever it may turn up in the universe. It is the only known explanation for the rich diversity of animals, plants, fungi and bacteria. . . Natural selection is the only workable explanation for the beautiful and compelling illusion of ‘design’ that pervades every living body and every organ. Knowledge of evolution may not be strictly useful in everyday commerce. You can live some sort of life and die without ever hearing the name of Darwin. But if, before you die, you want to understand why you lived in the first place, Darwinism is the one subject that you must study.” Richard Dawkins, foreword to John Maynard Smith’s The Theory of Evolution, Canto ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
The summary statement of evolution as an integrated collection of problem solving devices comes from Donald Symons, “Adaptationism and Human Mating Psychology,” in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. David M.Buss (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005). “The mind is what the brain does” and the analogy with the Apollo spacecraft come from Steven Pinker’s How The Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997).
Belief in one or more central holy figures: Although Catholicism and similar Greek and Eastern Orthodox religions are viewed primarily as monotheistic religions, they actually operate as polytheistic religions. Saints as supernatural agents provide nice proof of religion being man-made. If Catholics are honest with themselves, they’d see all of the saints as minor gods. You pray to St. Anthony if you lose something and St. Jude if you need something impossible. St. Clare became the patron saint of television in the 1950s due to her particular “vision.” As founder (with St. Francis of Assisi) and abbess of the “poor Clares,” she, in her old age, could no longer go to Christmas mass, so she reported that she saw it while she was alone, on the wall of her monastic cell.
Even though the saints do function as minor gods—there is a supernatural power imputed to them—it might be easier to think of them as heavenly lobbyists. Catholics pray to saints, but not to ask them to grant their prayers—only god can do that, they are told. Catholics are invoking access to god, asking the saints to “intercede” with god for them. That distinction, made very clear in Catholicism, cleverly gets around an accusation or appearance of polytheism. You can have your saints, but still one god (not counting the Trinity).
The process of designating someone as a saint, a holy person who should serve as a positive example, begins with the people who knew that person personally. The people then present evidence of holiness, usually first to a parish priest. The evidence for sainthood takes the form of miracles attributed to the saint-in-waiting—which, if you think about, negates the concept that the prospective saint merely asks god to perform miracles. The priest passes the information and documentation to a bishop, who sends it up the hierarchical chain to a cardinal and eventually the pope. Becoming a saint usually requires that at least three medical miracles be attributed to that person, though having died a martyr automatically takes the requirement down to two. (Try thinking of this in the context of suicide bombers of a different religion.)
The sainthood process is a classic example of religion and gods being created by man. In recent years, there have even been accusations that some popes “rushed” the sainthood process for political expediency. (Sunday Times [London], February 18, 2008.) And, of course, some saints, including the ever-popular St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers whose image appears on many medals hanging from taxicab rearview mirrors, have been “de-sainted” by the Vatican, which apparently has the power both to create and negate minor gods.
This all makes Catholicism essentially the same as Hinduism, which is defined as henotheistic—involving devotion to a single god while accepting the existence of others.
Chapter 2
The lovely phrase, “We are risen apes, not fallen angels,” is from William Allman’s Stone Age Present: How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Life—From Sex, Violence and Language to Emotions, Morals and Communities (New York: Touchstone, 1994).
One of my favorite stories: A little girl came home from school after an early lesson in the evolution of humans. She asked her mother, “Do we come from apes?” The mother paused and said, “Well, in a sense. We arose from monkeys and apes.” The little girl asked, “Well, where do monkeys come from?” The mother thought for a moment and replied, “The Kansas State Board of Education.”
The overview of human evolution comes from Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Press, 2006) and Richard Potts and Christopher Sloan’s What It Means to Be Human (Washington, DC: National Geographic Press, 2010). With Richard Dawkins, Todd Stiefel, Greg Langer, and a group from Howard University, I had the privilege of touring the new human origins exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, with its director, Richard Potts. Later he kindly reviewed my summary of human evolution to ensure accuracy. See that exhibit if you can. It is education at its best.
We are a social species with a vastly underappreciated capacity for cooperation. See the first chapter, “Apes on a Plane,” of Sarah Hrdy’s book Mothers and Others: The Evolution of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). We are able to cram into a plane, help each other load luggage in the overhead storage, and tolerate difficult people and screaming babies. If such a plane were loaded with chimpanzee passengers, by the time the plane landed it would be full of bloody body parts.
I am indebted to Robin Cornwell for the idea of religion as the ultimate fast-food meal.
The notion of “do-it-again centers” of our brain comes from Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan, Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts (New York: Penguin Press, 2000).
There is no better way to educate oneself about the theory of evolution, the modern Darwinian synthesis, and the evidence than to read—in this order—The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1996), The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and The Greatest Show on Earth (New York: Free Press, 2009), all by Richard Dawkins.
Chapter 3
The powerful description of the Homo erectus women surviving on the savannahs with vitamin A poisoning comes from Alan Walker and Pat Shipman’s The Wisdom of the Bones: In Search of Human Origins (New York: Knopf, 1996). A cast of her bones can be seen in the Hall of Human Origins at the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC. The parallel of Pentecostals reaching up to a God with children reaching up to a parent was an essential insight of Lee Kirkpatrick’s in developing his ideas about the deep connection between the attachment system and religion (personal communication,
2010). Also see his book Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion (New York: Guilford Press, 2005). Also, see John Bowlby, Attachment (New York: Basic Books, 1969). Mary Ainsworth was a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia whose humanity and warmth remain vivid in my memory. An excellent introduction to Ainsworth and Bowlby’s work can be found in “Becoming Attached” by Robert Karen in the Atlantic Monthly, which was later expanded into a book, Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Frank Sulloway has a superb essay that maps out Charles Darwin’s thinking in that crucial period in the late 1830s when Darwin discovered natural selection. See “Why Darwin Rejected Intelligent Design,” in Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement, ed.John Brockman New York: Vintage, 2006). The impact of Darwin losing his daughter, Annie, is beautifully told by his descendant Randal Keynes in Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution (London: Fourth Estate, 2001). The principal Darwin biography is Janet Browne’s magisterial two volume work, Voyaging (New York: Knopf, 1995) and The Power of Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Chapter 4
The insight into the mind-body split being part of the very structure of the perceptual tracks in the brain is found in Matthew Lieberman’s essay, “What Makes Big Ideas Sticky?” in Max Brockman’s edited volume What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science (New York: Vintage, 2009).
A summary of Jesse Bering’s work and ingenious experiments is found in his article “The Cognitive Psychology of Belief in the Supernatural,” in American Scientist 92 (2006): 142–149. He writes well, and his essays for Scientific American Mind are always worth reading. Be on the lookout for his book The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life, due to be published in 2011.
For a vivid account of the impact and comfort of a child’s imaginary friend, see the story of the young girl with “the little purple man” in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 349.
Chapter 5
This book elaborates the by-product theory of religious belief. There is another theory that religious belief is a separate, ingrained aspect of human nature and the product of group-selection processes. A reader interested in pursuing this view should look at David Sloan Wilson’sDarwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Nicholas Wade’s Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). For anyone interested in the group-selected adaptation vs. by-product debate, see Richard Sosis’s paper, “The Adaptationist-Byproduct Debate on the Evolution of Religion: Five Misunderstandings of the Adaptationist Program,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 9 (2009): 315–332. For yet an entirely behavioral view of religion, see Lyle Steadman and Craig Palmer’s The Supernatural and Natural Selection: The Evolution of Religion (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008).
Decoupled cognition’s importance to religion is well outlined in Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origin of Religious Belief (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
Robert Dunbar’s explanation of religion’s use of intensionality is found in “We Believe,” New Scientist 189 (2006): 30–33.
The theory that we are born altruists and then develop strategic self-interest is Michael Tomasello’s, the developmental psychologist who codirects the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The institute’s experiments with young children and chimpanzees that tease out the inborn capacities for cooperation and understanding others’ goals are wonderful to watch. Tomasello and his group have numerous articles, and he has a book titled Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). The idea of language growing out of shared intentions is fully developed in Tomasello’s Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
The comic movie actor Sacha Baron-Cohen has a cousin, Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge University, who has significantly advanced our understanding of Asperger’s syndrome and autism spectrum illnesses. He sees male brains as oriented toward systemizing and female brains toward empathizing. Theory-of-mind capacities in women are on average superior to men’s. The autism spectrum illnesses represent the extreme male brain. He has numerous scientific papers and an accessible book for the interested general reader, The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth about Autism (New York: Basic Books, 2003). The ability to empathize is often hard for men to develop. Studies showed long ago the importance for even premature infants to see faces.
The description of transference as a normal psychological mechanism of the mind is in Randolph Nesse and Alan Lloyd’s chapter on evolved psychological defenses, “The Evolution of Psychodynamic Mechanisms,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Chapter 6
The term “hyperactive agency detection device” comes from the work of Justin Barrett’s Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2004). This is a marvelous little book that clearly describes many of the cognitive mechanisms used in religion, but it is marred by the unexpected, unexplained, and inexplicable confession of Christian faith in one of the last paragraphs. The importance of our vulnerability to anthropomorphize religion is the basis of Stuart Guthrie’s book, Faces in the Cloud: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, l993). Richard Coss, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, introduced to me the idea and evidence for the persistence in our minds of mechanisms from our australopithicene ancestors.
Our quirk to construct minimally counterintuitive worlds is the bedrock of the cognitive neuroscience of religious belief. This is detailed in Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origin of Religious Belief (New York: Basic Books, 2001) and Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press 2002). Why do we all know the story of Little Red Riding Hood? It contains two minimally counter-intuitive occurrences, the talking wolf and then the little girl and the grandmother emerging alive from the wolf’s belly. We remember minimally counterintuitive ideas better than regular intuitive ideas or bizarre ideas. For empirical evidence of this, see “Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives” by Ara Norenzayan, Scott Atran, Jason Faulkner and Mark Schaller in Cognitive Science 30 (2006): 531–553. This article demonstrates how minimally counterintuitive elements are central to successful folk tales and religious narratives. The supernatural elements remain connected to the everyday and can relieve core existential human problems that are rationally intractable, such as death. They can be easily remembered, repeated, and handed down to the next generation.
An accessible book that outlines the cognitive neuroscience of religion in more detail than ours is Todd Tremlin’s Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
In one of the most important forewords to any book, Robert Trivers introduced the concept of self-deception in the original 1976 edition of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and it can be found in the book’s thirtieth anniversary edition. The notion of intuitive theists and promiscuous teleology was introduced by Deborah Kelemen, “Are Children Intuitive Theists? Reasoning about Purpose and Design in Nature,” Psychological Sciences 15 (2004): 295–301. Robin Cornwell pointed out the extension to the idea that there are only atheists in foxholes. The religious buy health insurance, use car seats for their infants, and expect others to also behave as if there is no divine protection in this life. If you are in the military or know someone who is, consider Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, www.maaf.info
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Our difficulty understanding evolution is nicely captured in Daniel Dennett’s
lecture “Human Nature and Belief,” Darwin Festival, Cambridge University, July 8, 2009. It can be easily accessed with a Google search. He uses the analogy of computers, which can do complex calculations with no understanding of mathematics. We are unfamiliar with competence without comprehension. Natural selection gives us beautiful designs with no skilled designer, reasons without a reasoner. The ability to comprehend is a recent outcome of the evolutionary process.
The “Eye of God” image seems to have a life of its own as a religious figure. Beginning in 2003 and reappearing sporadically after that, the image “went viral” via e-mail chains, as noted on the Internet hoax–debunking Web site Snopes.com
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One such e-mail, noted on the site, reads: “This photo is a very rare one, taken by NASA. It is called the Eye of God. This kind of event occurs once in 3000 years. This photo has done miracles in many lives. Make a wish. . . . you have looked into the eye of God. Surely you will see changes in your life within a day. Whether you believe it or not, don’t keep this e-mail with you. Pass this to at least 7 persons.”
Why We Believe in God(s) - Andy Thomson - Atheist Book Page 9