Why We Believe in God(s) - Andy Thomson - Atheist Book

by Andy Thomson, Richard Dawkins

  According to Snopes.com

  , “the photo is a real image of the Helix nebula, although it’s technically not a single photo but a composite image taken by NASA’s orbiting Hubble telescope and a land based telescope.” The Web site continues, “The Helix nebula does not naturally appear with the colors shown. . . . [T]he tinting of the image is artificial. The picture’s “eye of god” appellation is a title coined by an admirer of the photo . . . not something designated by NASA, and the nebula is also visible all the time, not merely ‘once in three thousand years.’”

  The spontaneous designation of an artificially enhanced composite photograph of a nebula as the eye of a deity powerfully illustrates humankind’s need and ability to create gods.

  Chapter 7

  A quick search of the Web will bring any interested reader full descriptions of Stanley Milgram’s work and even videos of recent experiments that replicate his findings.

  There has been a revolution in the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of morality. One of the best places to start to learn about this subject is Jonathan Haidt’s home page and his many writings on morality. “Morality: A Comprehensive Review of Moral Psychology,” a chapter he wrote for the Handbook of Social Psychology, is a superb overview that will bring an interested reader to the current debates. For a concise view of his synthesis, read Haidt’s “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology,” Science 316 (2007): 998–1002.

  For an enthralling discussion of animal morality, see Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

  The old notion that science and scientists have nothing to say about morality and moral values is turned on its head by one of my heroes, Sam Harris. In his latest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010), he argues that science, scientists, and neuroscience are central to shaping human morality in all its dimensions.

  The work with young children by Paul Bloom and his group at Yale is simply marvelous. See his book titled Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2004). Their ingenious experiments, which tease out moral inferential systems in children as young as three months old, are psychological science at its best. For a fun introduction see Bloom’s article titled “The Moral Life of Babies,” New York Times Magazine, May 5, 2010. Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford neuroscientist, has an enjoyable essay in the November 14, 2010, New York Times, “This Is Your Brain on Metaphors,” which lays out how our moral emotions are based on ancient animal reactions. The same area of our brain lights up whether we are eating fetid food, smelling awful food, thinking about disgusting food, or thinking about some scumbag who has robbed a widow.

  The dynamics of suicide terrorism and particularly the importance of kin psychology to recruitment can be found in Scott Atran’s outstanding “Genesis of Suicide Terrorism,” Science 299 (2003): 1534–1539.

  Richard Sosis describes the importance of costly signaling to religious ritual in “The Adaptative Value of Religious Ritual,” American Scientist 92 (2004): 166–172.

  Chapter 8

  Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Henry Holt, 2006) is an informative delight. She thinks one of the original functions of dancing was to scare away predators at night. A provocative comment is her observation that we have many cave paintings of groups in dance and ritual, yet we have no early paintings of just two people talking together.

  One of my favorite neuroscientists is Barry Jacobs in the psychology department at Princeton University. A nice introduction to serotonin is his “Serotonin, Motor Activity and Depression-Related Disorders,” American Scientist 82 (1994): 456–463. For a curious reader, Stephen Stahl’s books are a superb introduction to neurochemistry and psychopharmacology. They are set up so the reader can key off the illustrations, which begin at the fundamentals of neurochemistry and take you through the drugs used to treat the mind. Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific Basis and Practical Applications, 3rd ed.(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  The recent work that demonstrated how religious priming increased punishment of unfair behavior was done by Ryan McKay, Charles Efferson, Harvey Whitehouse, and Ernst Fehr, “Wrath of God: Religious Primes and Punishment,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, November 24, 2010, http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/ 11/17/rspb.2010.2125.abstract?papetoc

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  Maurice Apprey, a psychoanalyst born and raised in Africa, told us the following story: “Mr. Coleman, the headmaster of our Methodist church in Saltpond, Ghana, West Africa, was also our organist. With consternation and in horror, he approached and chided my Methodist middle school classmates during recess for chanting and encircling a tree with the following admonition: ‘Stop boys! Don’t you know that this is just how gods are created!?’ The boys were stunned, intrigued, and amused at the same time by the real potential that they could create a god through a game around a tree.”

  Rodney Needham, “Percussion and Transition,” Man 2 (1967): 606–614.

  Nicholas Wade, in The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), discusses the similarity between the three religions of the Kung San, the Andaman Islanders, and the Australian aborigines as well as their close common origin to our earliest ancestors in Africa. Although I disagree with his view that religion is a group-selected adaptation, I am indebted to him. Reading his description of their religions based on song, dance, and trance triggered the link between the earliest religion and how our ancestors harnessed our neurochemistry to cement religions into their brains.

  Robin Dunbar’s “We Believe,” New Scientist 189 (2006): 30–33, pointed out the relationship of endorphins to the physically stressful nature of most religious rituals. My view is a broader attempt to link endorphins, oxytocin, and the monoamine neurotransmitters to the origins of religion.

  Daniel Dennett’s review of Walter Burkett’s Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions titled “Appraising Grace: What Evolutionary Good is God?” Sciences (January–February 1997): 39–44, has an excellent description of the mere-messenger strategy.

  For the debate about music as by-product or sexually selected adaptation, see Pinker’s How the Mind Works, Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Doubleday, 2000), and Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006).

  Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath published interesting experiments about synchrony and cooperation in which subjects do not have to do heavy physical exercise to increase cooperative feelings; they just have to move in synchrony. See “Synchrony and Cooperation,”Psychological Science 20 (2009): 1–5. Robin Dunbar’s group devised the experiment with rowers that shows group effort, with work output controlled, raises endorphins and pain thresholds. Emma E. A. Cohen, Robin Ejsmond-Frey, Nicola Knight, and R. I. M. Dunbar, “Rowers’ High: Behavioral Synchrony Is Correlated with Elevated Pain Thresholds,” Biology Letters, 2009, http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/1/106.full

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  It was a fellow University of Virginia faculty member, James Coan, who did the ingenious experiment in which women have brain scans under a threat scenario, successively not holding hands, holding the hand of a stranger, and holding the hand of a partner. James A. Coan, Hillary S. Schaefer, and Richard J. Davidson,“Lending a Hand: Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Treat,” Psychological Science 17 (2006): 1032–1039. Benedict Carey wrote a lovely piece in the New York Times on February 22, 2010, “Evidence that Little Touches Do Mean So Much,” that summarizes some of the research on touch and its impact.

  I have had the privilege of working with anthropologist Helen Fisher, whose research has dissected the neuroanatomy of love. Our work on the sexual side effects of serotonin-
enhancing antidepressants summarizes the neurobiology of sexual desire and romantic love, “Lust, Romance, Attachment: Do the Sexual Side Effects of Serotonin-Enhancing Antidepressants Jeopardize Romantic Love, Marriage, and Fertility?” Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience, ed. Steven Platek (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006).

  The late Sheikh Yassin’s comments about women suicide bombers can be seen in Barbara Victor’s documentary, Women Suicide Bombers, available on her Web site, and are in her book, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2003).

  My friend Robin Cornwell notes that monks are also “brides of Christ”—set apart exclusively to his love. Another marriage image is of Christ as bridegroom of the church. In the Song of Songs, the marriage imagery is said to be of God’s love for Israel and, of course, the marital love between two flesh and blood people. Every Christian is in some sense the bride of Christ. Even men may qualify. Christianity would appear to have sanctioned gay marriage for a very long time.

  The concept of parental investment was elaborated by the brilliant biologist Robert Trivers, already noted here for his concept of self-deception, in “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection,” in Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, 1871–1971, ed. Bernard Campbell, 136–179 (Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1972).

  To learn about about Julia Sweeney’s play, now available on DVD, see www.juliasweeney.com/letting_go_mini/

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  Despite religion’s oppression of women, why do they often endure and pass on the bondage of faith? See Robin Cornwell’s “Why Women Are Bound to Religion: An Evolutionary Perspective,” http://richarddawkins.net/articles/3609

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  The 2009 study of Arizona college students showing that religious feelings increased as a part of sexual competition between same sexes was done by Douglas Kenrick’s group. Yexin J. Li, Adam B. Cohen, Jason Weeden, and Douglas T. Kenrick, “Mating Competitors Increase Religious Beliefs,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010): 428–431.

  Chapter 9

  Lone Frank, the Danish neurobiologist and journalist, has an underappreciated book titled Mindfield: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (Oxford: One World Publications, 2009). Her excellent chapter on the cognitive neuroscience of religion contains a vivid description of her visit to Michael Persinger’s laboratory and her own experience in the “God Helmet.”

  My discussion of Michael Persinger and Andrew Newberg is taken from L. S. St-Pierre and Michael A. Persinger, “Experimental Facilitation of the Sensed Presence Is Predicted by Specific Patterns of Applied Magnetic Fields Not by Suggestibility: Re-analyses of 19 Experiments,” International Journal of Neuroscience 116 (2006): 1079–1096; Michael A. Persinger, “Are Our Brains Structured to Avoid Refutations of the Belief in God? An Experimental Study,” Religion 39 (2009): 34–42; Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain (New York: Random House, 2009); Sharon Begley, “Religion and the Brain,” Newsweek, May 7, 2001; Jack Hitt, “This Is Your Brain on God,” Wired 7, no. 11 (November 1999); and Constance Holden, “Tongues on the Mind,” Science NOW, November 2, 2006.

  At the end of his 2009 article, Dr. Persinger reminds us, “That a belief in ‘some type’ of God must have adaptive utility has never been examined by the scientific method. The frequent presumption that affiliation with one of the myriad of religious organizations, each purporting to exclusively access the validity of this belief, is beneficial for humanity has never been verified. Human history has been replete with cases of peoples being marginalized, excluded, subjugated, or killed simply because they did not believe in the same God. Until the neurocognitive processes and multiple neuroanatomical pathways can be isolated, understood, and controlled, the God belief should be considered the source of potentially dangerous human behaviors.”

  Kapogiannis and colleagues’ neuroimaging study of ordinary believers and nonbelievers is, Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Su, Giovanna Zamboni, Frank Krueger, and Jordan Grafman, “Cognitive and Neural Foundations of Religious Belief,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 106 (2009): 4876–4881. The study is a triumph of science over politics. It comes from the National Institutes of Health during the last years of the conservative and religious George W. Bush administration. One wonders if it would have been published had the 2008 presidential election had a different outcome.

  Sam Harris, whose books The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape have garnered him much deserved attention as an articulate foe of religion, is also a neuroscientist. His neural imaging work on believers and nonbelievers was published in 2009. Sam Harris, Jonas T. Kaplan, Ashley Curiel, Susan Y. Bookheimer, Marco Jacoboni, and Mark S. Cohen, “The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief,” PLoS One 4, no. 10: e7272.

  Environment, piety, and parasites: Two other interesting scientific works have added to the literature about religion and religion’s effect on humanity in ways that may not have previously been considered. In a 2005 look at raw cross-cultural anthropologic data, Robert M. Sapolsky, a Stanford professor of biology and neurology, extracted information showing that religious ideas actually can be shaped by geography and ecology. Historically, rain forest dwellers, with nature’s abundance all around, tended to be polytheists, believing in spirits based on nature and less likely to assume that gods intervene in their lives. Desert dwellers, living in a monotonous, harsh, and unforgiving environment, were more likely to believe in a single, sometimes harsh, misogynistic, interventionist god. For various reasons, it was the god of the desert dwellers that was passed on to much of humanity. See his Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (New York: Scribner, 2005).

  A 2008 study at the University of New Mexico has demonstrated that infectious disease, specifically organisms that are transmitted between humans as opposed to those they catch from animals, influence people’s religiosity. In short, religion can be hazardous to health. Why? Religions promote collectivism—me and mine against you and yours. Those areas of the world that have the highest burden of human-to-human infectious disease are the most religious. Corey L. Fincher and Randy Thornhill, “Assortative Sociality, Limited Dispersal, Infectious Disease and the Genesis of the Global Pattern of Religion Diversity,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 275 (2008): 2587–2594.

  That our brains are ethical by design comes from Joshua Greene’s essay “Fruit Flies of the Moral Mind,” in What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science, ed. Max Brockman.

  Chapter 10

  Matthew Chapman, Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson, wrote deeply personal accounts of the Scopes Trial, Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir (New York: Picador, 2000) and the Dover trial, 40 Days and 40 Nights (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).

  Kenneth Miller, the Brown University biologist and textbook author, testified at the Dover trial:

  Q. Is evolution antireligious?

  A. I certainly don’t think so, and I devoted a whole book to arguing why I didn’t think it was.

  Q. Don’t some scientists invoke evolution in their arguments to say that, in fact, science and evolution is antireligious, it’s anti-God?

  A. Yes, they do. And I can certainly think of any number of specific examples from distinguished evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins or philosophers who have written about evolution like Daniel Dennett or William Paley. But as I said earlier, it’s very important to appreciate that every word that comes forth from the mouth of a scientist is not necessarily science. And every word that one says on the meaning or the importance of evolutionary theory is not necessarily scientific. Richard Dawkins, for example, has been eloquent in saying that for him, understanding that life and the origin of species has a material cause frees him from the need to believe in a divine being. I don’t know if I’ve been as eloquent as Richard Dawkins, but I have worked very hard in my own way to say that for me, the notion that we are united in a great chain of being with every other living thi
ng on this planet confirms my faith in a divine purpose and in a divine plan and means that when I go to church on Sunday, I thank the creator for this wonderful and bounteous earth and for the process of evolution that gave rise to such beauty and gave rise to such diversity that surrounds us. Those are my sentiments, in the same way that Dawkins’ are his. But I’m not speaking scientifically, and I’m not speaking as a scientist, and that’s, I think, the critical distinction.

  Q. So you wrote a whole book exploring this intersection between science and faith?

  A. That’s correct. . . . Now, I believe in that very strongly, but I certainly recognize that my views on this are not science and they are not scientific. My coauthor, Joseph Levine, who also is a religious person, I have to tell you, has different views of faith, belongs to a different faith, and follows a different religious tradition than I do. Joe and I both have enormous respect for religion. We both believe that the evolutionary theory is fully compatible with our different religious beliefs, but we also recognize that our religious beliefs are not scientific, that they are philosophical, theological, and deeply personal, and, as such, they don’t belong in a science curriculum, and they certainly don’t belong in a science textbook.

  Judge John E. Jones III concludes in his decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, “Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID [intelligent design] make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.”