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Humans Hardwired to Believe in Supernatural Deity?
dohcrx writes "According to a Sunday New York Times article, 6 in 10 Americans believe in the devil and hell, 7 in 10 believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and life after death, while 92% believe in a personal God. The article explores the possibility that this belief structure may be ingrained into our genetic makeup. 'When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success ... Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God — evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity?'"
It seems to me that if the conjecture of a genetic basis is right, then this probably does little to help agnostics like me decide whether or not God exists. Here's why...
If God doesn't exist, then a genetic basis gives a potentially adequate explanation for religiosity. So the genetic basis doesn't disprove atheism.
If God does exist, then this is consistent with the theology (Christian, at least) that God has built us to know Him. (Assuming for the sake of argument that God can and does work through evolution and genetics.) So the genetic basis wouldn't seem to disprove Christianity (and thus theism in general) either.
I dunno... what do you guys think?
For every young person that leaves his faith (not just Christianity, but Judaism, Hindusim, or Islam just the same), there's someone who finds religion in early or mid-adulthood. Many of these "megachurches" exploding with members who come from agnostic Boomer parents who didn't instill any kind of religious observance in their children.
This was one of the possibilities that Dawkins talked about in the God Delusion - according to the evolutionary approach, the belief in gods and the supernatural is really a 'spin-off' of a ingrained tendency to believe authority. Now, the reason this might be useful in an evolutionary perspective is that a child whose genetic makeup predisposes him to be a little more gullible, will probably heed his parents warnings about dangerous things. So if a child were to be told that he should not go down to a certain part of the riverside because of snakes - the more readily the child accepts this, the longer his genes will survive.
The side of effect of this whole process, is that the species may have a tendency to believe authority - some more so than others. Obviously, one has to be a little more specific as to what exactly is 'authority' - but thats a whole other thread.
As with all evolutionary explanations, one shouldn't push it too far - but it does sound quite plausible.
9% of USA Americans are non believers in God. They are no more representive than Swedes (85%) http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_atheist.html .
Belief in god simply is not universal. The numbers above make that clear. If it is a hard wired function of our brains, then explain the variation in brain wiring between Swedes and Americans. On the nature vs. nurture line, this one is at the nuture end.
I know my brain isn't wired for belief in god. My parents ran the Sunday school and brought me up a methodist. My grandparents were religious. My genetic inheritance should make me religious if its a preset brain wiring. Yet as a young child I saw the teachings as a system of inconsistent threats (be nice or go to hell, believe and be saved etc). As an older child I suspected the stories and teaching of being untrue. By the time I was in comprehensive school (age 11, UK) I knew I didn't believe a word of it and knew I was an atheist.
My personal experience leads to the opposite conclusion. We may be wired to follow the logic we understand or are taught. If we are taught how to think rationally and scientifically, then belief in God is vulnerable to rational analysis.
Moving to the USA (from the UK) had transformed atheism for me. It used to just be a fact. Relgious people went to Church and wasted their Sundays. There was no issue. In the USA I find people scared to be frank about their atheism. They find themselves in the minority, and a mistrusted minority at that. The outward effects of religion on society is caustic to education (e.g. evolution in schools), civil rights (e.g. bigotry in law and elsewhere towards homosexuals), personal freedoms (e.g. illogical drug use laws) and public policy (e.g. supporting abstinence education over contraceptive education).
I see the 'war' described in TFA as being an outcropping of this politicized environment and the research around it skewed by the politics.
I wonder if I can find work and a visa in Sweden?
Evil people are out to get you.
Funny how much that sounds like theology! It should be obvious that humans are hardwired for God, just like they are for singing or having a 7 day week.
The government can't save you.
I read something once where they claimed that if we did not dream while we slept, we would have no concept of an afterlife. Dreaming opens us up to something more than just what we experience.
We mustn't mistake a cognitive tendency to believe in religion for an affirmation of the truth of religion. We have many cognitive quirks as a species and even Pigeons can learn "superstitious" believes in Skinner boxes so I doubt any neurological basis for religious belief is anything but an artifact of our characteristics as social animals.
It seems that our desire to believe in a supreme being may be mis-adaptation of our built in need for parents. When we grow up, we know we know our parents no longer have all the answers but we still desire that idea of a parent who knows "everything", protect us and insure that we are treated fairly.
No ifs about it. My father told me many stories of his 22 years in the Navy. The relevant one is of a post WWII study based on interviews of POWs. A belief in God, be it Christian or Jewish (the two dominant samples, obviously) conferred survival advantages in the camps. It seems that men who had Someone to pray to, something to hope for, gained a psychological edge that could mean the difference between life and death under extreme conditions. Sorry I can't cite it properly. It was one of those stories that he repeated on more than one occasion.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The article mentions the anthropologist Pascal Boyer, who has a fairly simple (and imo fairly convincing) argument, that in the article is referred to as the "byproduct theory".
e s/atheism.shtml
Basically it says that the ability to connect cause and effect, that is to connect things that happen to the actors in the environment that cause them, was so powerful that is became overused in humans. Giving them a natural tendency to attribute everything, including chance events or natural phenomena to these actors, or as Boyer calls them "unseen agents".
The reason for this is fairly straightforward, if you were living in the prehistoric wilderness it paid to be paranoid, consider the simple example of someone sleeping in a cave who hears a noise outside, for the paranoid early human the thought process might be:
"oh no, what was that, it had to be something, something made that noise, it must have been a tiger, I know it was a tiger, there must be a huge tiger outside"
pros: if there really is a tiger, or some other threat, you may have just saved your life, increasing the probability your genetic code will be passed on creating future paranoid generations
cons: if you are wrong and there is nothing out there, you wasted a small amount of energy and made yourself look stupid
if on the other hand you don't attribute every event to some unseen agent, you might be tempted to assume it was just the wind, or some other harmless event
pros: if you are right you save a little bit of energy
cons: if you are wrong you may be dead
To hear it explained much more elegantly by Boyer himself there is a short video interview on youtube where he discusses the subject
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etiZv_rOOgc
Which is part of a larger BBC series called "Atheism: A Brief History of Disbelief" and "The Atheism Tapes", in which Jonathan Miller interviews famous scientists and philosophers on the subject of atheism. Much of which can be found on youtube/google video http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/featur
>>something to hope for, gained a psychological edge that could mean the difference between life and death under extreme conditions.
And you answer your own question. It isn't god you need but faith in something greater than yourself. That the World can be a better place, and since it is such a large world and your a small man who needs help from something larger than himself. Faith is needed, If not faith in yourself then Faith in a God.
soldiers see the very worst of man, they see their best friends ripped to shreds for being 6 inches to the left. To psychologically survive such an ordeal you need to believe in something else. It doesn't matter what you believe in as long as you believe. I have believed this for a long time, since I saw the petty corrupt politics that walked through the halls of churches with my own eyes.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The existance of religion in general seems to be a by product of our storytelling nature, the nature which played a large part in our ability to out-compete neanderthals. We are after all not really wise men (homo sapiens) but rather storytelling apes (pans narratans) and our drive to make sense out of an incredibly complex universe is what makes us human. If anyone doubts the impact of following a certain religion on the evolutionary path of a tribe then they should really consider why the god of the jews and the muslims forbade them to eat pig flesh - the most parasite ridden meat you can find. This commandment prevented the investation of the followers by tapeworms and other nasty bastards, drastically lowering the amount of morbidity and mortality in the population. The religion (and the people) proliferated. Plus there's always the fact that devout followers are more likely to survive and procreate in a society that has a tendency to stone non-believers to death ;)
Modern state-based religions rely on indoctrination of the kind you describe ( along with all of the other societal institutions, such as the military, taxation, the ruling elite, etc. ), but hunter/gatherers live a much more freer and explorative life than farmers. Evolutionary psychology posits that the human mind developed on the plains of Africa, naturally selected by the evolutionary pressures of dealing with hunting animals, gathering plants, and getting along with everybody else back at camp.
As part of my anthropology degree, I read a lot and also spent some time with modern hunter/gatherers. IF you read the literature, or do some field work, you will find that hunter gatherers are extremely mentally independent and have a world-view based on their own personal experience. "I went hunting, I saw the demon horse, and this is what happened... What!? You think I was imagining things? What the fuck do you know? I've been hunting these woods at night since I was a boy -- you think I can't tell the difference between a real animal and a demon? The shaman in the other village says the demon horse is not real? Who the fuck is he? What does he know? I am a man, a warrior, I make up my own mind, and this is my story." They live in an experiential meritocracy, not an awe-based authoritarian society.
Personally, I think our cognitive abilities evolved as a response to encountering plant poisons. Vegetarian animals, like deer and cows, have very a sensitive sense of smell and are *extremely* picky eaters. Opportunistic eaters, such as bears, human, and chimpanzees, aren't that picky when it comes to plants. This is a great opportunity to find new food sources, but can also get us into trouble if the plant has evolved poisons as a defense mechanism. And given that plants don't have many other defense mechanisms, the woods are full of poison.
So, if we are going to live as opportunistic eaters, we have to evolve mechanisms that handle plants attempts to poison our system. A lot of these poisons affect our mind. It would be really handy to tell the difference between an actual lion stalking you, and a paranoid fantasy -- but that opens up a whole Pandora's can of worms. In order to understand the difference between reality and hallucination, you have to become self-aware. If reality is "out there", and hallucination is a product solely of your mind, then you must begin to understand what your mind is, how it works, and what it is capable of creating, if you ever hope to distinguish hallucination from perception. And then once you can perceive hallucination, the products of the mind that are not based on perception of external reality, you begin to understand your mind and how it works. You become self-aware.
"Are there really snakes all over the ground, or am I seeing this because of these leave I ate this morning? Is this really real or does it just seem real? Hey, what the hell is reality anyway? Where do these thoughts come from? Who am I, what is reality, and how is it that I can percieve it?"
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Atheists and agnostics (and various theists) spend a lot of time arguing over what atheism/agnosticism is or is not :] Ironically, the one thing I'm sure of from all the arguments is that none of them are unsure about what they (don't) believe, but not all of them (dis)believe the same things, either.
Furthermore, the organism is likely incapable of creating a god any greater than itself. Most deities seem to have all the wonderful flaws of character that humans have --- jealousy, anger, hatred, etc.
One belief that C.S. Lewis espoused was that one can only go to Hell if one, in fact, chooses to. Since (to Christians) God is the source of all goodness, if you choose to isolate yourself from God you isolate yourself from all that is good and pure. He phrased it something like this: "There are two kinds of people in this world - those who tell God 'Thy will be done,' and those who God tells 'Thy will be done.' The gates of hell are locked from *the inside*." People who end up in Hell choose to consign themselves to the outer darkness of non-entity rather than submit themselves to God.
There is a good argument that can be used to test if someone is agnostic, atheist or just confused. Answer the below questions:
1. Are you agnostic or atheistic about your believes in God?
2a. If you answered atheist to question 1: You are an atheist. Good for you.
2b. If you answered agnostic to question 1: Are you agnostic or atheistic about your believes in Santa Claus, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, The Invisible Pink Unicorn and Fairies?
3a. If you answered agnostic to question 2b: You are an agnostic. You believe anything is possible even though there is no proof either way.
3b. If you answered atheist to question 2b: Why are you questioning your unbelief in God, but not your unbelief in Fairies? Both have just as little proof of their existence. Think about it carefully before doing the test a second time. If you arrived at this point for the second time it must be because you have a special reasoning concerning God. Call yourself an agnostic if you want, but be aware that atheists will think that you just like sitting on the fence post unless you give a very good argument for your reasoning.