Discussion Group Report

This question is the title of an article by Paul Bloom in the Atlantic Monthly, December 2005. Bloom buttresses these "facts" with observations of the objective world which he believes lend support to them.

"When I was a teenager," he says, "my rabbi believed that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who was living in Crown heights, Brooklyn, was the Messiah, and that the world was soon to end. He believed that the world was a few thousand years old, and that the fossil record was a consequence of the Great Flood. He could describe the afterlife, and was able to answer adolescent questions about the fate of Hitler's soul.

"My Rabbi was no crackpot; he was an intelligent and amiable man, a teacher and a scholar. But he held views which struck me as strange, even disturbing. Like many secular people, I am comfortable with religion as a source of spirituality and transcendence, tolerance and love, charity and good works… I am uncomfortable, however, with religion when it makes claims about the natural world, let alone a world beyond nature." It is easy, Bloom says, for those of us who reject supernatural beliefs to agree with Stephen Jay Gould that the best way to accord dignity and respect to both science and religion is to recognize that they apply to "non-overlapping magisteria": science gets the realm of facts, religion the realm of values."

But religion, he argues, is much more than a set of ethical principles or a vague sense of transcendence. The anthropologist Edward Tylor got it right in 1871 when he noted that the "minimum definition of religion" is a belief in spiritual beings, in the supernatural. My rabbi's specific claims define religion as billions of people understand and practice it.

In the United States just about everyone--96 percent in one poll--believes in God. Well over half of Americans believe in miracles, the devil and angels. Most believe in an afterlife, not just in the sense that we will live on in the memories of other people, or in our own good deeds; most Americans believe that after death they will actually reunite with relatives and get to meet God. But Woody Allen said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."

Do these facts about America show how much we differ from European countries? Not necessarily, says Bloom. Church attendance is much lower in Europe, but most polls show that a majority of European people are believers. Iceland is the most secular country on earth with only two percent attendance, but four out of five Icelanders say that they pray, and the same proportion believe in life after death. And in America Steven Waldman in the on-line magazine Slate states that one of America's two political parties is extremely religious. 61% of the party's voters say they pray daily or more often. 92% believe in life after death. A hard-core subgroup of this party think Bush uses too little religious rhetoric, and 51% believe God gave Israel to the Jews and that its existence fulfills the prophecy about the second coming of Christ. The hardcore group Waldman is talking about is Democrats, and the hard-core subgroup is African-American Democrats.

Scientists? They are less likely than non-scientists to be religious but not by a huge amount. A 1996 poll asked them whether they believed in a real biblical God, one believers could pray to and actually get an answer from. About 40% said yes. Only among the most elite scientists--members of the National Academy of Sciences--do we find a strong majority of atheists and agnostics.

These findings require a new theory of why we are religious--one that draws on research in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, and developmental psychology. One traditional approach is the observation that it is difficult to be a person. There is evil all around; everyone we love will soon die--slowly and probably unpleasantly or quickly and probably unpleasantly. For nearly all, life really is nasty, brutish and short. If our lives have some greater meaning, it is hardly obvious. So perhaps as Marx suggested, we have adopted religion as an opiate, to soothe the pain of existence. Supernatural beliefs solve the problem of this chaos by providing meaning. But, as scientist Steven Pinker reminds us, we don't typically get solace from propositions we don't already believe to be true. Hungry people don't cheer themselves by believing they just had a large meal. Heaven is reassuring only insofar as people believe such a place exists. An adequate theory of religion has to explain why such a belief occurs in the first place. Another alternative theory is social; religion brings people together, giving them an edge over those who lack this social glue. It is survival of the fittest working at the level of the social group. The claim is that religion thrives because groups that have it outgrow and outlast those who do not. This theory also explains why religions are so harsh toward those who do not share the faith, reserving particular ire for apostates. In the Old Testament "a jealous God" commands: "Should your brother, your mother's son, or your son or your daughter or the wife of your bosom or your companion who is like your own self incite you in secret, saying let us go and worship other gods…you shall surely kill him." This theory explains how rituals and sacrifices can bring people together and the possibility that a group that does such things may have an advantage over one that doesn't, but it is not clear why religion has to be involved. Why are gods, souls, an afterlife, miracles, etc., brought in? The theory doesn't explain what we are most interested in, belief in the supernatural.

Enthusiasm is building among scientists for a different view--that religion emerged not to serve a purpose but by accident. One version is the notion that a distinction between the physical and the psychological is fundamental to human thought. Purely physical things, such as rocks and trees, are subject to the pitiless laws of Newton. Psychological things, such as people, possess minds, intentions, beliefs, goals and desires. They move unexpectedly, according to volition and whim; they can chase or run away. Morally, a rock cannot be evil or kind; a person can.

Where does this distinction come from? Through experience, or is it somehow pre-wired into our brains? We can find out through the study of babies. It is hard to know what babies are thinking, since they can't think and have little control over their bodies. But babies, like the rest of us, tend to look longer at something they find unusual or bizarre. Babies show surprise if you (1) put an object on a table and then remove the table, and the object stays there held by a hidden wire (the baby expects the object to fall); (2) show a baby an object then put it behind a screen and later remove the screen and the object is not there. (they understand that objects persist over time if hidden); and (3) place first one object and then another behind a screen and when the screen drops, there are one or three objects, instead of two (they can do simple math). Other experiments find the same numerical understanding in nonhuman primates, including macaques and tamarins, and in dogs. Similar understandings show up in infants' understanding of the social world. Before they are a year old, they can determine the target of an adult's gaze and can learn by attending to the emotions of others. It is doubtful that these social capacities can be explained as a set of primitive responses, but rather there is evidence that they reflect a deeper understanding. When twelve-month-olds see one inanimate object chasing another, they seem to understand that it really is chasing it, and they are surprised when it does not continue its pursuit along the most direct path. When babies see one character in a movie help an individual and a different one hurt him, they later expect the individual to approach the character that helped it and avoid the one that hurt it.

How do these findings relate to supernatural belief? Babies have two systems that work in a cold-bloodedly rational way to help them anticipate and understand--and when they get older, to manipulate--physical and social entities. But these systems go awry in two important ways that are the foundations of religion. First, we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. This helps explain why we believe in gods and the afterlife. Second, our system of social understanding overshoots, inferring goals and desires where none exist. This makes us animists and creationists.

Richard Dawkins may be right when he describes the theory of natural selection as one of our species' finest accomplishments; it is an intellectually satisfying and empirically supported account of our own existence. But almost nobody believes it. One poll found that more than a third of college undergraduates believe that the Garden of Eden was where the first human beings appeared. And even among those who claim to endorse Darwinian evolution, many distort it in one way or another, often seeing it as a mysterious internal force driving species toward perfection. Dawkins writes that it appears almost as if "the human brain is specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism."

Religious authorities and scholars are often motivated to explore and reach out to science, as when the pope embraced evolution and the Dalai Lama became involved with neuroscience. But Bloom argues that "this scenario assumes the wrong account of where supernatural ideas come from. Religious teachings certainly shape many of the specific beliefs we hold; nobody is born with the idea that the birthplace of humanity was the Garden of Eden, or that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception, or that martyrs will be rewarded with sexual access to scores of virgins. These ideas are learned. But the universal themes of religion are not learned. They emerge as accidental by-products of our mental systems. They are part of human nature."