God: or Oops!
There's an interesting article in the latest Atlantic Monthly entitled "Is God an Accident?" by Paul Bloom. I read it this afternoon after work, and I'm skeptical. The author starts off by pointing out that America is no more religious than the rest of the world, thus linking all humanity together by making sure we don't feel ignorant compared to those enlightened Icelandic folk, 80% of whom pray on a regular basis and believe in an afterlife. He makes a point to decouple "Church attendance" from "religious belief". OK, fair enough. He talks about how Americans go to church more because our organized religions exist in a little Darwinistic/Adam Smith free market economy so they have to work harder to evolve and attract parishioners, as opposed to state-sponsored European churches. Good, great, lovely. Interesting. Then he moves on to ask the question, Why Religion? Why does it exist? The first "myth" he debunks is religion as opiate of the masses...that religion exists to soothe the pain of a nasty existance, and quell our fears of death. He makes what seems to me a circular arguement here about how hungry people don't believe in food to get full, they have to have it. So, believing in something doesn't make it exist, so how can religions fill that role for us? Since obviously sophisticated people know that there is no God or heaven, but they continue to believe in them, psychology is Right Out. Also, he makes a good and often undernoted point that our monotheistic religions offer a comprehensive worldview that explains humanity's role, postulates a caring and interventionist God, while many other religions have quarrelsome and very human Gods, who do not offer much in the way of hope or a One True Way. Fair point...no justice, no peace. Anyhoo, the upshot is that religion can be an opiate but that's not good enough. So onward we go to Myth #2, Religions evolving as a social construct...a fraternity. This is a more Darwinistic approach, basically saying that religion gave an evolutionary edge to young cultures and tribes, binding them together more tightly and giving them a reason to look out for each other and help each other survive wolves, winter, and other people. All right, he says, so now we're all eating the same food, not intermarrying, and circumcising the kids. Who is this God fellow and what does he have to do with it? What role does He or She play in tribal rituals? Why does the Thunder have to Speak? Why do we bother with souls, gods, creation, etc? Hmm, well, Ive never liked that theory anyway so I'll bite. And now: babies.
There are studies that show babies are dualistic, they are capable of abstract reasoning. Babies understand motivations, and the nature of things quite a lot earlier than we may have thought. We seem, from infancy, to understand or believe in a separation of body and soul, or mind and body. The idea of endurance, of perpetuation after death seems to be built in with humanity. We live in a material world and a non-physical one, and the division between them leads us easily into imaginig soulless bodies and bodiless souls. There is something called the "hypertrophy of social cognition, wherein we see purpose, intention, and design even when it's not there." Hmmm. You run across the same idea in Terry Pratchett's books, the power of stories. Stories that perpetuate themselves through people: Terry takes it a step further and writes that stories are organisms, parasitcal ones. Not a far stretch from hypertrophy of social cognition. That idea is picked up can carried for a few more yards in The Science of Discworld II: The Globe where precisely this is talked about - the propensity of people to think in terms of story, to ascribe motivation and purpose to even inanimate organisms. To understand that common things motivate us all and thus to predict how strangers will act. Anyway, back to the article. Interviewed and studied children want to believe in God, so therefore it's inborn. Presumably the children that talk about God and creation have not been indoctrinated into one religious canon, otherwise that sort of voids the whole "kids are little tabula rasas" theory that ascribes deep meaning to what the little munchkins say. The article then devolves into some idle speculation about the nature of heaven, and Buddhism, and whatnot. The point that he shakily makes is that humans are born ready to believe in something, therefore, religion is an evolutionary accident. The stretch is never quite made satisfactorily to me. How can you tell accident from design? And why is this an evolutionary trait? Why should humans want to believe anything? Why do we care what the thunder says? Will it get me more mammoth to eat? We don't need a God to make a tribe, and we don't need a philosophical system in order to live, eat, and reproduce.
It's an interesting article, and a thought provoking one, but ultimately unsatisfactory.
There are studies that show babies are dualistic, they are capable of abstract reasoning. Babies understand motivations, and the nature of things quite a lot earlier than we may have thought. We seem, from infancy, to understand or believe in a separation of body and soul, or mind and body. The idea of endurance, of perpetuation after death seems to be built in with humanity. We live in a material world and a non-physical one, and the division between them leads us easily into imaginig soulless bodies and bodiless souls. There is something called the "hypertrophy of social cognition, wherein we see purpose, intention, and design even when it's not there." Hmmm. You run across the same idea in Terry Pratchett's books, the power of stories. Stories that perpetuate themselves through people: Terry takes it a step further and writes that stories are organisms, parasitcal ones. Not a far stretch from hypertrophy of social cognition. That idea is picked up can carried for a few more yards in The Science of Discworld II: The Globe where precisely this is talked about - the propensity of people to think in terms of story, to ascribe motivation and purpose to even inanimate organisms. To understand that common things motivate us all and thus to predict how strangers will act. Anyway, back to the article. Interviewed and studied children want to believe in God, so therefore it's inborn. Presumably the children that talk about God and creation have not been indoctrinated into one religious canon, otherwise that sort of voids the whole "kids are little tabula rasas" theory that ascribes deep meaning to what the little munchkins say. The article then devolves into some idle speculation about the nature of heaven, and Buddhism, and whatnot. The point that he shakily makes is that humans are born ready to believe in something, therefore, religion is an evolutionary accident. The stretch is never quite made satisfactorily to me. How can you tell accident from design? And why is this an evolutionary trait? Why should humans want to believe anything? Why do we care what the thunder says? Will it get me more mammoth to eat? We don't need a God to make a tribe, and we don't need a philosophical system in order to live, eat, and reproduce.
It's an interesting article, and a thought provoking one, but ultimately unsatisfactory.
