The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (24 page)

Is religion an adaptation? The question itself is flawed. In his important book
Religion Explained
(2002), Washington University anthropologist Pascal Boyer writes, “People have religious notions and beliefs because they acquired them from other people. On the whole, people get their religion from other members of their social group.”
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But it is not at the level of religion per se where we are likely to find a true genetic adaptation.
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Natural selection is nondenominational. In fact, you may have noticed how seldom religion has entered our discussion over the course of this book. Instead, if an adaptation indeed exists, it’s at the level of brain-based psychological processes that we have been exploring throughout—those incredibly potent cognitive factors that lead us to think that we’ve been created for a special purpose, or that natural events contain important messages from another realm, or that our endless psychological existence is mysteriously linked with some hazy moral pact with the universe.

These building-block illusions had to be psychologically convincing enough before more elaborate, fill-in-the-blank, culturally diverse religious ideas could emerge. By all accounts, the basic illusion of God (or some other supernatural agent) “willfully” creating us as individuals, “wanting” us to behave in particular ways, “observing” and “knowing” about our otherwise private actions, “communicating” His desires to us in code through natural events, and “intending” to meet us after we die is pretty convincing for most people. These things transcend religion and cut across almost every single human society on this planet. By contrast, religion involves culturally acquired concepts that are flexible enough to meet the particular socioecological conditions at hand—it comprises the specific content of belief, not what drives belief itself.

Does all this disprove the existence of God? Of course not. Science speaks only to the improbable, not the impossible. If philosophy rules the day, God can never be ruled out entirely, because one could argue that human cognitive evolution was directly and intentionally inspired by God, so we alone, of all species, can perceive Him (and reality in general) using our naturally evolved theory of mind. But if scientific parsimony prevails, and I think it should, such philosophical positioning becomes embarrassingly like grasping at straws.
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The facts of the evolutionary case imply strongly that God’s existence is rather improbable. As Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom writes,

Owing to the distorting lens of our evolved theory of mind—distortions that warp our perception of reality in systematic, predictable ways because they served our ancestors’ genetic interests—we know now that what
feels
real (even when these thoughts are shared with other sane, healthy, completely normal people) is not always a good measure of what
is
real. The cognitive illusion of an ever-present and keenly observant God worked for our genes, and that’s reason enough for nature to have kept the illusion vividly alive in human brains.

In fact, the illusion can be so convincing that you may very well refuse to acknowledge it’s an illusion at all. But that may simply mean that the adaptation works particularly well in your case.

7
AND THEN YOU DIE

B
ASING THEIR CONCLUSIONS
on hearsay and a rather dubious narrative provenance, creationists have long held that Darwin “recanted” his theory of evolution on his deathbed and died a repentant Christian believer. As the story goes, a fervent evangelical Anglican named Lady Hope (born Elizabeth Reid Cotton, later marrying an admiral named Hope and thus adopting her noble prefix) had inveigled herself into the Darwins’ close circle of friends toward the end of the great scientist’s life. Lady Hope, who by all accounts was a busybody widow who had already made a name for herself in the temperance movement against drunkenness, allegedly paid her friend Charles a visit not long before his death. Her grandiloquent (and hotly contested) description of that visit was first published in a Washington, DC–based Baptist periodical called the
Watchman-Examiner
on August 19, 1915, reading partly as follows:

Over the years, many Christian apologists have all but exhausted themselves in trying to confirm Lady Hope’s tale of Darwin’s deathbed conversion and the so-called recantation of his scientific ideas. Darwin’s wife, Emma, soundly denied all such claims. Still, many years later, one scholar apparently rifled through the Darwin family’s otherwise unmarked set of dusty old Bibles and found a backward pencil tick mark appearing opposite the first few verses of Hebrews 6—alleged confirmation of Lady Hope’s account.
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When skeptics questioned the flowery language attributed to Darwin by Lady Hope, others pored over Darwin’s old letters and correspondence in search of previous incidents in which he had lapsed into similar purple prose. Still others pointed out that, indeed, Darwin did tend to twitch his fingers nervously on occasion, and did he not, in fact, possess a purple dressing gown?

Most evolutionists, however, fail to see the point in this creationist appeal to Darwin’s religious ambivalence. So what if his never fully excised, schoolboy sinner’s guilt did prick his conscience at the very end, they say. Whether Darwin died embracing the Christian Lord or slid off into death still the wary old agnostic he had been known as in life, it’s quite a stretch to claim that a verbal “taking back” of the theory of evolution has any repercussions for the central tenets of evolutionary theory itself. Fortunately, the truth of natural selection doesn’t depend on the firmness of any one man’s convictions, even if that man is Charles Darwin. More generally, of course, we might ask whether rambling, suffering-laden thoughts on one’s deathbed, a place where fear abounds and lucidity easily absconds, should trump our assessment of a person’s insights and thinking during the golden times of that individual’s healthy intellectual heights.

Even the staunchest of atheists, in moments of despair, can find themselves appealing to God. But this just says that atheists are human, with human brains, brains that work in predictably human ways—such as invoking God’s will—in response to particular human problems. I’ve never understood why so many skeptics are intent on demonstrating their immunity to irrational or quasi-religious thought. Although I have little doubt that many fervent nonbelievers out there have clung tenaciously to their atheism as they faced death or impending disaster (there’s even a popular website with signed testimonials from atheistic veterans proudly proclaiming their steely logical-headedness in the line of fire), foxhole atheism is still much ado about nothing, philosophically speaking. The atheist may or may not come to “God” when things appear most grim, but that doesn’t mean he or she is in any way confirming God’s existence. Even an atheist’s coming to confess “ignorance” and acknowledging God’s existence during difficult times would have zero to do with whether or not God actually exists. I, for one, don’t handle suffering very well; having a low-grade fever and a sore throat is enough to have me privately asking God why He’s being so unspeakably cruel to me. But I’m also pretty sure my wobbly epistemological stance during these difficult times doesn’t have much bearing elsewhere in the metaphysical cosmos.

As we’ve seen throughout this book, our private experiences generated by thinking about our individual purpose, the meaning of life, the afterlife, why bad things happen to good people, and so on, are highly seductive, emotionally appealing, and intuitively convincing—in most cases leading directly to belief in God. It is therefore more than a little foolhardy to think that human nature can ever be “cured” of God by scientific reason. As a way of thinking, God is an inherent part of our natural cognitive systems, and ridding ourselves of Him—really, thoroughly, permanently removing Him from our heads—would require a neurosurgeon, not a science teacher. So the real issue is this: knowing what we know now, is it wise to trust our evolved, subjective, mental intuitions to be reliable gauges of the reality outside our heads, or do we instead accept the possibility that such intuitions in fact arise through cognitive biases that—perhaps for biologically adaptive reasons—lead our thinking fundamentally away from objective reality? Do we keep blindly serving our genes and continue falling for this spectacular evolutionary ruse of a caring God, or do we peek behind the curtain and say, “Aha! That’s not God, that’s just Nature up to her dirty little tricks!”

Being poised to shatter the adaptive illusion of God is arguably one of the most significant turning points our species has ever faced in its relatively brief 150,000-year history. The belief instinct may never be completely deprogrammed in our animal brains, but by understanding it for what it is rather than subscribing uncritically to the intuitions it generates, we can distance ourselves from an adaptive system that was designed, ultimately, to keep us hobbled in fear. Our evolutionary ancestors required a fictitious moral watcher to tame their animalistic impulses, to keep them from miring their reputations under the real glare of human carriers. But what happens now that we know the truth about God, about our “souls,” about the afterlife?

Even if it’s only an intellectual liberation from these illusions and our emotions and intuitions never completely follow suit, the distracting (and often distressing) thoughts that come with seeing ourselves through the eyes of a judgmental, infallible, and unreasonable moral agent may eventually begin fading away, or at least lose their powerful influence over our decision making and behaviors. I’m not optimistic that this will happen, however, because I think nature has played too good a trick on us. Furthermore, whether shattering the adaptive illusion of God is a “good thing” or a “bad thing” isn’t entirely clear. That value judgment would almost certainly differ from person to person. From our genes’ perspectives, destroying this illusion may well be detrimental to our overall reproductive interests. Then again, I have a hard time believing that, upon seeing God for what He really is, people would suddenly start acting like amoral chimpanzees. With or without belief, the consequences for acting selfishly are as much a deterrent as they’ve always been: those who don’t play by the rules will—by and large, more often than not—suffer the
human
consequences.

The philosopher Voltaire famously said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
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That was sound logic at the time. But remember, Voltaire wrote this in 1768 during the French Enlightenment. Things have changed since then, to say the least. With today’s social-tracking technology (Social Security numbers, the Internet, hidden cameras, caller ID, fingerprints, voice recognition software, “lie detectors,” facial expression, DNA and handwriting analysis, to name just a few particularly effective behavior-regulating devices presently in place in the modern world), Voltaire’s declaration doesn’t really pertain anymore—at least, not for large-scale, developed nations. Who needs Voltaire’s “eye in the sky” when today we’ve got millions of virtual superhuman eyes trained on us from every possible angle, lodged discreetly in every pore of our lives? Human evolution hasn’t quite caught up with human technology, however, and the adaptive illusion of God is likely to survive as long as theory of mind is a part of our species’ cognitive blueprint.

Yet now that the illusion has started unraveling at its psychological seams, we can finally catch a glimpse of ourselves as the amazing creatures that we are. After all, compared to all the other creatures on this planet, we are strange manifestations of matter indeed, endowed with the unique capacity to think about what it’s like to be others, to reflect on the very question of meaning, and to be aware of our own limited time as subjectively experiencing selves.

We are the first generation, in the history of our species, to be confronted directly by the full scientific weight of an argument that renders a personal God both unnecessary and highly unlikely. The many loopholes of a more humble agnosticism have suddenly become unreasonable places to continue burying our heads. Yet being in the full godless light of this shattered illusion is, I think, a spectacular position to find oneself in.

Where I sit writing these words, the view is of an old Irish parishioner’s graveyard, and as such places go, it is a field of mildewed, pockmarked old headstones for the forgotten villagers who preceded me here in time. Certainly, many people in my village feel that these extinct individuals are more than just their ossified remains. If one has faith in an improbable Second Coming, a reanimated two-hundred-year-old corpse might one of these days crawl out of her tomb, straighten out her bodice, shout over to me that she’s dying for a cold pint of Guinness, and say, “Would you be so kind, love, as to fetch me one.” If that happened, and were I not already having my intestines gnawed on by some fiendish devils in hell as one of the wicked myself, I would be delighted to do so for her, from the very same pub where she preferred to drink in her own day, no less, since it’s still pouring Guinness for her heirs on the main street today. I would also endeavor, once the alcohol made her comfortable enough to share such a personal experience with me, to find out from this woman all that I could about what it’s like to be dead.

The seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal may well regard me as a fool for betting on an atheistic extinctivism on the grounds of his famous, and eponymous, wager. He argued that one should always wager that there is a God and an afterlife, because the believer has everything to win and nothing to lose, whereas the nonbeliever has everything to lose and nothing to win.
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(In fact, according to “Bering’s wager,” which deals in earthly currency, the believer has considerably more to lose.) My money is on this type of resurrection scenario never happening. The dead are the dead, nothing more and nothing less. Somewhere, there’s an extinct butcher in that overflowing graveyard across from my window, whose callused hands once skinned fatted calves, disposed of offal in the vacant fields behind the old abattoir, and brushed tenderly against his wife’s rosy cheeks. Now these hands are but yellowed phalanges layered with a delicate moss. The most beautiful woman in the village is somewhere under those dreary stones too, still wearing the same expensive silk-and-lace gown sent to her by the wealthy suitor she met while holidaying in Bath a hundred years ago. But, were we to disturb the earth and peel back the lid of her antique casket, no trace would remain of her once lovely face or her voluptuous breasts. Nor would we find any sign of the tuberculosis-riddled lungs beneath those breasts that stole her away from so many hopeful young men.

It’s not these people’s bodies that are buried six feet under the fertile Irish soil—they didn’t “occupy” their bodies or lease them out from God for the short time they were here. They were their bodies, and now they are my very quiet neighbors across the way. But using our theory of mind, we can imagine what it was like to be them on the eve of their deaths, preparing to “meet their maker” and to reunite with their loved ones (those mindless stones in the stratified tombs beneath theirs). Perhaps, alone with their thoughts, the butcher and the belle looked deeply in the mirror, gazed piercingly into their own eyes, and pictured themselves as the prone cadavers they were soon to turn into. And maybe they wondered what it’s all been for.