Religious Permanence
The human brain evolved to be religious, but religion also evolved to appeal to the human brain.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche
Many modern secular intellectuals find religious belief perplexing. They point out that its metaphysical claims are implausible—preposterous, even—and that many of its moral precepts are outdated, tribal, intolerant, and sometimes barbaric. Nevertheless, despite a steady decline in those affiliated with a specific religious denomination, many in the West and around the world continue to believe. Furthermore, if one accepts the argument that modern progressive doctrines resemble a quasi-secular religion, then religion remains a powerful and pervasive force in modern society, even among educated elites. Over a hundred years ago, Nietzsche’s madman lamented that God was dead. He was wrong, or at least premature. God remains very much alive.
Confronted with religion’s stubborn refusal to disappear, some intellectuals have taken to describing religious belief as a childish fantasy that comforts those too feeble or frightened to face reality. Biologist Richard Dawkins has offered a more sophisticated version of this “delusion” theory, contending that religion is an evolved complex of ideas that overcomes rational resistance with its primitive but powerful allure. These theories are not without superficial explanatory power, but they are unsatisfactory.
It is more likely that religious belief is inevitable because humans are smart, reflective, social animals, cognitively and emotionally predisposed to distinguish between the sacred and the profane, pursue meaning, and value communal ritual. And if we are to understand the causes of religious belief, we must first correct a common misunderstanding that the human mind is a general-purpose thinking machine. The brain may appear to be a single organ, but it does not have one function, and it does not work in one way. It is not, in other words, a homogeneous cognitive machine with a few simple procedures—combination, induction, deduction, and so on—for learning. It is a collection of many cognitive systems or gadgets which evolved to solve recurrent human problems.
For example, humans are exceptionally good at recognizing and remembering other human faces. They are able to accurately distinguish between similar features and remember thousands of unique faces. Like the performance of a well-trained ballerina, this remarkable faculty obscures the difficulty of the achievement. The face-processing system was likely sculpted by millions of years of evolution, relies on specific brain tissue, and is uniquely holistic. Some humans suffer from “face blindness” or prosopagnosia; they can recognize distinct objects, but struggle to recognize faces. This supports the view that face-recognition relies upon a specialized cognitive gadget and that it is not a byproduct of a general ability to distinguish objects from each other.
These cognitive gadgets work reasonably well; if they did not, their owners would likely have been outcompeted by others with more effective gadgets. But even the most finely honed cognitive system will, like other organs and machines, produce effects that weren’t selected for. Computers, especially old computers, are often hot. Of course, they were not designed to be hot; they were designed to process information. Heat is just an inevitable byproduct of computation and electrical resistance.
Similarly, humans are good at recognizing faces, but they also see faces in the clouds, in cups of coffee, and on pieces of toast. This is a subset of pareidolia, or the tendency to incorrectly recognize objects or patterns that do not actually exist. The face-processing system did not evolve so that humans could see Jesus in a paint splatter. Those false recognitions are a byproduct of a system that is very good at discovering, cataloging, and remembering real faces.
Religious belief may likewise have begun as a byproduct of many cognitive gadgets. This hypothesis is by no means novel. The most important of these gadgets are a hyperactive agent-detection device (ADD), a theory of mind (TOM), an intuitive ontological system that leads almost inevitably to mind-body dualism, and a propensity for functionalist cognition (more about each of these in a moment). However, religious belief was also likely explicitly selected for—at least culturally if not genetically—because it encourages prosocial tribalism that increases the formidability of a coalition. Like a talented sports team, a religious coalition might lose a single battle, but across time it is more likely to prevail than a non-religious coalition.
So, the substance of a successful religion is not haphazard—its ideas are constrained, disciplined, and selected for by the environment of the human mind. And like organisms, most religious ideas will ultimately become extinct. Only those that adapt to the intuitive preferences of humans will survive and spread. Of course, this does not mean that we can predict the specific details of any single flourishing religion because those details are myriad and historically contingent. But we can predict and understand the general outline of religious concepts just as we can predict and understand a pattern of sand on a wind-blasted beach but not the movement of any particular grain.
Most of us grasp this intuitively. We know, for example, that religious believers will likely not worship a god made of green licorice whose omniscience is limited to Tuesdays after 10pm. We know that our brains are prepared to accept some ideas and reject or forget others. And we know that just as tropical flowers will struggle to grow in a boreal forest, it is difficult to convince children that the universe is a cosmic accident that resulted from meaningless mechanical forces. Study of the cognitive gadgets that support religious beliefs can help us to understand why.
Agent-detection device. This cognitive gadget evolved to detect agency in the world. A grandfather clock moves, but it is not an agent because its movements are explicable in the language of mechanical push-pull causality. On the other hand, a squirrel is an agent because its behavior is initiated from within, and by causes that are inexplicable and internal. Humans explain the behavior of agents and non-agents quite differently, imputing internal desires and mental states to agents. If a bird flies into a bath and splashes itself with water, we might speculate that it landed in the bath in order to clean itself. Or if Thomas gives Rebecca a love poem, we would infer that he wants to win her affection. On the other hand, we would not say that a clock tolled in the new year because it hoped to alert us to the passing of time.
Since agents pose unique threats and challenges, it is important to recognize agents quickly and to adjust one’s behavior accordingly. A field filled with hungry lions is a lot more dangerous than a field of corn stalks. In his 2004 book, Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, Justin L. Barrett argues that the relative costs and benefits of false positives and negatives have led humans to evolve a hyperactive agent-detection device (HADD) likely to identify agency where none exists. In many cases, it is better to believe that an agent made that creaking sound in the house and to become anxious and vigilant than it is to ignore it if it is a threat. Vigilance is not terribly costly but insouciance can result in death.
HADD helps to make supernatural agents plausible. Since the human mind errs on the side of agency, stories or theories that use it to explain the mysterious will often seem compelling. Many modern religious believers are monotheists, so they might think that religion is about only one supernatural agent; but many religions are teeming with supernatural agents, and people who claim to believe in only one God may also believe in angels and demons and ghosts.
Theory of mind (TOM). This cognitive gadget allows us to understand and to theorize about other minds in the world. Agents are not omniscient. They have limited perspectives and knowledge, and distinct desires and goals. To compete and cooperate effectively, it is useful to know what those limitations, desires, and goals are. TOM allows humans to do that. Importantly, humans can also think about other minds even when the people are absent. Thomas knows that his roommate Callie loves French toast, which allows him to make some for her while she’s at the store. The ability and tendency to think about another’s thoughts and desires persists long after that person has perished. At funerals, for example, one often hears assertions such as “She would have liked this,” or “He would want us to celebrate, not mourn.”
Because humans can impute thoughts to agents who are not present or who are dead, they can also attribute thoughts to fictional or supernatural agents. They can think about what a ghost, an angel, a demon, or God wants from them. This allows for worship of a detached mind, which has no physical or sensory presence.
Intuitive ontology. This cognitive gadget allows humans to carve the world into cognitively digestible categories such as “inanimate object,” “artifact,” “animal,” “human,” and “spirit.” Each of these categories has predictable characteristics that allow humans to rapidly anticipate the behavior of the voluminous and variegated entities in the world. In other words, these categories have impressive inferential potential. If Sarah gives Samantha a chunk of stone, Samantha immediately knows many things about it, even if she has never seen that particular stone before. It does not have feelings, desires, thoughts, or interests; it won’t move on its own; it won’t talk; it wasn’t designed by another human. Similarly, if Sarah tells Samantha that John is waiting to meet them for dinner at a downtown restaurant, Samantha immediately knows many things about John even if she has never met him. He has hopes, desires, thoughts, worries; he probably likes good food; he probably enjoys cool water on a warm day; he probably hates it when people break promises.
Without this intuitive ontology, the world would be a chaos of colors, sounds, and randomness—it makes the world appear organized, intelligible, and predictable. The intuitive ontological system appears, almost inevitably, to generate dualistic beliefs that divide humans into mind (spirit) and body. Although many philosophers might point to Descartes as the originator (or at least the most powerful advocate) of mind-body dualism, some variant of such a division between a non-material mind and a material body seems nearly universal and irresistible. This division makes belief in non-material agents natural and appealing. The notion of a god that is pure spirit or mind, for example, is not difficult to imagine since it just requires subtracting body from the mind-body complex.
The intuitive ontological system also has a byproduct relevant to religious belief: It causes humans to be captivated by minimally counterintuitive (MCI) concepts. These are concepts that share most of the features of an ontological category but violate expectations in one or two ways (hence, “minimally counterintuitive”). A ghost is a good example. It triggers the intuitive ontological expectations for a human but subtracts the corporeal body. Ghost stories do not have to inform readers that ghosts get jealous or angry; listeners simply infer those propensities because they use their intuitive category “human” to make assumptions about ghosts. But ghost stories are interesting because ghosts can do interesting and unintuitive things such as floating through walls or hovering above a foggy swamp. Since many religious supernatural agents are also MCI concepts, they are catchy and easy to promulgate.
Functionalism. Humans tend to see things functionally or teleologically. They think about the purpose of objects, and this purpose becomes a part of the object’s essence. A watering bucket can become a trash can if the owner decides it should be a trash can. Functionalism is related to theory of mind (TOM) because an object’s function is at least partly determined by the intention of its creature or user. Sophisticated literary and art critics may declare that the author is dead and that the meaning or purpose of a text or object is determined by the reader or user and not by the author or creator, but most humans defer to the intentions of the designer. So, a TOM is required to see objects as functional or purposive.
Teleological descriptions are easily applied to the natural world as well. Why are trees full of leaves? To give shade to hot, haggard animals. Why do humans have a mouth? To talk to each other. Why do cheetahs have legs? To run after prey. This likely makes some version of creationism intuitively appealing because things with purpose point to a creator just as a text points to an author. In fact, many theologians have used the apparent design of the universe, and of the biological kingdom in particular, as evidence of the existence of God.
The human propensity to see purpose in the world also leads to the common and often discomfiting existential question: “What is my meaning or purpose?” And since purpose is generally conferred by a creator, answers to this anxiety-inducing inquiry that appeal to a god or agent are more intuitively appealing than other, more secular answers such as “you make your own meaning” or the bleak “there is no meaning.”
Cultural selection: Throughout human history, human groups have competed for territory, food, shelter, and mates. In the best case, vanquished groups lost access to coveted land and resources; in the worst, they lost their lives. On average, groups that were larger, more cooperative, and better coordinated were more formidable than their rivals. Therefore, not only were traits that enhanced cooperation and coordination selected for, but so too were cultural norms, institutions, and ideologies. Religion was likely one ideology that was selected because of its ability to encourage prosocial (or pro-tribal) behavior. But this does not just select for belief in supernatural agents or many gods; it selects for a particular kind of religion, one that impels prosociality and discourages cheating and free-riding, one that is moralistic and often dominated by one god.
Suppose human groups X, Y, and Z are in competition for resources. Group Z is zealous and monotheistic. Its god is morally engaged and punishes transgressors. Its members cooperate slightly more than those in group X or Y, which are polytheistic and believe in morally indifferent gods. Ceteris Paribus, group Z will triumph—and it will either kill groups X and Y and expand through increased fertility, or it will subordinate those groups, possibly assimilating and converting some of them, especially the women. Other groups on the periphery might witness the impressive success of group Z and copy it, importing the group’s religious beliefs. Over time, then, group Z’s religious beliefs spread, whereas the religious beliefs of other, less successful groups perish.
In all the different ways discussed here, successful religions have been shaped by the cognitive propensities of millions of individual humans and by the cultural needs of competing coalitions. It is true that the human brain evolved to be religious, but it is also true that religion evolved to appeal to the human brain. And if the past 10 or 20 years are any indication, the decline of traditional religious belief will be accompanied by a rise in less salubrious superstitions. The human mind, it seems, is irremediably metaphysical. If it can’t find God in the church, it will find god in spells, in drugs, in crystals, in poetry, or worst of all, in politics.
