WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD
An Empirical Study on a Deep Question
The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is however impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal; and apparently follows from a considerable advance in the reasoning powers of man, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder.
—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Vol. II, 1871, p. 395
Several years ago I attended a most unusual conference at the Santa Monica Miramar Sheraton Hotel in Southern California, sponsored by the Extropy Institute. Founded in 1988, the “Extropians” are dedicated to studying “transhumanism and futurist philosophy; life extension, immortalism, and cryonics; smart drugs and intelligence-increase technologies; machine intelligence, personality uploading, and artificial life; nanocomputers and nanotechnology; memetics (ideas as genes); effective thinking and information filtering; self-transformative psychology; rational market-based environmentalism; and probing the ultimate limits of physics.” Limited in scope Extropians are not.
Led by Max More and Tom Morrow (not surprisingly, these are pseudonyms), the Extropians, one might reasonably assume, are a bunch of kooks on the lunatic fringe. They are not. The Extropians are on the cutting edge between science and science fiction, fact and fantasy. Conference speakers included Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky, University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) pathologist and aging expert Roy Walford, and University of Southern California (USC) fuzzy logic founder Bart Kosko. They presented a mix of hard, scientific facts and soft, fanciful hopes about the future. Slides illustrating data were blended with inspirational orations. After Kosko gave a fact-filled summation of the science of fuzzy logic, a gentleman named FM-2030 (his legal name) delivered a sermon that would have been the envy of Billy Graham. By the year 2030, FM explained, nation-states will be obsolete, money will be purely electronic, computers will have near-human intelligence, and it will be possible to achieve considerable life extension in the range of hundreds or thousands of years, if not actual physical immortality. I spent several hours with FM and found him to be a most fascinating man, globally conscious (he has no permanent residence), open to all peoples and cultures (he refused to identify his race or accent, simply stating that he is human), interested in any science or technology that can be used to the betterment of humanity (he is eagerly awaiting his global cellular phone number), and ceaselessly optimistic about the future (he figures he will make it to 2030, and thus into centuries and millennia to come). If there was anyone for whom I would say that hope springs eternal it would be FM-2030, Max More, and this colorful band of Extropians.
What is perhaps most striking about this group, however, is the quasi-religious nature of their beliefs, including an almost faithlike devotion to science as a higher power. Scientism is their religion, technocracy their politics, progress their God. They hold an unmitigated confidence that because science has solved problems in the past, it will solve all problems in the future, including the biggest one of all—death. Why not follow the curve of scientific progress to its ultimate end, they argue? Medical science has cured many of the world’s major diseases—why not eventually all of them, including aging? They point optimistically to “Moore’s law” (in 1965 Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, accurately predicted that the density of transistors on integrated circuits would double every eighteen months) and speak fondly of nanotechnology, where some day computers will be the size of cells, capable of being injected into our bodies to repair organs, maintain tissues and systems, and eradicate cancers and other destructive agents.
Since death is something most of us would like to transcend, we must be particularly skeptical of claims that play on this deepest of all human desires, be it religiously or scientifically based. It is doubtful that the Extropians are right in their prediction that one day we will live into the thousands of years, if not achieve actual immortality. But I must admit it is fun to think about and occasionally, in quiet moments, I wonder … what if they are right?
In his 1996 book Leaps of Faith, psychologist Nicholas Humphrey speculates that true believers are in search of “supernatural consolation.” There is what he calls a “paranormal fundamentalism” among the faithful who maintain “an unshakable conviction that no matter what the evidence, ‘there must be something there.’” I would take this a step further and suggest that for all of us it is tempting to believe that “there must be something there.” For secular religions like Marxism, Something There is the force of linear history inexorably marching through the stages of economic development toward communism. For capitalists, Something There is the invisible hand gently guiding markets to produce higher-quality products at lower prices. For Extropians, Something There is the vision of a paradisiacal future of longevity, intelligence, health, and wealth, delivered on the wings of scientific imagination. For some, science, or more precisely scientism, is a secular religion in the sense of generating loyal commitments (a type of faith) to a method, a body of knowledge, and a hope for a better tomorrow. Perhaps seeing Something There is partly hard-wired in us all.
As we have seen, humans are pattern-seeking animals. Our brains are hard-wired to seek and find patterns, whether the pattern is real or not. Psychologist Stuart Vyse demonstrated this in his research with his colleague Ruth Heltzer, in an experiment in which subjects participated in a video game, the goal of which was to navigate a path through a matrix grid using directional keys to move the cursor. One group of subjects were rewarded with points for successfully finding a way through the grid’s lower right portion, while a second group of subjects were rewarded points randomly. Both groups were subsequently asked to describe how they thought the points were rewarded. Most of the subjects in the first group found the pattern of point scoring and accurately described it. Interestingly, most of the subjects in the second group also found “patterns” of point scoring, even though no pattern existed and the points were rewarded randomly. We seek and find patterns because we prefer to view the world as orderly instead of chaotic, and it is orderly often enough that this strategy works. In an ironic twist, it would appear that we were designed by nature to see in nature patterns of our design. Those patterns have to be given an identity, and for thousands of years many of those identities were called gods.
In his 1993 book, Fuzzy Thinking, Bart Kosko suggests that belief in God may be something similar to what we see when we look at the pattern in the Kanizsa-square illusion. The experience, Kosko suggests, is not unlike “our vague glimpses of God or His Shadow or His Handiwork … an illusion in the neural wiring of a creature recently and narrowly evolved on a fluke of a planet in a fluke of a galaxy in a fluke of a universe.” The neural wiring in our brain creates “neural nets,” or the sequence of neurons and the gaps between neurons called synapses, that together operate in the brain to store memory and pattern information. “These God glimpses or the feeling of God recognition,” Kosko intimates, “may be just a ‘filling in’ or déjà-vu type anomaly of our neural nets.” The Kanizsa square works to create the illusion of a square that is not really there. The four little Pac-man figures are turned at right angles to one another to create four false boundaries and a bright interior. But there is no square in this figure. The square is in our mind. There appears to be Something There, when in actual fact there is nothing there. As pattern-seeking animals it is virtually impossible for us not to see the pattern. The same may be true for God. For most of us it is very difficult not to see a pattern of God when looking at the false boundaries and bright interiors of the universe.
The Kanizsa-square illusion works by fooling the mind into thinking there is a square. All that is seen are four figures turned at right angles to create four false boundaries and a bright interior. Perhaps God is an illusion of the mind, generated by the false boundaries and bright interiors of the universe.
Do people see the pattern of God in the world and in their lives, and therefore believe in God for perfectly rational reasons? And if they do, does that pattern represent Something There or nothing there? Or are there other reasons people believe, such as an emotional need, a fear of death, a hope for immortality, an explanation for evil and suffering, a foundation for morality, parental upbringing, cultural influence, historical momentum, and so on? To find out I decided to do what I always do when I want to know why people believe something—ask. I started off by asking skeptics—defined simply as readers of Skeptic magazine and members of the Skeptics Society—if they believe in God, why or why not, and why they think other people do. I then asked a random sample of the American population (defined by a professional polling agency, which provided the database) the same set of questions. The results were most enlightening. But first we must consider another issue: Is the propensity to believe in God hard-wired, either genetically or in the brain?
The renowned British psychologist Hans Eysenck, not noted for timidity in commenting on controversial issues, rang in on the God Question with this quip: “I think there’s a gene for religiosity and I regret that I don’t have it.” Is there a gene for religiosity? No, any more than there is a gene for intelligence, aggression, or any other complex human expression. Such phenomena are the product of a complex interactive feedback loop between genes and environment, where many genes code for a range of reactions to environmental stimuli. The relative role of genes and environment would be impossible to tease apart were it not for the natural experiment of identical twins separated at birth and raised in relatively different environments. Intuitively it seems as if something as culturally variable as religion would be primarily, if not completely, the product of one’s environment. Indeed, as late as 1989, Robert Plomin concluded that “religiosity and certain political beliefs … show no genetic influence.” So pervasive is this presumption, in fact, that behavioral geneticists have used religiosity as a control variable in their studies of twins, while exploring other variables that could possibly be strongly influenced by genetics.
This assumption is beginning to change. Behavioral geneticist Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. directed the famous “Minnesota twins” study, one of the best known and most extensive studies to date. Bouchard and his colleagues have attempted to cleave the relative influence of nature and nurture on a number of variables long thought to be primarily under the control of the environment, including personality, political attitudes, and even religiosity. Studying fifty-three pairs of identical twins and thirty-one pairs of fraternal twins reared apart, looking at five different measures of religiosity, the researchers found that the correlations between identical twins were typically double those for fraternal twins, “suggesting that genetic factors play a significant role in the expression of this trait.” How significant? While admitting that their findings “indicate that individual differences in religious attitudes, interests and values arise from both genetic and environmental influences … genetic factors account for approximately 50 percent of the observed variance on our measures.” That is to say, about one-half of the differences among people in their religious attitudes, interests, and values is accounted for by their genes. After offering a proviso that much more research needs to be done in this area, and that this single study must be replicated, the twin-study experts concluded: “Social scientists will have to discard the a priori assumption that individual differences in religious and other social attitudes are solely influenced by environmental factors.” Nancy Segal, in her 1999 book on twins, Entwined Lives, points out that genes, of course, do not determine whether one chooses Judaism or Catholicism, rather, “religious interest and commitment to certain practices, such as regular service attendance or singing in a choir, partly reflect genetically based personality traits such as traditionalism and conformance to authority.” Clearly the fact that identical twins reared apart are more similar in their religious interests and commitments than fraternal twins reared together indicates that we cannot ignore heredity in our search to understand why people believe in God.
Taken at face value, a 50 percent heritability of religious tendencies may sound like a lot, but that still leaves the other half accounted for by the environment. Given the range of variables that individuals encounter in their religious experiences, there is much research still to be conducted. Virtually all studies implemented over the past century have found strong environmental factors in religiosity, including everything from family to class to culture. In other words, even with a genetic component to religiosity we still must examine other variables.
During the month of October 1997 the media had a field day when the renowned University of California-San Diego neuroscientist, Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, entitled “The Neural Basis of Religious Experience.” One reporter stood outside Ramachandran’s office and declared, “Inside this building scientists have discovered the God module.” Robert Lee Hotz for the Los Angeles Times reported: “In what researchers called the first serious experiment aimed at the neural basis of religion, scientists at the UC San Diego brain and perception laboratory this week said they found evidence of neural circuits in the human brain that affect how strongly someone responds to a mystical experience. As evidence of how brain cells and synapses might process spiritual stirrings, the experiment suggests a physical basis for a religious state of mind.” Hotz followed up six months later in the Los Angeles Times with a deeper analysis of “the biology of spirituality,” in which he explored just how far science might go with this line of research. “The issues are huge,” explained Robert John Russell, director of the Center for Theology and Natural Science in Berkeley. USC neuroscientist Michael Arbib agreed: “We cannot approach theology without some sense of the intricacy of the human brain. A lot of what people hold as articles of faith are eroded by neuroscience.” And Nancey Murphy, from the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, rationalized the problem to Hotz this way: “If we recognize the brain does all the things that we [traditionally] attributed to the soul, then God must have some way of interacting with human brains.”
Specifically, what Ramachandran said was that an individual’s religiosity may depend on how enhanced a part of the brain’s electrical circuitry becomes: “If these preliminary results hold up, they may indicate that the neural substrate for religion and belief in God may partially involve circuitry in the temporal lobes, which is enhanced in some patients.” Using electrical monitors on subjects’ skin (a skin conductance response commonly used to measure emotional arousal) Ramachandran and his colleagues tested three types of “emotional stimuli”: religious, violent, and sexual, in three populations: (1) temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients who had religious preoccupations, (2) normal “very religious” people, and (3) normal nonreligious people. In groups 2 and 3 Ramachandran found skin conductance response to be highest to sexual stimuli, whereas in the first group the response was strongest to religious words and icons, significantly above the religious control group.
Ramachandran considered three possible (but not mutually exclusive) hypotheses to explain his findings: (a) that the mystical reveries led the patient to religious beliefs; (b) that the facilitation of connections between emotion centers of the brain, like the amygdala, caused the patient to see deep cosmic significance in everything around him or her that is similar to religious experiences; (c) that there may be neural wiring in the temporal lobes focused on something akin to religion. Research other than Ramachandran’s tends not to support the first hypothesis, which leaves band c the likeliest explanations of the findings. Psychiatric and neurological patients experiencing hallucinations, for example, do not necessarily exhibit religious propensities, but TLE patients, when shown religious words, as well as words with sexual or violent connotations, showed much higher emotional response to the religious words. Cautious not to offend, Ramachandran concluded with this disclaimer: “Of course, far from invalidating religious experience this merely indicates what the underlying neural substrate might be.”
Related to Ramachandran’s research, with implications for both supernatural and paranormal beliefs, is the work of Michael Persinger at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada. Persinger places a motorcycle helmet specially modified with electromagnets on the subject’s head, who lies in a comfortable recumbent position in a soundproof room with eyes covered. The electrical activity generated by the electromagnets produces a magnetic field pattern that stimulates “microseizures” in the temporal lobes of the brain which, in turn, produces a number of what can best be described as “spiritual” and “supernatural” experiences—the sense of a presence in the room, an out-of-body experience, bizarre distortion of body parts, and even religious feelings. Persinger calls these experiences “temporal lobe transients,” or increases and instabilities in neuronal firing patterns in the temporal lobe. These “transients” are not unlike the seizures studied by Ramachandran. How do they produce religious states? Our “sense of self,” says Persinger, is maintained by the left hemisphere temporal cortex. Under normal brain functioning this is matched by the corresponding systems in the right hemisphere temporal cortex. When these two systems become uncoordinated, such as during a seizure or a transient event, the left hemisphere interprets the uncoordinated activity as “another self,” or a “sensed presence,” thus accounting for subjects’ experiences of a “presence” in the room (which might be interpreted as angels, demons, aliens, or ghosts), or leaving their bodies (as in a near-death experience), or even “God.” When the amygdala is involved in the transient events, emotional factors significantly enhance the experience which, when connected to spiritual themes, can be a powerful force for intense religious feelings.
Persinger got his start in this field when he began to explore the possibility that electromagnetic disturbances in the earth’s crust during earthquakes may cause such anomalies as ball lightning and other unusual atmospheric phenomena. From there he thought that perhaps earthquakes generate weak magnetic fields that could cause individuals to experience such paranormal phenomena as alien abductions and out-of-body experiences. Having now studied more than 600 subjects in the past decade, Persinger speculates that such transient events may account for psychological states routinely reported as happening outside the mind. These events, he suggests, may be triggered by the stress of a near-death experience (caused by an accident or traumatic surgery), high altitudes, fasting, a sudden decrease in oxygen, dramatic changes in blood sugar levels, and other stressful events.
In my 1997 book, Why People Believe Weird Things, I recount in detail my own alien abduction experience triggered by 83 hours of sleeplessness and riding a bicycle 1,259 miles without stopping (as part of the nonstop transcontinental bike race called Race Across America). I was, therefore, curious to experience Persinger’s research firsthand, which a trip to his laboratory for a television program on the paranormal allowed me to do. The effects, Persinger explained, are subtle for most subjects, dramatic for a few. His lab assistants strapped me into the helmet, hooked up the EEG and EKG machines (to measure brain waves and heart rate), and sealed me in the soundproof room. I initially felt giddiness, as if the whole process were a silly exercise that I could easily control. Then I slumped into a state of melancholy. Minutes later, still believing the magnetic field patterns were ineffectual, I felt like part of me wanted to have an out-of-body experience, but my skeptical/rational mind kept pulling me back in. It was then I realized that it was the magnetic field patterns causing these experiences, but that I was fighting them. I concluded that the more fantasy prone the personality, the more emotional/spiritual would be the experience. Persinger confirmed my informal hypothesis in a post-experiment debriefing. In a large population there will be a wide range of mental experiences, with the more fantasy prone people interpreting these as being outside the mind (demons, spirits, angels, ghosts, aliens, God), and the more rationally prone people interpreting these as being inside the mind (lucid, dreams, hallucinations, fantasies).
There is, in fact, a long history of research into the possibility of mental states being equated with the presence of God and other supernatural beings, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. The classic work in the field was Alexandre Brierre de Boismont’s 1859 On
Hallucinations: A History and Explanation of Apparitions, Visions, Dreams, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism. Brierre de Boismont, a French medical doctor, examined the relationship between hallucinations and a number of conditions, including “morality and religion.” It is in the nature of man, he explained, to form a “mental representation of objects.” We do this, for example, when we call up “the recollection of a friend, a landscape, or a statue” but these images, without practice, are “indistinct and obscure” and “still inferior to the original.” With practice, however, the representation becomes much more realistic (as tested in a series of experiments with artists’ models, who appeared for a fixed duration, followed by the artists’ rendition from memory). Such mental representations can be produced in extended meditation, so a hallucination must be the product of something resembling the normal process of mental representation and not a state of disease—physiology, not pathology: “I believe I am justified in concluding that the phenomena—apparently so dissimilar—of sensorial perception or sensation; of voluntary and normal mental representation (memory imagination, conception), and of involuntary and abnormal mental representation (illusions, hallucinations )—result from the operation of one and the same psycho-organic faculty, acting under different conditions, and with apparent degrees of intensity.” If intense enough, the hallucination seems “exterior and at some distance from the ego,” and thus “the person sees and believes.” Especially intense hallucinations, as produced through reverie and meditation, and with religious overtones, are particularly effective, where “everything concurred to favour the production of hallucinations—religion, the love of the marvellous, ignorance, anarchy, and the still lingering fear that the end of the world was at hand.” When Martin Luther wrote: “It happened on one occasion that I woke up suddenly, and Satan commenced disputing with me,” this was no literary trope. He was hallucinating, says Brierre de Boismont. The “ideas of Luther, exalted by perpetual controversy, by the dangers of his situation, by the fulminations of the church, and by continually dwelling on religious subjects, would naturally fall under the influence of the demon, which he saw everywhere, and to whom he attributed all the obstacles he encountered, and whom—like his contemporaries—he conceived interfered in all the affairs of life.” For Brierre de Boismont, Satan is a socially constructed hallucination, the product of a mind trapped in a demon-haunted world.
Brierre de Boismont’s early theories, constructed long before even a crude understanding of brain physiology was realized, have held up remarkably well. And if Ramachandran’s and Persinger’s research is corroborated, we might inquire further about the origin of temporal lobe-stimulated religiosity. Persinger proffers an evolutionary explanation: “The God Experience has had survival value. It has allowed the human species to live through famine, pestilence, and untold horrors. When temporal lobe transients occurred, men and women who might have sunk into a schizophrenic stupor continued to build, plan, and hope.” Maybe, but Ramachandran is more cautious: “Whether the findings imply the existence of a religion or a ‘God module’ in the temporal lobes remains to be seen.”
In fact, according to neuroscientist David Noelle, “the hypothesis that the neural mechanisms underlying religion form a distinct brain module was not really tested by these experiments. Reports of evidence for a ‘God module’ in the brain are, at best, premature.” When you consider the fact that most studies show that more than 90 percent of the population believes in God, it would take a big stretch of the temporal lobe imagination to suggest that billions of people of all faiths the world over have experienced or are experiencing temporal lobe seizures or transients. A more reasonable hypothesis is that the handful of fanatic religious leaders throughout history, who report hearing the voice and seeing the face of, and even communicating with God, the devil, angels, aliens, and other supernatural beings, can perhaps be accounted for by temporal lobe abnormalities and anomalies. Their followers need a different explanation.
In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins proposed a cultural replicator to explain the transmission of ideas through culture: “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.”
Dawkins did not develop the concept much further and there it lay dormant until mathematician Richard Brodie pushed the meme as a “virus of the mind” in 1996, physicist Aaron Lynch took it in the direction of a “thought contagion” in 1996, and cognitive psychologist Susan Blackmore developed it into a “meme machine” in 1997 and 1999. In countless lectures for the past two decades since his creation of the concept, Dawkins has strongly suggested that God is a meme and religion is a virus, and all of these authors have followed his lead by devoting entire chapters to the subject. Lynch, for example, suggests that the commandment to “honor thy father and mother” is a meme for children to imitate their parents (including their religious beliefs), and that dietary laws and holy days are memes to encourage commitment to one’s religion, to spread other memes within that particular faith, and to protect one faith’s memes against another faith’s memes: “‘I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no false gods before me’ supremely realizes this competition-supressing advantage. Thus arises the archetype of modern monotheism, right at the top of the Ten Commandments.” Blackmore argues that religious memes are like computer viruses that contain a “copy me” program not unlike those irritating chain letters and computer virus “warnings” that command you to “copy and distribute” the document—if you do, happiness and success will be abundant; if you do not, misery and failure will be your fate: “From an early age children are brought up by their Catholic parents to believe that if they break certain rules they will burn in hell forever after death. The children cannot easily test this since neither hell nor God can be seen, although He can see everything they do. So they must simply live in life-long fear until death, when they will find out for sure, or not. The idea of hell is thus a self-perpetuating meme.”
There may be something to this “God as meme” argument in the sense that all religions employ techniques to increase their membership, to compete against other religions, and to perpetuate themselves into future generations. Of course, all organizations do this—if not, they would quickly go the way of the Neanderthals and eight-track tapes. And it might even be possible to test meme theory through comparing and examining the exceptions. Judaism, for example, has a rather weak “copy me” program: Members are not encouraged to proselytize and recruit new members; converting to Judaism requires considerable time, energy, and commitment; interfaith marriages (where the non-Jewish spouse may or may not convert) are discouraged; and an aura of exclusivity (instead of the usual inclusivity found in most religions) surrounds the faith. As a consequence, the number of Jews worldwide for the past half century (after the Holocaust decimated their numbers) has hovered around thirteen million. By contrast, Catholicism, with one of the most effective “copy-me” memes ever created, boasts of a membership roll in excess of one billion souls. No corporate marketing and advertising program has even come close to the Catholic church’s nearly two-millennium-long campaign of recruitment and conversion.
This meme’s-eye view is intriguing, but there are a number of logical and scientific problems outlined by cognitive psychologist James Polichak, including not providing a clear operational definition of a meme, not presenting a testable model for how memes influence culture and why standard selection models are not adequate, ignoring the sophisticated social science models of information transfer already in place, and circularity in the explanatory power of memes. Blackmore has addressed these and other criticisms in her 1999 book. The Meme Machine, but what remains especially troubling is the pejorative and hostile spin put on religious memes by the memeticists—corporations employ memes, musicians and authors compose memes, science itself is a meme, but religion is a virus, a disease, a scourge on humanity, which, as with AIDS or some stealthy computer virus that threatens to erase the entire contents of civilization’s hard drive, we must rid ourselves of before it does us in.
There is, unfortunately, much historical evidence to support this perspective. From the Crusades’ numerous attempts to cleanse the Holy Land of infidels (anyone who was not a proper Christian), to the Inquisition’s efforts to purge society of heretics (anyone who dissented from Christian dogma), to the Counter Reformation’s push to extirpate reforming Protestants from Catholic lands, to the Holy Wars of the late twentieth century that continue to produce death rolls in the millions, all have been done in the name of God and the One True Religion. However, for every one of these grand tragedies there are ten thousand acts of personal kindness and social good that go largely unreported in the history books or on the evening news. Religion, like all social institutions of such historical depth and cultural impact, cannot be reduced to an unambiguous good or evil; shades of gray complexity abound in all such societal structures, and religion should not be treated any differently than, say, political organizations. One could easily build a case that state-sponsored terrorism, revolutions, and wars make even these horrific religion-sponsored catastrophies appear mild by comparison. If God is a meme, so is King and President; and if religion is a virus, politics is a full-blown epidemic replete with copy-me memes such as nationalism, jingoism, and outright racism. Yet no memeticist would propose that we do away with the state. Why? Because the state is a complex social entity with countless nuanced beneficent effects that go along with the pernicious.
Belief in God may partially be explained through the influence of techniques described by memeticists, but memes do not get to the core of what is going on inside the mind of the believer. To reach into that we must ask believers why they believe.
For those atheists who believe that the secularization thesis is more prescriptive than descriptive (that is, even though secular institutions are not replacing religion, they should), there is the problem of explaining why so many scientists believe in God. In 1997, the British science journal Nature published the results of a random sampling of 1,000 scientists (from the latest edition of American Men and Women of Science), comparing these findings to a similar study from 1916 by the psychologist of religion, James Leuba. As earlier in the century, approximately 40 percent of scientists proclaimed a belief in a personal God. (Of the 60 percent who said they do not believe, 45 percent were strong in their convictions of “personal disbelief,” whereas 15 percent consider themselves agnostics.) Edward Larson and Larry Witham, who conducted the 1997 study, concluded: “The stereotype of scientists is that they tend to reserve judgment about things they don’t know about. It turns out not only in history but about the same in our time, that scientists seem to know what they believe—or don’t believe. Either they’re a theist or a nontheist. There was not that great sea of doubt I would have expected.”
Belief in immortality was a different story. Here we see a shift downward in belief by more than 10 percent, as well as a change in belief across fields. Eighty years ago Leuba found that biologists showed the highest rate of disbelief—almost 70 percent—whereas today physicists and astronomers were the biggest skeptics at close to 80 percent. Of all the sciences, Larson and Witham found that mathematicians are the most likely to believe in God, coming in at 45 percent. (See the graph, showing the breakdown of belief between 1916 and 1996.)
Larson and Witham concluded that “religious Americans will doubtless be pleased to know that as many as 40 percent of scientists agree with them about God and an afterlife.” This study, however, stirred up a hornet’s nest among many scientists, who felt that the 40 percent figure was too high. Gerald Bergman, for example, surveyed the literature on the religious beliefs of scientists and concluded: “The level of commitment and strength of belief is not always easy to determine. Many scientists attend church for the sake of their families, and many are simply following the tradition in which they were raised.” Since scientists do not speak with one voice, in a follow-up study Larson and Witham controlled for “eminence,” or what their predecessor James Leuba called the “greater” scientists—those who held “superior knowledge, understanding, and experience.” Leuba discovered that disbelief in God rose from 60 percent among the general scientific population, to 67 percent and 85 percent in two different samples among these “greater” scientists (defined as members of the National Academy of Sciences, an extremely exclusive body whose members must be voted in based on a stellar body of original research). Eighty years later, Larson and Witham found, even more than Leuba, that when eminence is controlled for, disbelief in God rose to 69 percent among biologists, and 79 percent for physicists. When “doubt” or “agnosticism” is factored in, actual belief in God among eminent scientists (averaged over all fields) drops to a paltry 7 percent. Why? Larson and Witham attribute the difference with Leuba not to the intervening years, but to the fact that their sampling of “greater” scientists was from the National Academy of Sciences, a considerably more “elite” group than Leuba’s, which was taken from the standard (and not so selective) reference work of the time, American Men of Science.
It should be reemphasized that these figures are for Americans. The United Kingdom, Europe, and other developed nations of the world show lower levels of belief for both the general population and among scientists, and creationism is almost nonexistent outside of the United States (with some isolated pockets, such as in Australia and New Zealand). The University of Cincinnati political scientist, George Bishop, for example, reported that while about 45 percent of Americans reject evolution and accept a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible creation story, only 7 percent do in Great Britain and even less in Germany, Norway, Russia, and the Netherlands. In the seventeen developed nations he studied, Bishop found that Americans were the most likely to accept the Bible as “the actual word of God … to be taken literally, word for word,” and the least likely to read the Bible as “an ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.” In his survey published in The Public Perspective, the journal of the Roper Center, Bishop noted that the groups most likely to endorse biblical literalism and reject evolutionary theory were women, older Americans, the less well-educated, Southerners, African Americans, and fundamentalist Protestants.
For years after the founding of the Skeptics Society in 1992, we were accused by the media and public of being an organization of atheists. Curious to know the level of religious disbelief in the society, I conducted a survey of members in 1995. The society is a highly educated group, a fifth of whom have Ph.D.s and almost three-quarters of whom are college graduates. With most members working in the sciences and other professional careers, I expected the survey to show an extremely low level of belief in God. The results were surprising. While the vast majority of this group reported being skeptical about such things as the paranormal, reincarnation, near-death experiences, immortality, and Satan, over a third thought it “very likely” or “possible” that there is a God. At the other end of the spectrum, to the question Do you think there is a God (a purposeful higher intelligence that created the universe)?, 35 percent said, “Very Likely” or “Possibly,” while 67 percent said, “Not Very Likely,” “Very Unlikely,” or “Definitely Not” (some answered more than one category). Nor were skeptics as oppugnant toward religion as expected. For example, 77 percent said they believe that religion is “always” or “sometimes” a force for morality and social stability.
In retrospect, those who might best be described as “militant atheists”—whose behavior often resembles in intensity that of the fanatical believers they despise—appear to be a vocal minority. The 35 percent of skeptics who believe that God’s existence is either very likely or possible is not too far off Larson and Witham’s 42 percent of general scientists who profess belief. It is also in the range of a 1969 Carnegie Commission study of 60,000 college professors that revealed that 34 percent of physical scientists considered themselves “religiously conservative,” and 43 percent said they attended church two to three times a month, the latter figure being not so different from the general population.
So, while the majority of skeptics and scientists do not believe in God, a surprisingly large minority do. The question is, why? Why do scientists and skeptics believe in God? For that matter, why does anyone believe in God? As we have seen already, the question is partially answered by how our brains and genes are wired. But only partially. Although estimates of a 50 percent influence by genes on religiosity sounds like a lot, we must remember that genes do not determine behavior so much as code for a range of reactions to the environment in a complex and always interactive feedback loop between the two. Therefore the environment still plays an extremely powerful role in the expression of genetic traits. What is that role?
In 1998, MIT social scientist Frank Sulloway and I conducted an empirical study to answer this question, along with the more general one of why people believe in God. We began with a more sophisticated follow-up survey of members of the Skeptics Society, which had doubled in size since 1995. The survey was divided into four parts that included family background, religious beliefs, reasons for belief or disbelief, and an essay question asking why people believe (or disbelieve), and why they think other people believe. We followed up this survey with another that was mailed to a random sample of Americans.
The Skeptics Survey
Of the approximately 1,700 respondents to the Skeptics Society survey, 78 percent were men, 22 percent were women, and the average age was 49. Surprisingly, although twice the size of the first study, this group was just as well educated as the 1995 group, with over a fifth holding Ph.D.s and over three-quarters college graduates. (As we shall see, education plays a crucial role in religiosity.) Since the wording of the questionnaire had changed, the answers to the question Do you believe there is a God (a purposeful higher intelligence that created the universe)? varied slightly from the first survey.
In a similar question, 14 percent called themselves theists and 23 percent agnostics. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, there is a significant difference between having no belief in a God and believing there is no God, and for this reason we asked specifically where nonbelievers fell on this issue. We found 22 percent nontheists (no belief in God), while 32 percent said they were atheists (there is no God). In all, 18 percent, or almost a fifth, said, “Definitely yes” or “Very likely yes” there is a God. However, since only 14 percent called themselves theists, clearly some who think of themselves as agnostics also have some belief in God. In fact, 2 percent who called themselves agnostics also answered, “Definitely yes” or “Very likely yes” to the God question. It would seem possible then to believe in God while simultaneously having some doubts about His existence. All of this shows just how personal and subjective religious beliefs can be.
Interestingly, although 67 percent of our respondents attended church at least once a week while growing up, a startling 94 percent said they “never” or “almost never” attend church now. How can so many people believe in God yet not attend church? One answer is that although 70 percent of skeptics reported having no religious affiliation at present, 30 percent do, with Jews, Catholics, and Unitarians accounting for 20 of the 30 percent. So, while skeptics as a group are not religious in any traditional sense, a significant minority belong to religious organizations and also have some belief in God.
Another way to examine this question is to compare skeptics to the general population on various measures of religious conviction. To do so, Sulloway and I computed a correlation between the questions How strong are your religious convictions? and Do you believe there is a God? (A correlation is a statistical measure of the relationship between two variables, for example, height and weight—see Appendix I for an explanation of the statistical nomenclature; Appendix II includes the various formal statistics linked to the text.) In both the skeptics group and the general public the correlation between responses to these two questions is statistically significant, though less so among skeptics. What does this mean? For most people, the relationship between how religious you feel and a belief in God is very tightly linked—one defines the other. For skeptics, the relationship is much less determined, belief in God does not necessarily define their religiosity. This makes sense: If religiosity is a part of human nature (as I shall argue it is in Chapter 7, and as we saw supported by studies of twins), those who lose their faith in God’s existence may not lose the feeling of religiosity. Such individuals may still report feeling religious and feel that they belong to a religious group, especially one like Judaism or Unitarianism, where belief in God is not a requirement for membership. In other words, skeptics may be skeptical of God but still consider themselves religious in some nontraditional sense, defining terms such as God and religion in different ways than other people do.
However the pie is sliced, the percentage of believers among skeptics, while significantly lower than in the general population, is surprisingly high. The question, of course, is why? We sought to get at an answer through two separate questions: In your own words, why do you believe in God, or why don’t you believe in God? and In your own words, why do you think most other people believe in God? The diversity of answers we received was staggering. Two categories predominated, however: those who primarily believe in God because they “see” a pattern of God’s presence in the world (that is, for intellectual or “empirical” reasons), and those who believe in God because such belief brings comfort (that is, for emotional reasons). What was most interesting about these two answers is that they neatly cleaved between why people believe in God themselves (for intellectual reasons) and why they think other people believe in God (for emotional reasons). Moreover, this was true for both skeptics and the general public, and, as we shall see, this response tells us something very revealing about the psychology of religion.
Carefully reading through the diverse array of answers people gave, it quickly became apparent that these responses could be grouped into roughly ten reasons. The box below presents the most frequent reasons skeptics say they believe in God, why they think other people believe in God, and why they do not believe in God. (The specifics of this distribution can be found in Appendix II.)
WHY SKEPTICS BELIEVE IN GOD1. Arguments based on good design/natural beauty/perfection/ complexity of the world or universe. (29.2%)2. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life. (21.3%)3. The experience of God in everyday life/a feeling that God is in us. (14.4%)4. Just because/faith/or the need to believe in something. (11.4%)5. Without God there would be no morality. (6.4%)WHY SKEPTICS THINK OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD1. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life. (21.5%)2. The need to believe in an afterlife/the fear of death and the unknown. (17.8%)3. Lack of exposure to science/lack of education/ignorance. (13.5%)4. Raised to believe in God. (11.5%)5. Arguments based on good design/natural beauty/perfection/ complexity of the world or universe. (8.8%)WHY SKEPTICS DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD1. There is no proof for God’s existence. (37.9%)2. There is no need to believe in God. (13.2%)3. It is absurd to believe in God. (12.1%)4. God is unknowable. (8.3%)5. Science provides all the answers we need. (8.3%)
Compare the top answers given to the first two questions about personal belief and others’ belief, and note the ranked difference between intellectual reasons versus emotional reasons. Those skeptics who believe in God do so primarily because of the good design of the world, whereas this reason drops to number five for why they think other people believe. Emotional need and comfort are instead the top two reasons skeptics think other people believe in God.
Note also the overwhelming reason skeptics do not believe in God—there is no evidence for His existence. This was corroborated by the answers given to the question To what extent do you believe there is concrete evidence or proof of God? On a scale of 1 to 9, from Not at All to Completely, 77 percent of skeptics checked the lowest category. What makes this so interesting is that the number-one reason people offer for their belief in God is evidence of good design of the world. How can one set of people find no evidence for God’s existence while another set finds quite the opposite? Both are observing the same world. The answer, as we shall see, lies in the psychology of belief.
The General Survey
In 1998 Frank Sulloway and I also undertook a survey of a random sample of Americans (from a list provided by the same organization used by the most notable political, social, and cultural surveys conducted by social scientists and the media) about their religious attitudes and belief in God and, more importantly, why they believe. As with the skeptics, we inquired about family background, religious beliefs, reasons for belief or disbelief, and an essay question asking why people believe and why they think other people believe. We also added a section on personality to see if there were any characteristics especially related to religiosity.
In this survey we received responses from almost 1,000 people. The average age was forty-two, and 63 percent were men and 37 percent were women. Although less well educated than the skeptics group, this was a fairly credentialed population by national standards: 12 percent were Ph.D.s and 62 percent college graduates. Not at all surprising was the dramatic increase in belief in God from 18 percent in the skeptic survey to 64 percent in the general survey, with disbelief dropping from 70 percent for skeptics to only 25 percent for the general public. (The graphs of Appendix II show the rates of belief and disbelief.)
Most surveys show that over 90 percent of Americans believe in God, so this 64 percent figure is remarkably low in comparison. The explanation is most likely to be found in education levels. As it turns out, the people who completed our survey were significantly more educated than the average American, and higher education is associated with lower religiosity. According to the U.S. Census Bureau for 1998, one-quarter of Americans over twenty-five years old have completed their bachelor’s degree, whereas in our sample the corresponding rate was almost two-thirds. (It is hard to say why this was the case, but one possibility is that educated people are more likely to complete a moderately complicated survey.) This confirms what other social scientists have found: Of the numerous variables influencing religious attitudes, education is one of the most powerful. Precisely what is that influence and what are some of the other variables that lead people to believe (or not) in God?
To answer these questions, we examined the correlation between a number of variables on which we collected data with several measures of religiosity (see the graphs of Appendix II). In examining our findings, it is important to remember that the results represent tendencies, not absolutes. It turns out that the three strongest predictors of religiosity and belief in God are being raised religiously, gender (women are more religious than men), and parents’ religiosity. The three strongest predictors of lower religiosity and disbelief in God are education, age, and parental conflict. In other words, being male, educated, and older tends to make people less religious, while being female and raised by religious parents generally makes you more religious. However, people do not live in a psychological laboratory where variables can be perfectly controlled. All of these variables interact, and the effect of these interactions complicates the picture. For example, being raised religiously makes people more religious unless they have conflict with their parents, in which case the rebellious thing to do is to become less religious. Likewise, a correlation between attending church when growing up and parental conflict showed that this combination led to a significant reduction in current church attendance. That is, if church attendance was high in youth but a person experienced conflict with parents, then lowered church attendance later was an apparent consequence of this conflict.
How religious attitudes change is important in understanding why people believe or do not believe in God. For example, interest in science corresponds to lower religious intensity. (It should be noted also that interest in science is itself highly predicted by education, gender, personality, and background—being educated, male, conscientious, and open to experience is associated with greater interest in science, while being raised religiously is associated with reduced interest in science.) But interest in science is only part of the larger and more powerful variable of education. Becoming more educated and getting older both cause religious attitudes to decrease. Why? As people get older they invariably encounter other belief systems that broaden their intellectual horizons, either through formal education or life experience, causing them to realize that religious attitudes and belief in God are perhaps not as certain as they seemed at a younger age. But age has other effects, and interacts with religious intensity. For example, we asked people, Was there some age when you began to seriously doubt your religious faith? Tellingly, the less the religiosity, the earlier was the age that serious doubt occurred. This makes sense, of course, since religiosity and belief in God peak in the late teens and then decline gradually until the eighties, at which point there is slight increase as people begin thinking about the end of their lives. This finding is confirmed by other studies such as a comprehensive one by Chris Brand, who discovered that the young and the elderly showed the highest levels of religious belief and involvement.
Although many of the findings were expected, there were also some surprises. For example, socioeconomic status had no direct influence on religious beliefs. However, political beliefs certainly did, with conservatives being more religious and liberals less so. Thus, while the majority of both conservatives and liberals believe in God, if you are a political liberal you are less likely to believe. Why? Probably because most religions represent the status quo, and what conservatives wish most to conserve is the status quo. (Despite the rhetoric of “change” professed by members from one end of the political spectrum to the other, when conservatives advocate change in the system, it is almost always change back to an older form of conservatism. And the most extreme examples of this type typically come from what is accurately called the religious right.) Liberals are more in favor of change away from traditional institutions, and among these are society’s mainstream religions. (The exception is Judaism, which has traditionally supported liberal causes since Jews themselves have historically been a part of oppressed groups in virtually all cultures in which they have found themselves.) Thus, the liberal, radical thing to do is to change your religious attitudes, which usually means either becoming less religious, or adopting marginalized religious beliefs, as in the counterculture’s embracing of fringe cults in the 1960s and 1970s, or the adoption of New Age spiritual movements in the 1980s and 1990s.
This connection between religion and politics is corroborated by other studies. For example, during the greatest religious revolution in history—the Protestant Reformation—Sulloway, for example, found that supporters “were more likely to be young, laterborn, lower class, and low in professional status,” characteristics that today we would use to describe political liberals. And in a fascinating study on the religious attitudes and voting patterns of members of the 96th United States Congress, sociologists found that what they termed the most “legalistic” and “self-concerned” congressmen were the most conservative, whereas the “people-concerned” and “nontraditional” congressmen were the most liberal. For example, legislation favoring civil liberties received nearly three times the votes from the nontraditional/liberal congressmen as it did from the legalistic/ conservative congressmen. David Wulff, summarizing a sizeable body of literature on the subject, showed that this tendency extends to the population as a whole. Measuring “piety” as a function of religious affiliation, church attendance, doctrinal orthodoxy, and self-rated importance of religion, “researchers have consistently found positive correlations with ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, dogmatism, social distance, rigidity, intolerance of ambiguity, and specific forms of prejudice, especially against Jews and blacks.” That is to say, greater religiosity was associated with higher scores for these personality traits—traits that are the very antithesis of political liberalism.
Since personality plays an important role in many human beliefs, we examined a number of characteristics to see if there was any influence on religiosity. What is personality? Personality is the unique pattern of relatively permanent traits that shapes an individual’s thoughts and actions. We might contrast personality traits with situational states, that is, merely temporary reactions to environmental circumstances. Personality is our core being—the stuff of which we are made. It may be flexible, where we react differently in different situations, but it is only flexible within certain parameters determined by an interactive combination of nature and nurture, genes and environment, biology and psychology. The most popular theory today is known as the Five Factor Model. The “Big Five” personality dimensions include: Openness to experience (imaginative, idealistic, adventurous), Extraversion (friendly, warm, sociable), Agreeableness (forgiving, tender-minded, sympathetic), Conscientiousness (efficient, organized, ambitious), and Neuroticism (anxious, moody, defensive). Sulloway and I measured these five dimensions using a scale of 1 to 9 on adjectives describing each dimension. For example, to measure your agreeableness you would rank yourself from tender-minded (1) to tough-minded (9); or for openness you would rank yourself from unadventurous (1) to adventurous (9). Each of the five dimensions had two questions and scales.
The most consistent finding related to religious intensity involved openness. A higher ranking on the openness dimension was associated with lower levels of religiosity and higher levels of doubt. Moreover, openness was significantly correlated with change in religiosity, with higher openness scores being associated with lowered piety, as well as lower rates of church attendance. There was a modest association between birth order and openness, with laterborns scoring higher than firstborns. Sulloway has pointed out that laterborns tend to be more open to experience than firstborns because they must generally be more exploratory in finding a valued family niche and to compete for limited parental attention and resources. Not surprisingly, we found a strong correlation between openness and political liberalism. But we also discovered a significant correlation on the agreeableness (tough-minded—tender-minded) scale: We found that religious people are more tender-minded. But it should be noted that laterborns, when controlled for sex, socioeconomic status, education, age, and sibship (brother and sister) size, are more liberal than firstborns. Related to this is the finding that laterborns are more tender-minded than firstborns. So, overall, belief in God was significantly related to being conservative and being tender-minded, but because laterborns are more liberal and also more tender-minded than their elder siblings, these two predisposing factors will tend to cancel themselves out in the expression of religiosity.
In sum, people who score high in openness are less religious, more likely to entertain religious doubts, more likely to change their beliefs, and less likely to attend church. Why? Additional adjectives that correlate highly with openness to experience on the Personality Inventory we used offer some insight. These include: inventive, versatile, curious, optimistic, original, insightful, and unconventional. Consider what it means to be less religious and skeptical of God in a country in which 90 to 95 percent of the population are believers. To even arrive at this position one would have to be inventive, curious, and insightful. And to maintain this skepticism in the face of the possibility of great scorn being heaped by zealous believers would mean one would need to be optimistic and original. More than anything else, one would need to be unconventional. Religion and belief in God is, if nothing else, conventional. In fact, I would argue that it is the convention in our culture. With the possible exception of politics (and even this is probably a distant second), you would be hard pressed to find another convention that generates so much zealousness on the part of followers. To be pious—an adjective almost exclusively used to describe compliance in the observance of religion—means compliance to convention.
In order to probe deeper into the question of why people believe, we asked next a series of questions with similar wording, for example, To what extent does emotional comfort contribute to your religious beliefs? (followed by a 1 to 9 scale, from not at all to completely). Additional reasons for belief included “faith,” “apparently intelligent design of the world,” “without God there is no basis for morality,” and “a desire for meaning and purpose in life.” We also included two questions involving the undermining of religious belief: To what extent does the existence of evil, pain. and suffering undermine your religious beliefs? and To what extent have scientific explanations of the world undermined your religious beliefs? The final question was concerned with belief and evidence: To what extent do you believe there is concrete evidence or proof of God?
In analyzing the data, we lumped these questions into two groupings: (1) rational influences on belief (the apparent intelligent design of the world; without God there is no basis for morality; the existence of evil, pain, and suffering; and scientific explanations of the world); and (2) emotional influences on belief (emotional comfort, faith, and desire for meaning and purpose in life). The single strongest correlation we found was for gender: Men tended to justify their belief with rational reasons, while women tended to justify their belief with emotional reasons. This finding dovetails well with the other significant relationships we found, such as a positive correlation between education and rational arguments for God’s existence, and a negative correlation between education and emotional arguments for God’s existence (as education decreased, preferences for emotional arguments increased). There was also a significant relationship between openness and a tendency to prefer rational reasons for belief over emotional reasons. This was confirmed in the finding of a significant negative correlation between openness and a preference for emotional reasons for belief—low openness is associated with a higher preference for emotional reasons.
In other words, educated, open people, and men feel the need to justify their faith with rational arguments, whereas less-educated people, especially women, are comfortable with their faith being based on emotional reasons. One explanation for this outcome is that, in general, education causes a decrease in faith, so for those who are educated and still believe, there is a need to justify belief with rational arguments. Since most people come to their faith by being raised religiously or through personal experiences, rational arguments are not typically a part of this process. We should not be surprised, then, that there were significant negative correlations between rational arguments and being raised religiously as well as parents’ religiosity. That is, if your faith is a deep one, going back to childhood, there is less need to justify it with rational arguments. But these correlations, while significant, were weaker than for most we found in this study, indicating that education’s even stronger role can override early-life experiences.
One of the most interesting results to come out of this study was that the intellectually based reasons for belief of “good design” and “experience of God,” which were in first and second place in the first question of Why do you believe in God?, dropped to sixth and third place for the second question of Why do you think other people believe in God? Taking their place as the two most common reasons other people believe in God were the emotionally based categories of “comforting” and “raised to believe.”
Why? One possible answer to this question is what psychologists call “biases in attributions.” As pattern-seeking animals, we seek causes to which we can attribute our actions and the actions of others. According to attribution theory, we attribute the causes of our own and others’ behaviors to either a situation or a disposition. When we make a situational attribution, we identify the cause in the environment (“my depression is caused by a death in the family”); when we make a dispositional attribution, we identify the cause in the person as an enduring trait (“her depression is caused by a melancholy personality”). Problems in attribution may arise in our haste to accept the first cause that comes to mind. But I suspect this is only part of the explanation. Social psychologists Carol Tavris and Carole Wade explain that there is, not surprisingly, a tendency for people “to take credit for their good actions (a dispositional attribution) and let the situation account for their bad ones.” In dealing with others, for example, we might attribute our own good fortune to hard work and intelligence, whereas the other person’s good fortune is attributed to luck and circumstance.
I would argue that there is an intellectual attribution bias, where we consider our own actions as being rationally motivated, whereas we see those of others as more emotionally driven. Our commitment to a belief is attributed to a rational decision and intellectual choice (“I’m against gun control because statistics show that crime decreases when gun ownership increases”); whereas the other person’s is attributed to need and emotion (“he’s for gun control because he’s a bleeding-heart liberal who needs to identify with the victim”). This intellectual attribution bias applies to religion as a belief system and to God as the subject of belief. As pattern-seeking animals, the matter of the apparent good design of the universe, and the perceived action of a higher intelligence in the day-to-day contingencies of our lives, is a powerful one as an intellectual justification for belief. But we attribute other people’s religious beliefs to their emotional needs. Here are just a few examples from the written portion of the surveys:
• A thirty-year-old male Jewish teacher with strong religious convictions (8 on a scale of 1 to 9), says he believes in God “because I believe in the Big Bang; and when you believe in the B.B., you have to ask yourself—‘what came before that?’ A creation implies a creator.” (Aquinas’s prime mover argument; see Chapter 5.) Yet, he goes on to explain: “I think that most people believe out of an emotional need, although there is a significant minority of rational (even skeptical!) believers such as myself.”• A fifty-one-year-old male with very strong religious convictions (9 on a scale of 1 to 9) but no formal religious membership writes that he believes in God based on his “personal experiences,” but for others “belief in God provides emotional support and a belief structure that provides meaning, purpose, and rules of conduct for them. Many feel lost without believing something /someone more important than them runs their life rather than believing that they can and do create their reality and the universe.”• A sixty-five-year-old male Catholic with moderately strong religious convictions (7 on a scale of 1 to 9) gives the standard watchmaker argument: “To say that the universe was created by the Big Bang theory is to say that you can create Webster’s Dictionary by throwing a bomb in a printing shop and the resulting explosion results in the dictionary.” Nevertheless, other people believe in God because of a “sense of security” and “blind faith.”• A thirty-seven-year-old female Catholic with strong religious convictions (8 on a scale of 1 to 9) says she believes in God because “how else could you explain our origins? Only God could create a world and universe out of nothing. There are miracles every day that science cannot explain.” Others believe, she says, because it “gives hope.”• A forty-one-year-old male Baptist with very strong religious convictions (9 on a scale of 1 to 9) explains that he believes in God “due to the evidence of his magnificent creation and the extraordinary order of the universe,” whereas other people believe because “without God there is no purpose for their lives or the universe.”
There are many, many more examples. Morever, these data support Gallup polls taken in 1982 and 1991, where 46 percent of the public believe that “man was created pretty much in his current form at one time within the past 10,000 years,” 40 percent believe that “man evolved over millions of years from less developed forms of life, but God guided the process, including the creation of man,” but only 9 percent believe that “man evolved over millions of years from less developed forms of life. God had no part in the process.” The Gallup polls did not ask why, but it seems obvious from our results that the answer is that people see God in the universe, in the world, and in their lives. Hardly anyone has heard of theologian William Paley and his eighteenth-century watchmaker argument for God, but they know this argument intuitively from their experiences. They also read about it from science popularizers like cornet hunter David Levy, who told millions of readers of Parade Magazine that the “miracle of life” was due to the fact that the universe was “designed” for us, and that this is proved by such scientific facts as: (1) ice floats; (2) the night sky is dark; (3) protons and electrons have absolutely identical charges; (4) we have the right kind of Sun. There are perfectly rational, scientific explanations for these facts that have nothing whatsoever to do with life being “designed” or a “miracle” in any supernatural sense. But these counterarguments are also counterintuitive. The “feeling” one gets in studying the world and life is that it seems designed. And this is what people report about their perceptions and experiences.
Interestingly, the primary reasons people gave for not believing in God were also the intellectually based categories of “there is no proof for God’s existence,” followed by “God is a product of the mind and culture,” “the problem of evil,” and “science provides all the answers we need.” For example, an eighteen-year-old Jewish male who considers himself an atheist, writes: “I don’t believe in God because it is impossible for a being to be what God must be in order to be a god without being obvious and undeniable. In short, God is philosophically impossible and scientifically and cosmologically unnecessary.” By contrast, and following the tendency to attribute to others emotional reasons for belief, he says other people believe in God because: “It’s comforting. Additionally, some people find it easier to deal with problems if they believe it is ‘God’s will.’”
In his 1781 classic work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon concluded his discussion of religion with this observation: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” As we have seen, belief in God in the modern world is a function of a complex array of reasons that, while true for some people and false for others, certainly are equally useful. Consistently we find a fascinating distinction in belief attribution between why people think they believe in God and why they think other people believe in God.
This distinction was not lost on the psalmists of the Old Testament. To the choirmaster of Psalm 19:1, the author proclaims: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” Yet in the psalm for the sons of Korah, Psalm 46:1
3, it is declared: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.”
3, it is declared: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.”Are these not, in a way, two sides of the same coin? For believers, the heavens declare God’s glory; for other believers He provides strength in their time of need. Or, as Robert Browning wrote in Pippa
Passes: “God’s in His Heaven—All’s right with the world.”