This is the question explored in an excellent article by Robin Marantz Henig in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
Henig follows the work of anthropologist Scott Atran, who holds appointments at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris, the University of Michigan, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Atran's research interests have led him to the question of God, which he approaches from cognitive science and evolutionary biology. He asks why religion has persisted for so long if it provides no evolutionary benefits. His answers reveal a deep divide within evolutionary science - the debate between those who believe that belief in God originally served some evolutionary, adaptive function and those who believe that belief in God is merely a byproduct or consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.
As Henig notes, Atran's work and the work of likeminded colleagues is not intended to answer the question of the existence of God, because God cannot be an object of scientific investigation. Atran and his colleagues are attempting to answer the question of human belief in God, an answer they hope to find in the complexity of the human brain.
Is the human brain hard-wired to believe in God? If so, how did that happen?
As Henig notes,
[For most of the 20th century,] a polite convention generally separated science and religion, at least in much of the Western world. Science, as the old trope had it, was assigned the territory that describes how the heavens go; religion, how to go to heaven.
Every culture on earth has had some sort of religious system, whether animistic, polytheistic, monotheistic, or even non-theistic (e.g., some Buddhist traditions). This raises an interesting question for evolutionary scientists: why is something so counterintuitive, so illogical (at face value) so pervasive and so persistent?
For many years evolutionary scientists were puzzled by what they considered to be the enormous cognitive effort required to believe in God or gods. Atran, however, has come to consider the opposite view: perhaps belief in God requires much less cognitive effort than was previously thought. Perhaps the human brain is "hard-wired" to believe in God. Perhaps it is, in fact, our default position.
Psychologists refer to three cognitive tools that help to explain the evolutionary basis for belief in God: agent detection, causal reasoning, and theory of mind:
Agent detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent — which is jargon for any creature with volitional, independent behavior — is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from, even if you are wrong. If it turns out to have been just the rustling of leaves, you are still alive; if what you took to be leaves rustling was really a hyena about to pounce, you are dead.
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What does this mean for belief in the supernatural? It means our brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic. "The most central concepts in religions are related to agents," Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, "Why Would Anyone Believe in God?" Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote, "people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world."
A second mental module that primes us for religion is causal reasoning. The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random. "We automatically, and often unconsciously, look for an explanation of why things happen to us," Barrett wrote, "and ‘stuff just happens’ is no explanation. Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events." The ancient Greeks believed thunder was the sound of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Similarly, a contemporary woman whose cancer treatment works despite 10-to-1 odds might look for a story to explain her survival. It fits better with her causal-reasoning tool for her recovery to be a miracle, or a reward for prayer, than for it to be just a lucky roll of the dice.
A third cognitive trick is a kind of social intuition known as theory of mind. It’s an odd phrase for something so automatic, since the word "theory" suggests formality and self-consciousness. Other terms have been used for the same concept, like intentional stance and social cognition. One good alternative is the term Atran uses: folkpsychology.
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The process begins with positing the existence of minds, our own and others’, that we cannot see or feel. This leaves us open, almost instinctively, to belief in the separation of the body (the visible) and the mind (the invisible). If you can posit minds in other people that you cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author of "Descartes’ Baby," published in 2004, it is a short step to positing minds that do not have to be anchored to a body. And from there, he said, it is another short step to positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.
Atran suggests that children in particular are primed to believe in omniscient beings, invisible minds, and immaterial souls, and that this belief requires no more cognitive effort than believing, for example, that their parents will care for them. Religion as practice and theology as a set of doctrines are then added to this innate sense for God, the particulars being determined by the particular culture in which the child is raised. So a child raised by Christians will fill in the particulars with Christian symbols, a Muslim with Muslim symbols, a Hindu with Hindu symbols, a Pagan with Pagan symbols, etc. But it is all based on the same innate sense.
The second school of thought within evolutionary science is the adaptationist school. They argue that religion, at one time, offered specific adaptive advantages, even if those advantages are no longer necessary or even useful.
So trying to explain the adaptiveness of religion means looking for how it might have helped early humans survive and reproduce. As some adaptationists see it, this could have worked on two levels, individual and group. Religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves. As William James put it, religion filled people with "a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life . . . an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections."
Such sentiments, some adaptationists say, made the faithful better at finding and storing food, for instance, and helped them attract better mates because of their reputations for morality, obedience and sober living. The advantage might have worked at the group level too, with religious groups outlasting others because they were more cohesive, more likely to contain individuals willing to make sacrifices for the group and more adept at sharing resources and preparing for warfare.
Henig notes the diversity of attitudes toward religion even within this group of evolutionary scientists. Some are observant Christians, others practice Buddhist meditation, some are atheists, etc.:
"Christian theology teaches that people were crafted by God to be in a loving relationship with him and other people," [Justin Barrett, a member of the "byproduct group"] wrote in his e-mail message. "Why wouldn’t God, then, design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?" Having a scientific explanation for mental phenomena does not mean we should stop believing in them, he wrote. "Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me — should I then stop believing that she does?"
What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism.
This research certainly will not end the debate on the nature and truth of religion, neither within science itself nor between science and religion. But it does present new areas for study and new possibility for dialogue between scientists and theologians.
The "Father of Modern Theology," the German Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, wrote in the middle of the 19th century of an "eternal covenant" between theology and science, in which theology must learn all it can from the sciences in order to ensure that its doctrines are never found to be contradicted by the best currently accepted science. If the Christian faith is to be relevant to modern people, if there is to be any future at all for Christianity, it must adapt itself to the modern mindset while remaining true to its own essence.
Rather than attack this most recent scientific research into the nature of human belief in God, theologians should welcome it and learn from it. Theologians realize that science can never disprove the existence of God, just as they realize that they themselves can never prove the existence of God. Much energy and ink has been wasted trying to do just that. Rather, this is a new opportunity to understand the nature of belief and the answers science and religion give to it.
How one responds to the hypothesis of the brain being "hard-wired" for belief in God will depend on one's presuppositions. An atheist might respond by reaffirming what Feuerbach concluded in the 1840s - all religion is nothing more than projection of human wishes and desires, the objectifying and deifying of human nature. God is nothing more than the ultimate wish fulfillment. A religious person might respond by affirming what John Calvin wrote in the 16th century - all human beings are naturally inclined to believe in God, and religiousness is an essential component of human nature.
Atran's research lends credence to positions as diverse as the pious John Calvin's and the atheist Ludwig Feuerbach's. It provides the questions and some answers but, because of the nature of the question itself, it can never answer the ultimate question of religion: What is God?
Cross-Posted at Street Prophets.