Why Is Religion Natural?

Is religious belief a mere leap into irrationality as many skeptics assume? Psychology suggests that there may be more to belief than the suspension of reason.

Pascal Boyer

explanations for religion

Oct 23, 2006

Highly recommended is Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained. It's a perspective from a data-centric point of view (the data is people, not chemistry or biology or various slices of physical reality that religious arguments devolve into, as people are the subjects under investigation). For example, in the first chapter he enummerates the various secular and theological explanations that have been given for religion over the years ("mind control," "social cohesion," ''enforcement of morality," "fear of death," "cosmology," "people are stupid", etc, etc) - and dismisses each one with hard, counterfactual datapoints. None of these historical explanations fit all the facts, they don't. The book is worth picking up for this amazing feat of counter-intuitive thinking itself. (Secular explanations for religion - Dennett's and Dawking's, for example- are themselves as faulty as religious explanations!)

Another chapter grabbed my attention as he makes a list of beliefs and asks us the reader to pick out which are "real" - that is, which are beliefs that have been believed by some group of people at some time. I was amazed that (a) I was able to partition the list into actual beliefs and never-believed ones with complete accuracy without years of study behind me! and that (b) not everything you can think of is a candidate for religious belief - some ideas don't fit the human psyche at all.

See Boyer's short lecture ... Functional Origins of Religious Concepts. It reads like a set of design patterns.

He also retells a story of an English anthroplogist who was studying a primitive tribal people with animist beliefs. One day there was a report that a house fell down while three tribal elders were having lunch inside, killing them on the spot. The natives quickly told the English anthropologist that ancestor spirits had been neglected by those elders, and the spirits had carried out revenge for the mistreatment. The English anthropologist being a practical man of science decided to look around the site a bit. He picked up a piece of the house's frame and showing it to tribes people said, "See here, old chap, there's a perfectly rational explanation for why the house fell down. Termites ate through the wood and weakened it, causing gravity to make the house fall down. No spirits were involved in the elders' deaths."

The tribesmen looked back at the Englishman as if he was the biggest idiot on the planet. "No d'uh, the termites ate through the wood," they said. "But what caused the termites to eat through the wood at the moment the elders were in the house?"

limit of sets and ontological proof of God

I'm not sure, Aaron. Occam's Razor would dictate against assuming you know what God wants. That does sound grandly presumptious of you. If you knew what God wanted and God was all-powerful (ie, was able to carry out the things you knew about), then you should be able to predict what will happen tomorrow. But you don't.

(You could say God knows that you know what he wants AND is maliciously subverting his own desires in order to thwart your predictions. But really, you are multiplying assumptions even more at this point.)

Hence, *you* do not know what God wants and do not know why God would want something less perfect than himself to exist and your argument just reduces to the standard problem of evil of problem. It's still a problem, for sure, but it's not particularly a novel disproof of God.

All these definition (ontological) proofs always sound like Cauchy limits and calculus to me. "When dealing with infinitimals or infinites, there are different rules." Which is true. One can't add to aleph-sub-zeros together in the same way one adds 2 and 2. So in a similar way, rules of human intentionality or control don't really apply to God who is both infinite (beyond natural numbers) and infinitesimal (between real ones).

Personally I have a very bland, Darwinian explanation for the existence of most suffering. As far as evil - I'm undecided if it exists. I've seen some bad shit: suffering where no one gains. Not even the sadists. A below-zero game. I can see why some posit the existence of another agent to account for the graft.

speaking in tongues, neuroscience

Contrary to what may be a common perception, studies suggest that people who speak in tongues rarely suffer from mental problems. A recent study of nearly 1,000 evangelical Christians in England found that those who engaged in the practice were more emotionally stable than those who did not. Researchers have identified at least two forms of the practice, one ecstatic and frenzied, the other subdued and nearly silent.

The new findings contrasted sharply with images taken of other spiritually inspired mental states like meditation, which is often a highly focused mental exercise, activating the frontal lobes.

religious delusions

Good points, sop. It's not that *I* want it both ways. I think it's that I'd like the analysis of religion to be more, um, scientific and less religious. The 'sleep of reason' analysis is cliche as pointed out in the link.

I *do* believe that God is delusion, but I also believe that either (a) delusions are necessary (like the suspension of belief in stories), or (b) that delusions are a byproduct (a spindle, or whatever Gould called it?) of other necessary human psychological machinery.