PATTERN-SEEKING THEORIES
Whereas psychological theories of the origin of gods and religions may provide psychological comfort, pattern-seeking theories may provide intellectual or cognitive comfort. Such theories have become prominent in recent years.
One of the first books to promote such theories was Stewart Guthrie’s Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, published in 1993. Guthrie, cited previously, argued that “religion may best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism: the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things or events.” In fact, “anthropomorphism is the core of religious experience.… [It] pervades human thought and action, and … religion is its most systematic form.” Not only do we naturally tend to see faces in clouds, he said, but we also attribute to gods natural phenomena, such as thunder and lightning. Guthrie claimed that anthropomorphizing is evolutionarily advantageous, “because the world is uncertain, ambiguous, and in need of interpretation.” From an evolutionary point of view, he noted, “it is better for a hiker to mistake a boulder for a bear than to mistake a bear for a boulder.”21
Over the past two decades, several pattern-seeking theorists have followed this line of reasoning. Psychologist and science writer Michael Shermer argued in How We Believe that “humans evolved to be skilled pattern-seeking creatures.… Humans evolved a Belief Engine whose function it is to seek patterns and find causal relationships.… Those who were best at finding patterns … left behind the most offspring.” Pascal Boyer, cited previously, in Religion Explained described “religion in terms of cognitive processes that are common to all human brains, part and parcel of how a normal mind functions.… Faith and belief seem to be simple by-products of the way concepts and inferences are doing their work for religion in much the same way as ‘for other domains.’ ” Similarly, Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University, published Breaking the Spell, in which he argued that religious belief is the product of a human “hyperactive agent detection device.” As he described it: “At the root of human belief in gods lies an instinct on a hair trigger: the disposition to attribute agency—beliefs and desires and other mental states—to anything complicated that moves.”22
It is true that humans are pattern-seeking creatures, which is a direct result of the intelligence we developed over the past two million years. As discussed in chapter 4, however, could pattern-seeking, which is fundamentally an intellectual exercise, by itself have led to the origin of gods? The people who buried their kin at Sungir 28,000 years ago with elaborate grave goods and the people who built Göblecki Tepe 11,000 years ago were investing enormous resources into their labors and must have been moved by profoundly felt beliefs. Would pattern- seeking have been sufficient?
NEUROLOGICAL THEORIES
With the widespread availability of brain functional magnetic resonance imaging in recent years, there has been an outpouring of research efforts to identify brain areas associated with religious thinking. Such studies are often categorized as neurotheology and are well summarized in Patrick McNamara’s The Neuroscience of Religious Experiences.23
The temporal lobe has been the focus of many studies, because individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy occasionally report religious experiences, such as seeing God, during their seizures. Vilayanur Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Diego, reported that prior to such seizures one-quarter of such individuals “have deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communication with God.” Similarly, Michael Persinger, a psychologist at Canada’s Laurentian University and author of Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs, contended that “the God Experience is a normal and more organized pattern of temporal lobe activity,” a type of miniseizure “precipitated by subtle psychological factors such as personal stress, loss of a loved one, and the dilemma of anticipated death.” Persinger believes that “a biological capacity for the God Experience was critical for the survival of the species.… The God Experience is a phenomenon that is associated with the construction of the temporal lobe.… If the temporal lobe had developed in some other way, the God Experience would not have occurred.”24
The parietal lobe, especially the area adjacent to the superior temporal lobe (temporo- parietal junction), has also been the subject of neurotheology studies. When stimulated, this brain area may produce feelings of an out-of-body experience or “the feeling of a presence,” often interpreted in a religious context. Persinger’s studies have included the parietal area along with the temporal lobe. Similarly, Cosimo Urgesi et al. in Italy studied 88 individuals with brain tumors and reported that religious feelings of “self-transcendence” were associated with activity in the inferior parietal lobule. Matthew Alper, a philosopher and writer, labeled the temporal- parietal area “the God part of the brain” in his book of that title, and he whimsically suggested that someday it may be possible to surgically remove the “God part of the brain” by doing a “Godectomy.”25
The hippocampus, the amygdala, and associated parts of the limbic system have also drawn attention in neurotheology studies. Rhawn Joseph, a psychologist who worked in the Palo Alto VA Hospital, theorized that the limbic system contains “God neurons” and “God neurotransmitters.” A recent study by researchers at Duke University reported that atrophy of the hippocampus “was observed for participants reporting a life-changing religious experience.” Patrick McNamara reported that “in hundreds of clinical cases and a handful of neuroimaging studies, it is a striking fact that the amygdala, large portions of the prefrontal lobes, and the anterior temporal cortex are repeatedly implicated in expression of religious experiences.” McNamara labeled this a religion-related brain circuit.26
Consistent with McNamara’s findings, the frontal lobe has also figured prominently in studies of neurotheology. For example, Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili at the University of Pennsylvania studied brain areas activated when Franciscan nuns and Buddhist monks were meditating and reported “greater activity in the frontal lobes, and in particular in the prefrontal cortex.” At the same time, the nuns and monks showed reduced activity in their parietal lobes and described themselves “as entering a state of timelessness and spacelessness.” Other researchers have related religiosity to specific parts of the frontal lobes, including the orbital frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate, or to a combination of frontal and parietal areas.27
Still other researchers have linked religious ideation to other brain areas, such as the thalamus and caudate, as well as to specific neurochemical systems, such as dopamine and serotonin. What seems clear at this point is that there is no single “god center” in the brain. Rather, religious experiences are mediated by an extensive brain network similar to the network, described in the foregoing chapters, that mediates awareness of self, awareness of others, introspection, and autobiographical memory—in other words, the brain network that makes us uniquely human. McNamara similarly noted that “there is considerable anatomical overlap between the brain sites implicated in religious experience and the brain sites implicated in the sense of Self and self-consciousness.” It is also clear that the areas of the brain that are activated by religious experiences depend on the specific type of that experience. For example, meditation will activate frontal areas, whereas experiences involving intense emotions will activate the amygdala. Similarly, a study in which some subjects were asked to experience “an intimate relationship with God” while other subjects were asked to experience “fear of God’s anger” also activated different brain areas.28
GENETIC THEORIES
Studies of twins have suggested that there is a genetic component to religiosity. A study of teenage twins, both identical and nonidentical, “found the genetic contribution toward variation in religiosity to be around 20 percent.” Another widely publicized study of identical and nonidentical twins reared apart assessed religiosity in a variety of ways (for example, religious beliefs, interest in religious occupations) a
nd reported a “50 percent genetic influence on religiosity.” The authors of that study cautioned, however, that the genetic influence “might operate through personality traits such as traditionalism”; in other words, individuals who inherit similar personality traits might be more drawn to religious ideas. In such cases, the genetic effect would be on the personality traits, not on religiosity as such.29
A few researchers have even suggested that “our universal spiritual/religious proclivities represent … a genetically inherited trait … what we could call ‘spiritual’ genes.” If true, then “human beings are genetically predisposed or ‘hard-wired’ to believe in the concepts of spiritual reality, a God or gods, a soul, and an afterlife.”30
The most ambitious attempt to identify such a gene was carried out by geneticist Dean Hamer, who in 2004 published The God Gene and was featured in a cover story in Time magazine. Hamer used a “self-transcendence scale of spirituality,” which included questions such as connectedness to nature and interest in extrasensory perceptions, as his measure of religiosity. He then identified a gene that accounted for only 1 percent of the variance in the test scores of his subjects and designated it a “spiritual allele,” or “God gene.” The designated gene affects dopamine, serotonin, and other brain chemicals that, when released, according to Hamer, “bring a profound sense of joy, fulfillment, and peace.” Hamer’s work has been widely criticized for his choice of measures of religiosity, for his statistically weak findings, and for his designation of a single gene as a “God gene” when it is known that most human traits are the product of hundreds of genes, if they are genetic in origin at all.31
Another widely cited, if quixotic, attempt to establish a genetic basis for religiosity was a book by psychologist Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published in 1976. Jaynes argued that until about 3,000 years ago, the two halves of the brain, the “bicameral mind,” operated independently. At that time, a genetic change took place, causing the two halves of the brain to become integrated. This in turn produced auditory hallucinations that humans interpreted as the voices of gods, and this gave rise to religions. As Jaynes summarized it: “The neurological structure responsible for these hallucinations is neurologically bound to substrates for religious feelings, and this is because the source of religion and of gods themselves is in the bicameral mind.” Jaynes’s thesis is at odds with almost everything known about the evolution of the human brain.32
ARE GODS THE PRODUCTS, OR BY-PRODUCTS, OF EVOLUTION?
A final question regarding theories of the origin of gods is whether the emergence of the gods represents an adaptation of evolution and was evolutionarily advantageous, or whether the emergence of gods was merely a by-product of evolution, “a vestigial artifact of a primitive mind,” in the words of one writer. Debate on this issue has been ongoing and spirited, with the majority of writers favoring an adaptationist position.33
The most common argument put forth by the adaptationists is that gods improve the survival of the group. According to this theory, “ancestral societies with culturally widespread God concepts would have outcompeted societies without such concepts, given the cooperative advantage of believing groups.” This argument assumes that groups sharing gods are more willing to share resources, more willing to defend the group against outside threats, and more cooperative in general. As summarized by Nicholas Wade: “Other things being equal, groups with a stronger religious inclination would have been more united and at a considerable advantage compared with groups that were less cohesive. People in the more successful group would have left more surviving children, and genes favoring an instinct for religious behavior would have become commoner each generation until they had swept through the entire human population.” Although this is a reasonable hypothesis, I am not aware of any supporting data. In addition, some geneticists have questioned the validity of group selection, saying that evolutionary theory applies only to individuals.34
At the individual level, there are also said to be evolutionary advantages to believing in gods. Dean Hamer argued that the “God genes” are advantageous in providing “human beings with an innate sense of optimism.… Optimism is the will to keep on living and procreating, despite the fact that death is ultimately inevitable.” Matthew Alper similarly wrote that “those individuals whose brains possessed some genetic mutation that could withstand the overwhelming anxiety induced by our awareness of death were more likely to survive.” And Patrick McNamara contended that the religion-inspired “unified Self” may be “more effective in pursuing behavioral goals … in evading predators … in war and combat,” and more cooperative.35
Another argument in favor of gods being evolutionarily advantageous is that they are good for your physical and mental health. Numerous studies have reported that individuals who attend church regularly have lower rates of hypertension, heart disease, emphysema, cirrhosis, anxiety, depression, and suicide. However, individuals who attend church regularly may also be less likely to smoke and drink heavily, which may account for many of these differences. In addition, most such studies have been carried out on older adults; such differences would only be evolutionarily advantageous if they were operational for individuals in their childbearing years.36
On the other side of the argument, fewer scholars of religion have portrayed gods as by-products of evolution. The brain evolution theory outlined in this book proposes that gods are a by-product of our acquisition of autobiographical memory and suggests that religions followed the emergence of gods as the population increased and societies became organized. Other writers who have defended a by-product position include Pascal Boyer in Religion Explained, cited previously, who argued that gods and religions are by-products of the human tendency to seek patterns. Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, claimed in his book In Gods We Trust that “religion has no evolutionary function per se.” And Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Oxford University, argued in The God Delusion that religion “doesn’t have a direct survival value of its own, but is a by-product of something else that does.”37
As by-products of evolution, gods would usually be assumed to be neutral and to have had no effect on evolution as such. This may or may not be true, since it is also possible that gods may be ultimately evolutionarily disadvantageous. Possible scenarios for this are “god contests,” in which wars are fought to determine whose god is the correct god. Such wars were fought between city-states in ancient Mesopotamia, as described in chapter 6, and apparently contributed to the demise of the world’s first civilization. An Old Testament god contest familiar to many is the battle between the followers of Baal, the Canaanite fertility god, and the followers of Jehovah, the Israelite protector God. Elijah, a prophet of Jehovah, prevailed and then had the 450 followers of Baal put to death.38
The history of modern Homo sapiens up to the present is littered with god contests. In The Great Big Book of Horrible Things, a list of history’s 100 worst manmade atrocities, 25 of the 100 were god contests. Such contests become especially dangerous when combined with apocalyptic beliefs about the end of the world as being glorious and weapons of mass destruction capable of terminating the existence of modern Homo sapiens. In his Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris invoked this apparition:
Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.… That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.
Under such scenarios, the deistic by-products of evolution could terminate human existence with one final nuclear chorus of Dies Irae.39
Humans need gods. As Fyodor Dos
toevsky phrased it: “Man needs the unfathomable and infinite just as much as he needs the small planet which he inhabits.” Since the human need for gods is an integral part of the brain networks that make us uniquely human, and since formal religions are deeply socially integrated into our cultures, neither gods nor religions are likely to simply disappear anytime soon, even if they are no longer needed. In America alone, there are over 1,500 different religious denominations, ranging from the Agasha Temple of Wisdom to Zygon International; most of these are small, but 25 of them have at least one million adherents. At many other places in the world, gods and religions also continue to play very important roles in the lives of the people. The Jotabeche Methodist Pentecostal Church in Santiago, Chile, seats 18,000 people. The Yoide Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, seats 12,000 in the main church and 20,000 in overflow chapels and has seven Sunday services. As British anthropologist Sir James Frazer noted: “It seems probable that the great majority of our species will continue to acquiesce in a belief so flattering to human vanity and so comforting to human sorrow.” Frazer continued: “It cannot be denied that the champions of eternal life have entrenched themselves in a strong, if not impregnable, position; for if it is impossible to prove the immortality of the soul, it is, in the present state of our knowledge, equally impossible to disprove it.”40
Thus, gods and their accompanying religions will probably continue to be born and to die. Examples of religions that have come into being within the last two centuries and that already have several million adherents are Ahmadiyya in Pakistan and Mormonism in the United States. Ahmadiyya was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who claimed to be the promised Messiah and Mahdi awaited by Muslims. Ahmadis teach that Jesus was an earlier prophet who was crucified but survived his time on the cross and died later of old age in Kashmir, where he was seeking the Lost Tribes of Israel. Ahmadiyya has been influential among African American Muslims. Mormonism, officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, was founded by Joseph Smith, who claimed to have found buried in the ground, where an angel directed him to dig, golden plates that were the records of an ancient religion. This religion had been founded by Israelites who had come to America 2,600 years earlier. Mormons teach that, following his crucifixion and rising from the dead, Jesus came to America and designated it as the new Promised Land. The Mormon religion thus claims to be a continuation of this ancient religion.41
Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods Page 24
