Why We Believe in God(s) - Andy Thomson - Atheist Book

by Andy Thomson, Richard Dawkins

  Although we are all much more deferential to authority than any of us would suspect, as the Milgram experiments proved, we do have moral emotions that help us negotiate our relationships with authority, allowing us to somehow define in-groups to which we are loyal. We deem their actions good, and we defend them. We also identify out-groups of which we remain wary, determining that they are suspect and not to be trusted until they demonstrate otherwise. Religions have served as a ready-made mechanism to define death-deserving out-groups.

  Purity seems another dimension of our automatic moral emotions. Perhaps it arose from our disgust feelings at putrid meat, which protected us from disease, but that disgust reaction can carry over into social relationships. Disgust has become a powerful moralizing emotion, brought in to enhance criticism and condemnation. It is often directed toward those labeled as the out-group. Feelings of purity inform our sense of people, places, or items tagged as sacred, and our discomfort when rituals or the sacred are violated or “contaminated.”

  Our conscious moral feelings are rationalization processes that allow us to justify our automatic emotional responses. To understand this, compare moral responses to aesthetic judgments. When you see a painting you like, you just like it. It moves you somehow. When asked why, you come up with reasons, but they are essentially rationalizations that may or may not at all relate to whatever that positive gut reaction was.

  We have similar automatic moral reactions, and we can then, like a good lawyer, build a conscious case to justify them. That “lawyer” part of our brain, which has been localized to the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outer layer, will give the reasons for any moral reaction and will build our case. Sometimes that part of our brain can override our emotional response, and we might find someone we “instinctively” detest innocent.

  Since so much of our moral emotional processes are unconscious, religion can make our lives easier by assigning for us conscious reasons to feelings that arise seemingly out of nowhere and with no conscious processing.

  It is quite possible to be nonreligious but highly moral. But if you followed the exact wording of the Bible, you could sell your uppity daughter into slavery (Exodus 21:7). Other religious works have equally odd provisions. Ancient scriptures seem full of moral advice that sounds anything but moral to the modern listener. The less you abide by scripture, and the more you use your basic moral intuitions, the more moral you are likely to be.

  Genuine morality is doing what is right regardless of what we may be told; religious morality is doing what we are told. Religion’s power gives us strong reasons to do what we’re told. Religion allows us to be part of an in-group that will reap eternal reward or it can prevent us from burning in hell for eternity.

  People who have abandoned religion will also tell you that having religious belief is much easier than not having it, requiring, as it does, so much less mental effort than making one’s own decisions.

  Kin Psychology

  Humans evolved and are born with elegant mind mechanisms to recognize and relate to kin, to favor relatives over strangers. It is captured in the old saying, “Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my brother, my cousin, and I against strangers.”

  These kinship feelings are crucial not just to our survival but also to the survival of copies of our genes that reside in our kin. We evolved to favor those with our genes over those without.

  Religions evoke and exploit kin emotions. Roman Catholicism offers a superb example. The nuns are “sisters” or even “mother superiors,” the priests are “fathers,” the monks are “brothers,” the Pope is the “Holy Father,” and the religion itself is referred to as the “Holy Mother Church.”

  Exploitation of kin emotions is central to the recruitment and training of today’s male suicide bombers and submission to the group and its god. Kinship cues are manipulated. Charismatic recruiters and trainers create cells of fictive kin, pseudobrothers outraged at the treatment of their Muslim brothers and sisters and separated from actual kin. The appeal of such martyrdom is not just the sexual fantasy of multiple heavenly virgins, but the chance to give chosen kin punched tickets to paradise.

  A June 18, 2010, report from the Associated Press powerfully illustrates kinship use by religion: “an Al-Qaeda-linked insurgent shot and killed his own father as he slept in his bed for refusing to quit his job as an Iraqi interpreter for the U.S. military.” In this situation, the extraordinary power of created religious “kinship” trumped actual kinship, overriding not just individual kinship emotions but a general cultural taboo against patricide. This shows how genuinely dangerous religions can become.

  And the largest single loss of American civilian life in a nonnatural disaster until the events of 9/11 came about because of religion, when a total of 918 people died at Jonestown—909 of them by suicide, with some killing their own children before drinking a cyanide-laced punch. The community was founded by Jim Jones, the charismatic “father” of the People’s Temple, a religious cult he created.

  Why did those 909 people trust a madman with their lives?

  Costly Signaling

  How do you trust a person who promises to do something? Your trust rises if the promise comes with a hard-to-fake, honest, costly signal of commitment: a $1,000 up-front down payment; a diamond ring; self-flagellation in the name of a god; uprooting yourself and your congregation or family to create an entirely new town in Central America.

  Hard-to-fake, honest, costly signals of commitment are part of our relationships. Religions use these quite nicely. They entice us to commit to them and to sacrifice our blood, sweat, toils, tears, spare change, great fortunes, and even our own kin.

  How do I judge your commitment to the faith and to me as a brother in the faith? I watch your hard-to-fake, costly participation in the rituals of our faith—rituals that are often long, tedious, uncomfortable, and financially and physically taxing.

  8

  Wherever Two or More of You Are Gathered

  Harnessing Brain Chemistry through Ritual

  The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.

  —Charles Darwin

  Like religious ideas and beliefs, religious rituals are by-products of mental mechanisms originally designed for other purposes.

  Rituals maintain, transmit, and propagate belief across time and space. We have seen how vulnerable the individual mind is to generating, accepting, and believing religious ideas. If the process stopped there, religious beliefs might be loosely held. But, by mobilizing powerful brain chemicals that arouse intense emotional experiences and give rise to feelings as diverse as self-esteem, pleasure, fear, motivation, pain relief, and attachment, ritual creates a whole far stronger than the sum of its parts. The group nature of ritual takes individual minds already primed for belief and throws them into a continuous loop of mutual reinforcement, creating a volatile congregation of conscious and unconscious forces.

  In a sense there is only one real religion, created by our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the original Homo sapiens in Africa, some 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. Our window into deep time, when these rituals were created, comes from three surviving populations of hunter-gatherers.

  First are the Kung San of Africa, who until recently lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Second is a tribe that lived isolated from the world until the twentieth century in the Bay of Bengal’s Andaman Islands; its members are thought to be descended from the original band of humans who left Africa, traveled south around the Arabian Peninsula, then around India, and ultimately to Indonesia and Australia. Third are the Australian aborigines, who, according to genetic evidence, came from Africa in one wave.

  All three of these tribes have religions that are striking in their similarity. They are all based on song, dance, and trance. Why? It turns out those are activities that harness some of our most powerful brain chemicals, the ones that influence pleasure,
fear, love, trust, self-esteem, and attachment. So powerful was the religion our ancestors discovered that if you look closely, you still see echoes of this first religion in all of the faiths on the planet today. Just as we are all the sons and daughters of that small band of hunter-gatherers that roamed Africa less than a hundred thousand years ago, so too are all our religions derivative of their discovery of the power of song, dance, and trance.

  The Brain Chemistry of Ritual

  Cells within the brain communicate through neurotransmitters, allowing signals to move from cell to cell.

  Every animal with a central nervous system has serotonin, the oldest of a class of neurotransmitters called monoamines. Serotonin neurons reside in the brain stem and send projections throughout the brain for a variety of reasons, including gross and repetitive motor movement. But more important to this topic is that serotonin also chemically regulates our self-esteem in accord with social feedback.

  If I am fired from all of my jobs, my serotonin levels and activity will decrease, and the loss in social standing likely will trigger depression, irritability, and impulsivity in me. Conversely, if you, the reader, are made president of the United States, whether or not you want the job, your serotonin levels and activity will increase, and you will feel more esteemed. Modern antidepressants such as Prozac increase serotonin activity.

  As you sit quietly reading this, the serotonin neurons in your brain stem are going about three cycles per second. If you are up, moving around, they are firing at five cycles per second. When you do heavy exercise, you receive a boost in serotonin.

  Another monoamine neurotransmitter of some renown is dopamine, generally associated with pleasure. A dopamine-rich area of our brain called the nucleus accumbens lights up with pleasure in response to certain stimuli, such as food, sex, and drugs. This is what triggers the “do-it-again” response to fast food.

  Yet dopamine is more than just the pleasure chemical. Dopamine is involved with muscle function, fine motor movement, repetitive compulsive behavior, and perseveration, the uncontrollable repetition of a certain response. It was a dopamine analog that temporarily revived catatonic patients being treated by neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, who recorded the phenomenon in his 1973 book, Awakenings, later fictionalized in a 1990 film of the same name. Dopamine also helps to mark things in our brains as important, to give them salience, and to anticipate a reward.

  The last of the monoamine neurotransmitters are epinephrine and norepinephrine, better known as adrenaline and noradrenaline. Adrenaline increases our heart rates, makes us feel anxious, focuses our attention, and causes us to sweat. It provides temporary bursts of strength, allowing us to flee or fight, and sometimes allows otherwise impossible physical feats, such as a mother lifting a car to free her child.

  Oxytocin is of particular interest in religious rituals because of its bonding properties. During childbirth, the mother’s brain releases a massive dose of oxytocin in response to cervical and vaginal dilation. Breastfeeding triggers the letdown response for milk, which stimulates more oxytocin. Oxytocin loosens the mother’s other attachments and helps her to focus on, commit to, and attach to the infant. Oxytocin also increases during sexual arousal, and orgasm releases a nice hit of it.

  Oxytocin generates trust, love, generosity, and empathy in both sexes. It reduces fear and probably has a positive impact on all of our social emotions. Early religions able to utilize oxytocin would have been able to insinuate themselves into the potentials for man’s most powerful, pleasurable, and dangerous emotions.

  The endorphins, the last neurochemicals of specific importance to religion, are our internal opiates; the word actually derives from the term “endogenous morphine.” The endorphins’ main function is to block pain when injury occurs, and they are produced by exercise, excitement, pain, touch, laughter, music, orgasm, chili peppers, and the placenta.

  If a runner is put into a brain scanner after a long run, endorphin receptors light up. The increase in endorphins is what causes a “runners high,” and it occurs with vigorous exercise for a reason.

  For our ancestors, the reason for this endorphin rush was survival. Vigorous exercise generally signaled a substantial risk of injury, whether they were hunting or being hunted. If injury did occur, their brains were ready for it, providing a pain-relieving chemical that also allowed a sense of control and power, at least until all threats had passed. This is why today’s weekend warriors can continue their activity past what would normally be a pain threshold—at least until the next day—just as their ancestors would have been safe from immediate threat.

  Endorphins also facilitate social bonds and increase the release of dopamine. This is a cycle unique to neurotransmitters. Though each has a specific function, they overlap and can stimulate each other, creating unique combinations that can be exploited for specific purposes—which brings us to religious rituals.

  With no knowledge of neurochemistry, somehow our ancestors stumbled upon combinations of activities that could stimulate and boost serotonin, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, oxytocin, and the endorphins, creating brain activity unique to those combinations. And that is the key to understanding the enduring place of rituals in all cultures because, literally, there is nothing else like them.

  The word religion probably derives from the Latin “religare,” which means “to bind, or tie.” The religious rituals invented by our ancestors captured our chemistry in a singular, uniquely human way that tied people together and facilitated social bonds.

  To survive in a hostile environment, our ancestors established social groups, which created a new set of problems. Groups experienced interpersonal differences and disputes, which could doom the group if not resolved. But within a species as social as we are, anarchy was not an evolutionary option. If one member acted in a way inimical to group survival, an individual or subgroup that dared to discipline that member risked revenge from the offenders’ friends or kin. But unseen forces—dead ancestors or gods—could determine punishment and reinforce groupishness easily and with constant vigilance.

  Recent research supports this hypothesis. In a study about the effects of religion on punishment, Ryan McKay and his colleagues in Zurich, Switzerland, and England have demonstrated that participants who were given subliminal religious suggestions (religious priming) when determining punishment of unfair behavior in others tended to punish more severely than others. Participants were subliminally primed with religious primes, secular punishment primes, or control primes. Religion increased costly punishment, clearly trumping the other two groups. Two mechanisms were operative. The first was a “supernatural watcher” mechanism. Religious participants punish unfair behaviors when primed because they sense that failure to do so will enrage or disappoint an observing supernatural agent. The second mechanism involved the religious activation of cultural norms about fairness and its enforcement.

  Thus, creation of gods or salient ancestors made eminent, if unconscious, sense, and creating rituals to help communicate with those invisible forces likely was the next logical step. But if ritual first invoked unseen and powerful others, how did our ancestors come to believe in specific invisible deities, or accept that dead ancestors could still hold power?

  Well, we are brought back to the building blocks of belief—the perception of a power higher than ourselves, the sense of being able to communicate or interact with that power, and so on.

  Then, as now, god was a product of the mind—or, more precisely, a by-product of the mind’s cognitive mechanisms.

  The Role of Dreams in Ritual—and Trance

  Our ancestors most likely literally dreamed up gods. Today, we know that dreams are a product of our brains; that they might provide insight into our emotional lives, and we accept that they may or may not make sense. Freud called dreams the “royal road to the unconscious.”

  But as far as we know, our deep ancestral societies did not include skilled therapists, and even the best scientists and therapists today ca
nnot be entirely sure how or why we dream the things we dream. But our ancestors dreamed, too, and we have reason to believe that they believed that dreams were uniquely powerful.

  Beginning in the fifth century BCE, the ancient Greeks, a relatively recent and enlightened civilization, built incubation centers, temples dedicated to Asclepius, the god of healing. Citizens would go to the temples to sleep and induce dreams through ritual, fasting, and prayer, using information from dreams for healing and believing that the gods revealed themselves in dreams. The early Egyptians also saw dreams as a key source of divine information.

  Go back further in human development, and imagine a hunter-gatherer asleep on the plains of Africa ten millennia ago, visited in sleep by a deceased relative in a dream that made no apparent sense. It would seem logical to accept the odd landscapes of dreams as an invisible reality, perhaps another world filled with wiser and more powerful ancestral spirits or some sorts of deities that could offer guidance.

  Combine that with a sense of wonder at the natural world, mix in decoupled cognition, which as already demonstrated allows us to accept unseen beings, and we could have the beginnings of gods.

  We will never know exactly how our remote ancestors created the first gods. Gods may have been created also as personifications and explanations of natural forces such as fire, which is still present in rituals for most of the world’s religions, in the form of candles. Imagine our ancestors harnessing fire for the first time. It must have seemed truly miraculous. Combine that with dramatic weather changes, volcanoes, the sun, the moon, and other natural wonders. As with all other powerful psychological phenomena, there were undoubtedly multiple determinants of those first supernatural beings.