As always,Jehovah gets the last laugh.

Evolutionary Studies Suggest that Atheists, Whatever They Say to the Contrary, Really Do Believe in God

Casey Luskin August 1, 2014 6:28 AM

Over the past few weeks, a theme of discussion on the Internet has been the proposal that atheists may not exist. Of course people who think they're atheists exist, but a study discussed inNature proposes that people really aren't functionally atheists because we're innately predisposed toward religion. In an article titled "Scientists discover that atheists might not exist, and that's not a joke," Science 2.0 has a nice summary:

While militant atheists like Richard Dawkins may be convinced God doesn't exist, God, if he is around, may be amused to find that atheists might not exist.

Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged.

While this idea may seem outlandish -- after all, it seems easy to decide not to believe in God -- evidence from several disciplines indicates that what you actually believe is not a decision you make for yourself. Your fundamental beliefs are decided by much deeper levels of consciousness, and some may well be more or less set in stone.

This line of thought has led to some scientists claiming that "atheism is psychologically impossible because of the way humans think," says Graham Lawton, an avowed atheist himself, writing in the New Scientist. "They point to studies showing, for example, that even people who claim to be committed atheists tacitly hold religious beliefs, such as the existence of an immortal soul."

This shouldn't come as a surprise, since we are born believers, not atheists, scientists say. Humans are pattern-seekers from birth, with a belief in karma, or cosmic justice, as our default setting. "A slew of cognitive traits predisposes us to faith," writes Pascal Boyer in Nature, the science journal, adding that people "are only aware of some of their religious ideas".

Boyer's article in Nature continues this line of argument: "Religious thought and behaviour can be considered part of the natural human capacities, such as music, political systems, family relations or ethnic coalitions." He continues, "religious thoughts seem to be an emergent property of our standard cognitive capacities." In a striking comment, he points out that these religious predispositions exist in humans from a very young age:

Humans also tend to entertain social relations with these and other non-physical agents, even from a very young age. ... It is a small step from having this capacity to bond with non-physical agents to conceptualizing spirits, dead ancestors and gods, who are neither visible nor tangible, yet are socially involved.

Boyer gives every sign that he himself is an atheist, writing things like, "When people proclaim their adherence to a particular faith, they subscribe to claims for which there is no evidence," or "Religious concepts and activities hijack our cognitive resources." So it's not surprising that he suggests evolution is the ultimate cause of our religiosity:

Is religion a product of our evolution? The very question makes many people, religious or otherwise, cringe, although for different reasons. Some people of faith fear that an understanding of the processes underlying belief could undermine it. Others worry that what is shown to be part of our evolutionary heritage will be interpreted as good, true, necessary or inevitable. Still others, many scientists included, simply dismiss the whole issue, seeing religion as childish, dangerous nonsense.

Here's my take. Evolutionary explanations of the origin of religion typically have two things in common: First, they're dreadfully predictable. They simply look at some aspect of religious life or faith and ask how that behavior (or belief) might aid survival by endowing us with a beneficial trait (we'll call that "X"). Second, in doing so, they utterly fail to explain the totality of religious experience and belief. Trait X might indeed aid in survival, but there's no reason why evolving Trait X would imply or necessitate evolving anything like the full-fledged religion that's so common throughout human societies today. Thankfully that's not Boyer's approach. Instead, he simply sees religion as an extension (or "hijacking") of human "standard cognitive capacities," however they might have arisen:

So is religion an adaptation or a by-product of our evolution? Perhaps one day we will find compelling evidence that a capacity for religious thoughts, rather than "religion" in the modern form of socio-political institutions, contributed to fitness in ancestral times. For the time being, the data support a more modest conclusion: religious thoughts seem to be an emergent property of our standard cognitive capacities.

At least Boyer is being honest that it's difficult as of yet to provide a full-fledged evolutionary account of the origin of religion. He argues, however, that evolutionary attempts to explain the origin of religion challenge key tenets of religion:

The findings emerging from this cognitive-evolutionary approach challenge two central tenets of most established religions. First, the notion that their particular creed differs from all other (supposedly misguided) faiths; second, that it is only because of extraordinary events or the actual presence of supernatural agents that religious ideas have taken shape. On the contrary, we now know that all versions of religion are based on very similar tacit assumptions, and that all it takes to imagine supernatural agents are normal human minds processing information in the most natural way.

So the fact that all religions think they're right and involve belief in supernatural agents mean they're all basically the same? That discounts, in a naïve way that one comes to expect from atheists, the profound differences among the world's religions. And why should our being predisposed to faith somehow mean no religion is correct? That doesn't follow at all. If anything, it would seem to support a key premise of theistic religion: that God gives us a capacity and desire to believe.

The philosopher and author Paul Copan cuts right through such arguments with clean logic. He writes:

The inventor Thomas Edison said that humans are "incurably religious." History certainly bears this out. But why have humans been so religiously inclined across the millennia and civilizations? Neo-atheists Dawkins and Dennett interpret the phenomenon this way: theology is biology. To Dawkins, God is a "delusion"; for Dennett, religious believers are under a kind of "spell" that needs to be broken. Like computers, Dawkins says, we come equipped with a remarkable predisposition to do (and believe) what we're told. So young minds full of mush are susceptible to mental infections or viruses ("memes"). Charismatic preachers and other adults spew out their superstitious bilge, and later generations latch on to it and eventually create churches and religious schools. Even if there isn't a "God gene," humans have a certain religious urge -- an apparent hardwiring in the brain that draws us to supernatural myths.

Some conclude, therefore that God doesn't exist but is simply the product of predictable biological processes. One big problem with this statement: it is a whopping non sequitur. It just doesn't follow that if humans are somehow wired to be religious, God therefore doesn't exist. This is what's called "the genetic fallacy" -- proving or disproving the truth of a view based on its origin. In this case, God's existence is a separate question from the source of religious beliefs. We need to sort out the biology of belief from the rationality of belief.

There's more to say here. We could turn the argument on its head: if God exists and has designed us to connect with him, then we're actually functioning properly when we're directed toward belief in God. We can agree that natural/physical processes partly contribute to commitment to God. In that case, the basic argument of Dawkins and Dennett could actually support the idea that religious believers are functioning decently and in order.

On top of this, we're left wondering why people would think up gods and spirits in the first place. Why would humans voluntarily sacrifice their lives for some intangible realm? Maybe it's because the physical domain doesn't contain the source of coherence, order, morality, meaning, and guidance for life. Humans, though embodied, are moral, spiritual beings; they're able to rise above the physical and biological to reflect on it and their condition. This can result in the search for a world-transcending God.

Attempts by these New Atheists to explain away theology as a useful fiction or, worse, a harmful delusion fall short of telling us why the religious impulse is so deeply embedded. If God exists, however, we have an excellent reason as to why religious fervor should exist.

(Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?, pp. 29-30 (Baker Books, 2011) (emphases in original).)

Copan is exactly right: If God exists then we would predict that humans should have this innate tendency toward religiosity. Critics of religion will forever chase inadequate explanations for these religious tendencies. Science 2.0 gives a good example of this fruitless thinking:

If a tendency to believe in the reality of an intangible network is so deeply wired into humanity, the implication is that it must have an evolutionary purpose. Social scientists have long believed that the emotional depth and complexity of the human mind means that mindful, self-aware people necessarily suffer from deep existential dread. Spiritual beliefs evolved over thousands of years as nature's way to help us balance this out and go on functioning.

So religion evolved to help us cope with the reality that we really live in a meaningless universe? How convenient that is for those who believe we live in a meaningless universe! But why should anyone feel "existential dread" in the first place, if not for the fact that we long for something greater and beyond our mortal lives? Why is that longing for greater purpose there in the first place? This argument reduces to "religion evolved to meet a need" without, however, bothering to explain where the need itself came from.

Well, where does it come from? Perhaps the answer was given by a different Pascal -- not Pascal Boyer but Blaise Pascal. Centuries ago, he argued that if we find a "God-shaped vacuum" (a popular but apt paraphrase of his view) in the human heart, that is simply because God put it there.

Scientists discover that atheists might not exist, and that’s not a joke

By Nury Vittachi | July 6th 2014 08:03 PM

Metaphysical thought processes are more deeply wired than hitherto suspected

WHILE MILITANT ATHEISTS like Richard Dawkins may be convinced God doesn’t exist, God, if he is around, may be amused to find that atheists might not exist.

    Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged.

    While this idea may seem outlandish—after all, it seems easy to decide not to believe in God—evidence from several disciplines indicates that what you actually believe is not a decision you make for yourself. Your fundamental beliefs are decided by much deeper levels of consciousness, and some may well be more or less set in stone. 

    This line of thought has led to some scientists claiming that “atheism is psychologically impossible because of the way humans think,” says Graham Lawton, an avowed atheist himself, writing in the New Scientist. “They point to studies showing, for example, that even people who claim to be committed atheists tacitly hold religious beliefs, such as the existence of an immortal soul.”

    This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since we are born believers, not atheists, scientists say. Humans are pattern-seekers from birth, with a belief in karma, or cosmic justice, as our default setting. “A slew of cognitive traits predisposes us to faith,” writes Pascal Boyer in Nature, the science journal, adding that people “are only aware of some of their religious ideas”.

INTERNAL MONOLOGUES

Scientists have discovered that “invisible friends” are not something reserved for children. We all have them, and encounter them often in the form of interior monologues. As we experience events, we mentally tell a non-present listener about it. 

    The imagined listener may be a spouse, it may be Jesus or Buddha or it may be no one in particular. It’s just how the way the human mind processes facts. The identity, tangibility or existence of the listener is irrelevant.

    “From childhood, people form enduring, stable and important relationships with fictional characters, imaginary friends, deceased relatives, unseen heroes and fantasized mates,” says Boyer of Washington University, himself an atheist. This feeling of having an awareness of another  consciousness might simply be the way our natural operating system works.

PUZZLING RESPONSES

These findings may go a long way to explaining a series of puzzles in recent social science studies. In the United States, 38% of people who identified themselves as atheist or agnostic went on to claim to believe in a God or a Higher Power (Pew Forum, “Religion and the Unaffiliated”, 2012).

    While the UK is often defined as an irreligious place, a recent survey by Theos, a think tank, found that very few people—only 13 per cent of adults—agreed with the statement “humans are purely material beings with no spiritual element”. For the vast majority of us, unseen realities are very present.

    When researchers asked people whether they had taken part in esoteric spiritual practices such as having a Reiki session or having their aura read, the results were almost identical (between 38 and 40%) for people who defined themselves as religious, non-religious or atheist.

    The implication is that we all believe in a not dissimilar range of tangible and intangible realities. Whether a particular brand of higher consciousness is included in that list (“I believe in God”, “I believe in some sort of higher force”, “I believe in no higher consciousness”) is little more than a detail.

    

Starry Night at La Silla 

Creative Common license 3.0 ESO/H. Dahle - http://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1333a/

EVOLUTIONARY PURPOSES

If a tendency to believe in the reality of an intangible network is so deeply wired into humanity, the implication is that it must have an evolutionary purpose. Social scientists have long believed that the emotional depth and complexity of the human mind means that mindful, self-aware people necessarily suffer from deep existential dread. Spiritual beliefs evolved over thousands of years as nature’s way to help us balance this out and go on functioning. 

    If a loved one dies, even many anti-religious people usually feel a need for a farewell ritual, complete with readings from old books and intoned declarations that are not unlike prayers. In war situations, commanders frequently comment that atheist soldiers pray far more than they think they do.

    Statistics show that the majority of people who stop being part of organized religious groups don’t become committed atheists, but retain a mental model in which “The Universe” somehow has a purpose for humanity.

    In the US, only 20 per cent of people have no religious affiliation, but of these, only one in ten say they are atheists. The majority are “nothing in particular” according to figures published in New Scientist.

FEELING OF CONNECTEDNESS

There are other, more socially-oriented evolutionary purposes, too. Religious communities grow faster, since people behave better (referring to the general majority over the millennia, as opposed to minority extremists highlighted by the media on any given day). 

    Why is this so? Religious folk attend weekly lectures on morality, read portions of respected books about the subject on a daily basis and regularly discuss the subject in groups, so it would be inevitable that some of this guidance sinks in. 

    There is also the notion that the presence of an invisible moralistic presence makes misdemeanors harder to commit. “People who think they are being watched tend to behave themselves and cooperate more,” says the New Scientist’s Lawton. “Societies that chanced on the idea of supernatural surveillance were likely to have been more successful than those that didn't, further spreading religious ideas.”

    This is not simply a matter of religious folk having a metaphorical angel on their shoulder, dispensing advice. It is far deeper than that—a sense of interconnectivity between all things. If I commit a sin, it is not an isolated event but will have appropriate repercussions. This idea is common to all large scale faith groups, whether it is called karma or simply God ensuring that you “reap what you sow”.  

NARRATIVE PRESENCE

These theories find confirmation from a very different academic discipline—the literature department. The present writer, based at the Creativity Lab at Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design, has been looking at the manifestation of cosmic justice in fictional narratives—books, movies and games. It is clear that in almost all fictional worlds, God exists, whether the stories are written by people of a religious, atheist or indeterminate beliefs.

    It’s not that a deity appears directly in tales. It is that the fundamental basis of stories appears to be the link between the moral decisions made by the protagonists and the same characters’ ultimate destiny. The payback is always appropriate to the choices made. An unnamed, unidentified mechanism ensures that this is so, and is a fundamental element of stories—perhaps the fundamental element of narratives. 

    In children’s stories, this can be very simple: the good guys win, the bad guys lose. In narratives for older readers, the ending is more complex, with some lose ends left dangling, and others ambiguous. Yet the ultimate appropriateness of the ending is rarely in doubt. If a tale ended with Harry Potter being tortured to death and the Dursley family dancing on his grave, the audience would be horrified, of course, but also puzzled: that’s not what happens in stories. Similarly, in a tragedy, we would be surprised if King Lear’s cruelty to Cordelia did not lead to his demise.

    Indeed, it appears that stories exist to establish that there exists a mechanism or a person—cosmic destiny, karma, God, fate, Mother Nature—to make sure the right thing happens to the right person. Without this overarching moral mechanism, narratives become records of unrelated  arbitrary events, and lose much of their entertainment value. In contrast, the stories which become universally popular appear to be carefully composed records of cosmic justice at work. 

WELL-DEFINED PROCESS

In manuals for writers (see “Screenplay” by Syd Field, for example) this process is often defined in some detail. Would-be screenwriters are taught that during the build-up of the story, the villain can sin (take unfair advantages) to his or her heart’s content without punishment, but the heroic protagonist must be karmically punished for even the slightest deviation from the path of moral rectitude. The hero does eventually win the fight, not by being bigger or stronger, but because of the choices he makes.

    This process is so well-established in narrative creation that the literati have even created a specific category for the minority of tales which fail to follow this pattern. They are known as “bleak” narratives. An example is A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry, in which the likable central characters suffer terrible fates while the horrible faceless villains triumph entirely unmolested.

    While some bleak stories are well-received by critics, they rarely win mass popularity among readers or moviegoers. Stories without the appropriate outcome mechanism feel incomplete. The purveyor of cosmic justice is not just a cast member, but appears to be the hidden heart of the show.

ROOTS OF ATHEISM

But if a belief in cosmic justice is natural and deeply rooted, the question arises: where does atheism fit in? Albert Einstein, who had a life-long fascination with metaphysics, believed atheism came from a mistaken belief that harmful superstition and a general belief in religious or mystical experience were the same thing, missing the fact that evolution would discard unhelpful beliefs and foster the growth of helpful ones. He declared himself “not a ‘Freethinker’ in the usual sense of the word because I find that this is in the main an attitude nourished exclusively by an opposition against naive superstition” (“Einstein on Peace”, page 510).

    Similarly, Charles Darwin, in a meeting with a campaigner for atheism in September 1881, distanced himself from the views of his guest, finding them too “aggressive”. In the latter years of his life, he offered his premises for the use of the local church minister and changed his family schedule to enable his children to attend services.

SMALL DIFFERENCES

Of course these findings do not prove that it is impossible to stop believing in God. What they do indicate, quite powerfully, is that we may be fooling ourselves if we think that we are making the key decisions about what we believe, and if we think we know how deeply our views pervade our consciousnesses. It further suggests that the difference between the atheist and the non-atheist viewpoint is much smaller than probably either side perceives. Both groups have consciousnesses which create for themselves realities which include very similar tangible and intangible elements. It may simply be that their awareness levels and interpretations of certain surface details differ.

THE FUTURE

But as higher levels of education spread, will starry-eyed spirituality die out and cooler, drier atheism sweep the field, as some atheism campaigners suggest? Some specialists feel this is unlikely. “If godlessness flourishes where there is stability and prosperity, then climate change and environmental degradation could seriously slow the spread of atheism,” says Lawton in New Scientist.

    On a more personal level, we all have loved ones who will die, and we all have a tendency to puzzle about what consciousness is, whether it is separate from the brain, and whether it can survive.  We will always have existential dread with us—at a personal or societal level. So the need for periods of contemplative calm in churches or temples or other places devoted to the ineffable and inexplicable will remain. They appear to be part of who we are as humans.

    Furthermore, every time we read a book or watch a movie, we are reinforcing our default belief in the eventual triumph of karma. While there is certainly growth in the number of bleak narratives being produced, it is difficult to imagine them becoming the majority form of cultural entertainment. Most of us will skip Cormac McCarthy’s crushingly depressing “The Road” in favor of the newest Pixar movie.

    

POPULATION IMPLICATIONS

When looking at trends, there’s also population growth to consider. Western countries are moving away from the standard family model, and tend to obsess over topics such as same-sex marriage and abortion on demand. Whatever the rights and wrongs of these issues, in practice they are associated with shrinking populations.  Europeans (and the Japanese) are not having enough children to replace the adult generation, and are seeing their communities shrink on a daily basis. 

    Africans and South Asians, on the other hand, are generally religious and retain the traditional model of multi-child families—which may be old-fashioned from a Western point of view, but it’s a model powerfully sanctioned by the evolutionary urge to extend the gene pool. 

    “It’s clearly the case that the future will involve an increase in religious populations and a decrease in scepticism,” says Steve Jones, a professor in genetics at University College London, speaking at the Hay Festival in the UK recently.

    This may appear as bad news for pro-atheism campaigners. But for the evolutionary life-force which may actually make the decisions, this may augur well for the continued existence of humanity. (An image of Richard Dawkins and his selfish gene having a testy argument over dinner  springs to mind.)

       In the meantime, it might be wise for religious folks to refrain from teasing atheist friends who accidentally say something about their souls. And it might be equally smart for the more militant of today’s atheists to stop teasing religious people at all. 

         We might all be a little more spiritual than we think.