Wed 11 Feb, 2009
“Born believers: How your brain creates God — New Scientist”
6:00 am Comments (3) Filed under: Origins and ScienceTags: Evolution, God, Psychology, Religion
The question at New Scientist was, how did we ever come up with the idea of gods? The answer begins,
It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods. Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. “It’s not that religion is not important,” says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, “it’s that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress.” The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions….
Two thoughts on this:
1) “Science has largely shied away from asking why…. but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions.”
The obvious underlying assumption is that until science tells us, we don’t know; for there is no other way to know but through science.
2) “It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times…. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.”
This is marvelously consistent with our having been created in God’s image, for relating with God. What’s lacking in that answer? Sure, we can also “conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods, and monsters,” but this is easily understood also from a Biblical perspective: our relationship with God has been broken, and in our alienation we worship the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:20-23).
The New Scientist article proposes two cognitive features of humans as sources of our religiosity: the way wementally treat living things as opposed to non-living things, and an “overdeveloped sense of cause and effect.” There’s no need to doubt these are true of humans, from childhood on. There’s also no need to doubt that they contribute to beliefs in that imaginary world. But is there a need to assume that the explanation for religion is entirely natural and evolutionary? No, for God has spoken to us, we have his revelation of where our belief in him first originated, where it has gone wrong, and what he has done through Christ to bring us back to him.
It never ceases to amaze me how these pieces can operate from a default naturalism and get to be considered objective.
It also continues to amaze me that they get away with acting as if the mind-brain question has been solved.
interesting post. funny how we can’t ever know anything until scientists figure it out. i think apples still fell out of trees long before scientists called it ‘gravity’. but then again, is there any record of this phenomenon happening before Newton got hit in the head…?
No, I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as that.
That’s a little harsh…that assumption’s not stated, and it is a science magazine after all – so seeing a scientific explanation shouldn’t be a surprise. No-one disputes that empirical investigation is a way of gaining knowledge. And I don’t claim it’s the only possible way at all. But I have my doubts about other ways (such as knowledge gained through faith) simply because experience has shown many people believing frankly contradictory things as a result.
To me, it seems ad-hoc. We’re hard-wired for God-belief, but any differences of religious experience are a result of our fallen nature. I fully grant that that’s an explanation, but it’s not what I’d intuitively expect. I would expect (for example), consiliences across religions that point to the truth of Christianity. For example: how about discovering a traditional Incan belief of the triunity of the divine, combined with a prophecy of divine manifestation in the far east 1200 years earlier? Now that *would* be an eye-opener.
Aside: the example above is, in a sense, scientific evidence. But what’s wrong with that? Why would we expect the total lack of scientific evidence that we do see? (Setting the ID argument aside for the moment).
Of course, there are Biblical prophecies of the incarnation and so forth. But you know as well as I do there’s enough muddiness, contingency and after-the-fact amendment in the history of the bible to be less than amazed at its prophetic record. Though I suspect most readers of this site will disagree.