Humans’ instinct for belief in a higher being can be trouble, says research psychologist Jesse Bering.
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Considering the almost complete godlessness of New Zealand’s elections – the 4.3% glory days of the Christian Coalition are far behind us – it’s easy to underestimate the role the Big Guy has to play in US politics. The race for the Republican presidential nomination has proved religion is as important as ever in deciding who leads the world’s most powerful country. Mitt Romney, runner-up for the Republican nomination in 2008, has found it impossible to shake off his competition largely for one reason – he’s Mormon. Instead, in early polls voters have expressed a preference for fire-and-brimstone Christians such as Rick Perry, Herman Cain and now Newt Gingrich.
All, of course, claim to have God on their side, and they know because He has been sending them signs. Perry, the Governor of Texas, said his decision to run was a “calling”, whereas Michele Bachmann, an early frontrunner who has since fallen from favour, went as far as to say the Almighty was responsible for an earthquake in Virginia and Hurricane Irene, both extreme events for the normally natural-disaster-lite East.
“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of politicians. We’ve had an earthquake. We’ve had a hurricane,” Bachmann said in an August campaign stop. “He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’”
Bachmann may not know it, but she’s subscribing to a school of thought that has persisted for as long as humans have been bipedal: God has a judgmental mind and uses His powers to punish wayward behaviour. Hence, as one website claimed, Christchurch’s February earthquake was retaliation for Gay Ski Week. And Haiti suffered last year, apparently, because of a pact the small island nation made with Satan in the 19th century.
There is an explanation for such fearful assessments, says one leading psychologist, and it’s rooted in the human brain’s capacity for an adaptive illusion that helped our ancestors gain an evolutionary advantage.
“Whenever there’s a moral catastrophe, people search quite fervently and aggressively to find some causal connection between social behaviour and the natural disaster,” says Jesse Bering, author of The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life.
Bering, on the phone from Columbus, Ohio, where until recently he was on a writing sabbatical from his usual role as director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University in Belfast, says such people are using a fairly sophisticated psychological system that is the product of evolution, one that hinges on “theory of mind” – basically, the ability and tendency to intuit what other people (or, in this case, a supernatural being) are thinking. It is an overdeveloped theory of mind that leads some people to believe inanimate objects like tarot cards, tea leaves and weather systems have a hidden “super-mind” that can be divined.
The most famous example of this cognitive phenomenon of seeing minds in non-living objects, says Bering, is a 1944 American Journal of Psychology study. Participants watching triangles moving about on a screen were asked to describe what they had just seen. Most saw the large triangle as “bullying” the “timid” smaller triangle, both of “whom” were “seeking” the “affections” of the “female” circle.
Those with theological beliefs “are not suffering from a delusion, which is maybe something Richard Dawkins would say, but they are experiencing a psychological illusion by seeing a purpose or some sort of moral significance in a natural event that isn’t there,” he says.
What’s the sophisticated part of all that? That reaches to the heart of Bering’s thesis in The God Instinct. Throughout history, Bering posits, a belief in gods has served as a regulator of human behaviour – an omniscient set of eyes keeping a wary watch over things to make sure we petty beings act in the best interests of the wider group; a morality that has been crucial to our survival and ability to thrive as a species.
With the emergence of language tens of thousands of years ago, says Bering, all of a sudden reputation mattered. If you were the subject of gossip that painted you as a murderer or rapist, then your reproductive ability would be compromised. The most genetically successful of our ancestors were people who subscribed to moral, unselfish behaviours: patience, restraint, inhibition, modesty. Clearly that doesn’t explain the existence of people like Charlie Sheen, but it’s no coincidence that the Bible prescribes just such social medication for the devout.
Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas and sometime collaborator of Bering, endorses his ideas. There are clearly psychological mechanisms at work that make it easier for people to believe in a god figure, he says, which is why gods appear in all major cultures. “What’s really refreshing about Jesse’s approach to this issue is that that observation is not taken as an invitation to say, ‘Therefore all of this God stuff is ridiculous.’”
Of course, not everyone is so happy with Bering. Mark Vernon, a writer for the Guardian and former priest who now describes himself as agnostic, tore into The God Instinct, saying Bering oversimplifies the discussion of the divine.
Bering is unruffled by the criticism. “To me, the question of the existence of God is not something we can answer through psychological science, but we can certainly get a lot closer to the reality of God’s existence, or non-existence in this case, through a scientific approach rather than a philosophical approach.”
He likes to think of his theory as “nuanced atheism” as opposed to the “new atheism” espoused in books like Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great. “My book is an appeal to common sense and not a watertight philosophical proof theorem about the non-existence of God.”
Like Dawkins and Hitchens, however, he points out that our instinct for belief can be trouble. “It becomes dangerous when people, these unctuous figures, try to convince us they have a personal relationship with God, and God [is] giving them special messages that need to be relayed to other individuals who don’t have that connection with God.” (Look no further than what’s happening in US politics.)
But Bering offers an escape. When we understand how the mind works in relation to supernatural beliefs, we can stop ourselves from becoming suckers at the hands of illusion. “Once we’re aware of how the illusion operates, and how mechanistic it is and how predictable it is, we can catch ourselves as falling prey to it really easily,” says Bering.
Then we are free to develop a deeper appreciation of our utter mortality – the realisation, says Bering, that this life is the only one we have to live and there will be no supernatural consequences or hell to pay at the end, only missed opportunities. As Bering responded to one critic, “I deliberately sought to avoid making those types of sanctimonious ‘beauty can be found in nature’ quasi-spiritualistic suggestions for how to handle an inherently meaningless life that are so often found in my colleagues’ books”. But it’s up to us how we view all this. As Bering writes in the book, “Being in the full godless light of this shattered illusion is, I think, a spectacular position to find oneself in.”
THE GOD INSTINCT: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOULS, DESTINY, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE, by Jesse Bering (Allen & Unwin, $39.99).