The Predisposition of humans to believe in God

Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic (Dec 2005) surveys recent developments in evolutionary biology and concludes that our predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomenon is a by-product of the way our cognitive functioning has evolved.

His discourse, in a nutshell, goes something like this. First, there is duality in our thinking: we intuit that our person and physical body are separate. Although we think with our brain, we see it as just an apparatus that assists us: the "I" or "me" is separate from my body and brain. This dualism makes it possible for us to think of a soul or person existing outside of its body, and from there to think of supernatural entities.

Second, we “suffer” from a “hypertrophy of social cognition”: we attribute human characteristics to a wide range of real world entities; and we are hypersensitive to signs of agency. In short, our quickness to over-read purpose into things extends to the perception of intentional design.

Now, if we add an existential factor and an anthropological one, it is hardly surprising that nine tenths of the world’s population believe in God. The existential factor is that life is tough: there is evil all around and we and everyone we know will die.

The anthropological factor is the one concerning survival, protection, belonging, and social cohesion. This comes under the name of religion. So there is a propensity and two motivating factors that make believing in God compelling and hard to resist.

However, on the issue of the spirit world, I would like to make a comment. Bloom points out that humans have a sense, that although someone dies, “they” are somehow still alive. It is the mind/body dualism in our thinking that allows us to feel this. I say “feel” because we don’t “think” it in the sense that we know that their body is dead, that they are no longer here. But it is this feeling, this continuing sense of them that gives rise to the thought that somehow they are still here. And so we have come to represent this by talking about their spirit or their soul.

I would say that both the memory of them and the loss of them are very powerful emotions: they are still “alive” in us, in our thoughts and feelings and memories. This sense is so strong and so palpable that we almost think that they have not altogether died. And so we have conjured up the idea of spirit or soul as a balm, a way to sooth the pain of loss and a way to explain their continuing presence. We imagine the recent dead so intensely, see them in our minds eye, dream about them as they were when they were alive, turn our heads and expect to see them, with a vertiginous gulp see them approaching as a silhouette in the form of somebody else with a similar build.

And so the ability to think this way is the product of evolution but the belief in the post-mortem life of souls is born out of grief. We might imagine “intuitively” a person, represented by a supernatural soul, continuing on after the death of his body, but that is just imagination, a creative novelty, albeit one that serves an important and necessary emotional purpose. It “feels” right that the soul and the body are separate. It feels right that “I” am more than my brain, that my brain is just an apparatus that helps “me”, but the reality is that there is no such supernatural phenomenon. Me, my brain and my body are one organism.

It is true that because we can cognate and dream and imagine ourselves in other places, we therefore have a sense of ourselves being separate from even our brains, the very organism that allows us to do those things. But this is a delusion. Just because we can imagine it doesn’t allow us to escape the reality that we need our brains to imagine it in the first place. The person needs a body to live in and a brain with which to think, to be. I hate to be a killjoy but when the body dies the person dies too; it is only in the memory, emotions and lives of the living that they continue to live.

A person (call them a soul if you must) cannot jump out of their body and certainly not into another body. Your “person” is also the result of attributes of your brain and body; IQ for example. Leaving aside the quantum physical impossibility of this transaction, if you jumped into a body with a lower IQ you would not be the same person.

No, there is no such thing as souls floating around purposelessly in the ether. There are however, as Paul Bloom has explained, several good evolutionary reasons why people believe that they do. There are also very good sociological, psychological and political reasons why religions form to promote this phenomenon of belief.