Wired for Religion...At the Expense of Science?

In this excellent article, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom discusses some psychological origins of religious and supernatural beliefs. It nicely summarizes and expands on a number of ideas I have discussed elsewhere on this blog.

While I highly recommend the full article, I found one idea particularly noteworthy. To give some background--Bloom describes how we seem to have two separate innate systems for reasoning about inanimate or animate objects. This makes sense: inanimate objects are acted upon by causal forces, whereas animate beings can move on their own, so it is useful to divide the world into these categories. However, we naturally essentialize this difference, treating them as two distinct categories of things--matter and mind--and we thus become natural dualists. In Bloom's words:

First, we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls. This helps explain why we believe in gods and an afterlife. Second, as we will see, our system of social understanding overshoots, inferring goals and desires where none exist. This makes us animists and creationists.

Our animacy detection is so hypersensitive to finding agents that we see intention and goals where there are none. This gets to the striking point in the last sentence above: it means that we are not just intuitive dualists--we are intuitive creationists as well. Bloom quotes Richard Dawkins as saying that it often seems "as if the human brain is specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism." (Spend five minutes in a blog thread with creationists and you will know what he means.) In a way, Bloom suggests, this is actually true--natural selection runs counter to innate intuitions about agency:

When we see a complex structure, we see it as the product of beliefs and goals and desires. Our social mode of understanding leaves it difficult for us to make sense of it any other way. Our gut feeling is that design requires a designer—a fact that is understandably exploited by those who argue against Darwin.

It's not surprising, then, that nascent creationist views are found in young children. Four-year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions ("to go in the zoo") and clouds ("for raining")... And when asked about the origin of animals and people, children tend to prefer explanations that involve an intentional creator, even if the adults raising them do not. Creationism—and belief in God—is bred in the bone.

I have previously blogged about psychological roots for supernatural beliefs. Bloom points out, though, that these may actually come at the expense of scientific understanding. At least, I would add, in those who do not work past those gut reactions and understand the ideas involved. Finally, we can see yet another reason why gut intuitions about the universe are of very limited weight when discussing its origins and workings.

There is Grandeur in this View of Life

I recently overheard two women talking. One was discussing her pregnancy, and how she had undergone her first ultrasound. She then exclaimed, "God is so amazing!"

This seems like a nice spring board to discuss a common accusation against skepticism. The religious believer sees wondrous miracles inhabiting her life, and the cold, rational skeptic turns it all into mechanisms and equations. The religious person sees the divine gift of life, and the skeptic sees only chemicals and processes by reducing everything scientifically.

I'd beg to differ, though, about that caricature. The baby developing inside her began as one single cell, containing half her DNA and half her husband's DNA. That cell then began dividing. Now, each daughter cell and granddaughter cell would get the exact same DNA as the original one--and DNA, of course, comprises the instructions telling a cell what to do. The cells have to eventually take on different jobs, though, throughout the body. And so over time, the cells differentiate in terms of which genes they express, first into simple groups based on small chemical or physical differences. Over more time, the differentiations accumulate until you have liver cells, nerve cells, skin cells, etc, each of which expresses only some of the genes in its DNA and thus performs a different job. Incredibly, no one guides this process, even though it begins from one cell with one set of DNA. The differentiations flows from local rules, as if a paper filled with magnets in the right way would fold into a beautiful origami pattern on its own.

This child will then be born with innate cognitive functions developed by evolution over hundreds of thousands of years, for more complicated ones, and millions of years for more basic ones. It will begin imitating others rapidly after birth. It will form attachment with its mother in a particular stage. It will learn language in a later stage, in the same age range as other children. It will go on to develop a theory of mind around age four. All of this is programmed to unfold, with no one having programmed it.

When I consider all of this--not to mention, for example, the complexities of the DNA code written in only four bases on a more micro scale--I am filled with awe and wonder at the complexity involved. That this complexity could emerge on its own over thousands of millions of years via a simple algorithm--and go on to allow the love, pain, and friendship the child will feel at some point--is all the more mind-boggling.

In comparison, isn't reducing it to "God is so amazing" a little cheap? If one were struck by the processes involved and felt an immanent God equated with nature behind it all, that would be one thing. Or if "God is amazing" were just an expression of gratitude and wonder, great. But doesn't Someone magically getting the baby in and out--and I don't mean to belittle her excitement, but that's how she seemed to mean it--pale in comparison to the truth, which is itself quite wondrous and awe-inspiring?

There can indeed be grandeur in this view of life.

Evolution and Religion: Thoughts in Progress

Many religious people--including many or even most Modern Orthodox Jews--view the fact of evolution as compatible with religious tradition: Genesis is not to be taken literally, and God had a guiding Hand over the process of evolution.

Now, I like this take on religion and evolution, mostly because a) it's what I believed when I still believed, and b) it's good for honest religion and honest science. Indeed, some point to commentators like Ramban, who seems to suggest that God may have inserted a soul into a man-like animal to create humans. However, it is obvious that many religious people find evolution threatening, and it's important to ask why. Moreover, I have come to question the idea that religion and evolution can be squared so easily; it can be done, I'm sure, but I think it's harder than I used to assume. Here's a list of issues evolution presents for religion, some of which are culled from recent points I or others have made around the blogosphere. I'd be interested to see if anyone has any other points to add, or thinks these aren't such serious issues for the conciliatory point of view.

1. Evolution contradicts Genesis. An obvious starting point, yes, but even for those who say the Bible shouldn't be taken literally, one might wonder why God would write an account that looks like an actual description of creation to those who don't know better. I assume it was taken as literal by many people over a very long stretch of time, so how come only those of us living in the last 151 years get to understand that it is metaphorical? Is this not theologically confusing? ("God is mysterious and had a reason," I suppose. Post hoc and vague, but not unusually so. "People couldn't have handled it back then, so God waited until we were ready," I have also heard. I say: have you been to modern day Texas?)

Beyond this more minor point, though, some of the details become challenging. For example, Genesis discusses the creation of different animals, clearly stating that God created each animal "l'minah"--"according to its kind." From an evolutionary point of view, though, there is no such thing as a fixed, stable species with its own essence. Any two species can be connected via a series of intermediates in some pattern, with no sharp dividing line between them: any animal in the series was very similar to its parents and offspring. At a certain point, two groups of animals are different enough that they can no longer interbreed, and we call them two different species. So, the allegorical reader of Genesis must not only understand "God created" as "God guided the process of evolution," but also understand details such as "l'minah" as using "lashon b'nei adam" ("the common language of people"). Alternatively, the "creation" of a species involves the insertion of some essential soul into random animals in a series. (As noted above, IIRC, the Ramban actually suggests something along these lines about the creation of humanity--but that's what set humanity apart from animals. And, which animal should get the special essential soul of the species, if none had previously been essentially different from the prior or following links in the chain?)

To sum it up: evolution is not creation, and Genesis contains a creation story. It seems like it might need to be understood as a myth that contains a moral message in order to get off the ground, doesn't it? And at that point, aren't we wondering why God is writing a creation myth?

2. Let's suppose God has indeed providentially guided the process of evolution. Again, this gets harder when you examine the details. For hundreds of millions of years, animals have been competing, suffering, and dying. As may be obvious, animals can feel pain, so it is easy to begin to see "nature red in tooth and claw" when you consider evolutionary history. All that time and all that suffering was mandated by God to have a mechanistic process that would eventually churn out humans, in a tiny blip in the timeframe? The problem of evil becomes magnified a thousandfold.

3 & 4. As noted in the last post I put up, Western religions assume humans have a special place in the universe. Evolution creates two problems for this. First, humans are a part of the same mechanistic process as all natural life, not on a special metaphysical plane--even though we still have unique abilities in the animal world. Second, at some point, presumably, a new species will branch out of Homo Sapiens--making it a little harder for us to be the be all and end all. Once again, you have to assume the insertion of a special essence into humanity. Cognitive science has not been kind to the "ghost in the machine," though, making it an unnecessary entity that has been posited.

5. Evolution explains away the appearance of design in the universe, and as such, makes it unnecessary to posit that Someone was guiding the process (explored in more depth here). Like the ghost in the machine in cognitive science, one is positing the unnecessary to explain the data.

Of course, it's certainly still possible to accept evolution and theology, and I hope many people continue to do so. However, it's interesting and worthwhile to consider why it is so threatening to so many religious people and how well it can actually be squared with religion. The above contains my first stab. Any thoughts?