The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (10 page)

As with any other psychological trait, there appear to be meaningful individual differences in the constraint imposed by functional fixedness on any given human brain. In other words, there are exceptions to the rule. And sometimes these exceptions make history. In 2001, for example, a Malawian teenager named William Kamkwamba saw a bunch of discarded bicycle tires, rusty old car parts, and blue gum trees as being potential building material for solar-powered windmills, and eventually he brought free electricity to his rural village in Africa. Yet when it comes to the development of our self-concepts, other people’s definitions of us, as inferred by their actions and reactions toward us as children, may cast us in something like the role of the spoon in the cup. Sartre believed that this is what happened to the celebrated criminal and playwright Jean Genet (author of
The Maids
and
Our Lady of the Flowers,
among other works). Upon allegedly stealing from a nun as a child, Genet was branded a degenerate by society, and then conformed to be this, his inescapable, essential, rotten identity—but this identity was in fact one that had only been imposed on him by others. Still, Genet saw an inherent purpose in such a life. Amid many colorful, licentious years as a pimp, petty thief, and homosexual prostitute, Genet spent almost two decades as a cog in the French penal system. Yet he pointed out, and reasonably so, that criminals were just as important to society as were those who despised them. After all, said Genet, an entire industry of people—lawyers, judges, jailers, clerks, guards, legislators, psychiatrists, counselors, and so on—were able to pay their taxes, feed their children, and furnish their homes only through the tireless labors of criminals.
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Teleo-functional reasoning isn’t just a quirky way of thinking, therefore. It has real consequences for how we come to live our lives. It also plays an important role in the evolution of morality because it relates closely to another important error in our social reasoning, one that tempts us into thinking that we
should
and
ought to
behave a certain way because that is what we are made to do. This notion of God’s moral intentions in manufacturing our minds and bodies is connected to the philosophical construct of the “naturalistic fallacy,” which is the conceptual error made in claiming that what is natural is also inherently good, proper, or right. Again, without theory of mind, we couldn’t very well ponder, squabble about, and kill each other over what God intended or didn’t intend for us to be doing.

The naturalistic fallacy plagues especially the discipline of evolutionary psychology, because researchers in this field often uncover aspects of the human psyche that are “natural” (unlearned and largely invariant across cultures) but hardly desirable in terms of social mores. Typical examples are unwelcome sexual proclivities, such as men’s tendency to sexually coerce unwilling women, or their carnal desires for legally underage, reproductively viable girls, who, because of their comparative remaining years of fertility, combined with the fact that virginity ensures paternity, are especially high in adaptive value. Showing such desires to be natural, critics argue, equates to giving people permission to unleash these lascivious impulses. “It’s only natural,” we hear people say—and usually to justify thoughts that inspire guilt and shame, staking them out as being normal and therefore okay. So evolutionary psychology is continually embattled by emotion-fueled claims that tug at people’s moralistic penchant for design reasoning, and it must repeatedly defend itself against such misunderstandings by clarifying through ever more creative language that what is natural is neither good nor bad, but simply is.

Another hot-button issue that frequently invokes the naturalistic fallacy, and one that evolutionary psychology has historically brooded over, is the subject of homosexuality. The rather ugly business of homophobia is often smugly wrapped up in a corrosive teleo-functional sentiment involving gender roles. For example, in the 2009 Miss USA pageant, gay celebrity blogger and panel judge Perez Hilton asked Miss California, Carrie Prejean, whether she believed that all states should follow the progressive lead of Vermont in legalizing same-sex marriage. The blonde, statuesque Prejean, a pretty but not much else twenty-one-year-old studying special education at a small evangelical college in San Diego, quickly weighed the question in her head, blinked once, and then polarized the nation by offering through a Vaseline-gummed smile this rambling response:

Pageant watchers still contend that the bluntness of her answer cost Prejean the crown; she ended up as runner-up to an allegedly more tolerant Miss North Carolina. Another drama unfolded in the lobby after the show, where Miss New Mexico’s mother lapsed into a tirade of even more obvious design-stance language, shouting at one outraged audience member the old refrain, “In the Bible it says that marriage is between Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!”
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Tempting as it may be, however, we mustn’t just take the easy road of picking on beauty pageant contestants and their Bible-blinded mothers. In doing so, we would miss psychological clues that run deeper than scripture. In fact, as medical interventionist approaches to “correcting” homosexuality have attested in even recent decades, it’s not uncommon for scientific atheists to demonstrate passionate antigay attitudes, and these prejudices are at least partially rooted in the teleo-functional bias. This nonreligious maligning of homosexuality is something often mistaken for religious intolerance. In
The God Delusion
(2006), for example, Richard Dawkins asks us to consider the case of Alan Turing, the doomed British mathematician and German Enigma code breaker who crimped Nazi intelligence efforts and singularly helped end the Second World War. Turing was famously convicted in 1952 under British sodomy laws for an exposed tryst with a young man, and forced by psychiatrists to undergo chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones—which caused him, sadly, embarrassingly, to grow breasts. Faced with the prospect of continued injections of these hormones or a lengthy prison sentence, Turing escaped both nightmares by biting into a cyanide-laced apple and committing suicide. Dawkins sees Turing, wrongly, as an example of gays being persecuted because of religiously motivated moralistic beliefs. He writes,

In fact, the British government, especially its legislative arm, was among the most secular regulating establishments in the world at that time, and although the legislation of sodomy laws may have occurred against a general backdrop of religious belief in England (and even this was considerably less noticeable compared to other Western nations), the truth is that the 1950s psychiatric community, wholly independent of religious sentiments, regarded homosexuality as a medical disorder mandating curative treatment. So although Dawkins is right to condemn Turing’s unspeakable sentence at the hands of the British elite, it is in fact scientists (conducting flawed science, but science nonetheless) who were more to blame for this man’s demise than that era’s “faith-based moralizers.”

There is, needless to say, a genuine adaptive purpose in heterosexual intercourse, which is a very direct route to reproductive success. But we must continually remind ourselves that adaptive biological design offers no intrinsic directives, or prescriptions, for moral behavior. One wouldn’t normally say that men
should
be promiscuous because, after all, the pulpy underflaring of their penises’ coronal ridges is specially tailored by God for excessive use with multiple women, retracting competitors’ sperm. Likewise, one wouldn’t usually be concerned about the unnaturalness of masking our body odors by drowning our glands in a factory-derived effluvium, even though the use of deodorant and perfume clearly also goes against the natural order of things.

Another modern example of how teleo-functional thinking intersects with moral reasoning is the issue of medically assisted suicide. Those who believe that one’s life is owned by God are more likely to view medical euthanasia—as well as abortion and capital punishment—as being morally wrong. If a person’s essence is created by God, as many believe it to be, then it follows that individuals haven’t the right to purposefully cause their own death, because that right is seen as being God’s alone. Suicide therefore becomes a form of intellectual theft; the self redesigns its end in an act of mutiny against its creator. As an angst-ridden Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in his
Diary of a Writer
(1873), “I condemn that nature which, with such impudent nerve, brought me into being in order to suffer—I condemn it in order to be annihilated with me.”
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To see an inherent purpose in life, whether purpose in our own individual existence or life more generally, is to see an intentional, creative mind—usually God—that had a reason for designing it this way and not some other way. If we subscribe wholly and properly to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, however, we must view human life, generally, and our own lives, individually, as arising through solely nonintentional, physical means. This doesn’t imply that we are “accidents,” because even that term requires a mind, albeit one that created by mistake. Rather, we simply
are.
To state otherwise, such as saying that you or I exist for a reason, would constitute an obvious category error, one in which we’re applying teleo-functional thinking to something that neither was designed creatively nor evolved as a discrete biological adaptation.

Yet owing to our theory of mind, and specifically to our undisciplined teleological reasoning, it is excruciatingly difficult to refrain from seeing human existence in such intentional terms. To think that we are moral because morality works in a mechanistic, evolutionary sense is like saying that we are moral because we are moral; it’s unfulfilling in that it strips the authority away from a God that created us to act in specific ways because He knew best, and He would become disappointed and angry if we failed to go along with His rules for human nature. But peeling back the cognitive illusion of the purpose of life as we have done in this chapter gives us our first glimpse into the question asked at the outset of the book: Has our species’ unique cognitive evolution duped us into believing in this, the grandest mind of all? So far, the answer is clearly “yes.”

3
SIGNS, SIGNS, EVERYWHERE SIGNS

J
UST AS WE
see other people as more than just their bodies, we also tend to see natural events as more than natural events. And again, this seeing beyond the obvious is the consequence of the very peculiar way our brains have evolved, with a theory of mind. At every turn, we seem to think there are subtle messages scratched into the woodwork of nature, subtle signs or cues that God, or some other supernatural agent, is trying to communicate a lesson or idea to us—and often to us alone. Usually, it’s about how we should behave. So we listen attentively, effortlessly translating natural events into divine or supernatural messages.

The best examples of seeing God’s mind at work in nature tend also to be the most laughable, but from them we can see just how people’s religious and spiritual views articulate with our species’ evolved theory of mind. The outspoken African American mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, suggested to reporters in 2005 that Hurricane Katrina, one of the most savage and destructive storms ever to strike North American shores, was in fact a climatological testament to God’s vitriolic fury at the drug-addled city, the country’s military incursion in Iraq, and “black America” all rolled into one:

This comment drew sharp criticism from all sides and eventually led to Nagin’s offering an awkward apology in which he promised to be more sensitive the next time around. But the outrage sparked by the mayor’s pulpit rhetoric wasn’t due to people’s inability to comprehend Nagin’s basic point. Rather, it was just that most people didn’t believe that their God, whom they viewed as being a loving, nonwrathful God, would communicate to us poor human beings in this particular way. As Einstein once allegedly remarked to a friend, “God is slick, but he ain’t mean.”
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Of course, Nagin was only reinventing the well-treaded fire-and-brimstone wheel in suggesting that our God is a testy and vengeful one. Just a year before he made his political gaffe, other reflective people from all corners of the globe borrowed from the same barrel of explanation and offered commentary on the “real” reason for the Indonesian tsunami that killed nearly a quarter of a million people in Southeast Asia in 2004. (Never mind the sudden shifting of tectonic plates on the Indian Ocean floor.) All similarly saw that catastrophe, too, as a sort of enormous, Vegas-style, blinking marquee meant to convey an unambiguous message to us superficial, fallen, and famously flawed human beings. Here are a few anonymous samples from some online discussion forums just a few days after the tsunami disaster:

The important thing to notice with all of these examples, or any case in which a natural event is taken as a sign, omen, or symbol, is the universal common denominator: theory of mind. In analyzing things this way, we’re trying to get into God’s head—or the head of whichever culturally constructed supernatural agent we have on offer. Consider, however, that without our evolved capacity to reason about unseen mental states, hurricanes and tsunamis would be just what they are for every other animal on earth—really bad storms. That is to say, just like other people’s surface behaviors, natural events can be perceived by us human beings as being
about
something other than their surface characteristics only because our brains are equipped with the specialized cognitive software, theory of mind, that enables us to think about underlying psychological causes.

Of course, in reality there probably aren’t any such psychological causes, but our brains don’t mind that. Our theory of mind goes into overdrive, jump-started in the very same way it’s provoked by another person’s unexpected social behavior. It’s a bit like if you went to shake your best friend’s hand and he punched you in the face. It may not be immediately apparent, but there must be some reason for him to have acted in this way. Except here, it’s not other people’s behaviors we’re trying to understand; it’s God’s “behaviors,” or otherwise the universe acting as if it were some vague, intentional agent.

In his book
Acts of Meaning
(1992), Harvard University psychologist Jerome Bruner argues that we tend to search for meaning whenever others’ behaviors violate our expectations, or when they don’t adhere to basic social norms. For instance, breaches of linguistic rules—what language theorists call “conversational implicatures”—often encourage a frenzied search for the speaker’s intentions. If someone responds with “a whiskey sour, please” after being asked what the weather forecast is for tomorrow, most listeners will automatically think about the causes for this inappropriate—or at least unexpected—social response. Perhaps the person doesn’t speak English and didn’t understand the question; perhaps the person is mentally ill; or maybe he’s angry and is trying to frustrate the listener; perhaps the person is being sarcastic, playful, is hard of hearing—or maybe he’s just really thirsty. Although each of these explanations invokes different theories for the cause of the speaker’s strange response, they all share an appeal to his mental state. By contrast, it’s unlikely a similar search for meaning would occur if he had made an appropriate response, such as, “I think it’s supposed to rain.” Likewise, natural events that are expected or mundane are unlikely to be seen as signs or messages from God, because they fail to trigger our theory of mind. Most of the time, things unfold in a manner consistent with our expectations. It’s when they don’t that we become such willing slaves to illogical thinking.

Without a general cognitive bias to see hidden messages as being embedded in natural events, much of religion as we know it would never have gotten off the ground. This is because such episodes are often taken as confirmation that there are communicative “others”—God, ancestors, whatever—capable of influencing our personal lives through causal interference with the natural world. This perceived feedback from the other side induces the powerful sense for us that we (and perhaps more importantly, our behavior)
matter
to something more than just the here and now. And without the belief that God cares enough about us as individuals to bother sending us a veiled, personalized “just thinking of you” message every once in a while, there’s not really much reason to pay attention to Him.
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If seeing signs in natural events hinges on the presence of a fully functioning theory of mind, then we might expect people with clinically impaired theory-of-mind abilities to be less susceptible to this type of thinking and so to manifest religion very differently from the rest of us. One such disorder is autism. Individuals along the autistic spectrum, including otherwise high-functioning people with Asperger’s syndrome who have very normal (or even high) general IQs, often have tremendous difficulty reasoning about other people’s psychological states, particularly the subtle, nuanced aspects of other minds, such as sarcasm, faux pas, and irony. University of Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen—who happens to be first cousin to the
Borat
(2006) and
Brüno
(2009) star—has referred to autistics as being “mindblind,”
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although this characterization is probably a bit strong. A better way to conceptualize people with autism is to view them as having never developed a fully erect intentional stance. Their sensitivity to mental states is probably diluted rather than missing altogether.

In recent years, Baron-Cohen and his colleagues have put forth the rather astonishing hypothesis that, although they tend to have profound difficulties in the social domain, people with autism may actually possess a superior understanding of folk physics when compared to the rest of us. “Folk physics,” according to Baron-Cohen, “is our everyday ability to understand and predict the behavior of inanimate objects in terms of principles relating to size, weight, motion, physical causality, etc.”
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In short, autistics are preoccupied with the way things work in terms of
how
they work, not
why.
The parents of many autistic children, for instance, are often startled to see that their sons and daughters display obsessive-compulsive interests clustering around machines and physical systems. These children tend to become thoroughly enamored with what might seem to the rest of us the most eccentric of hobbies: collecting patterned light filaments, systematically dismantling old Polaroid cameras and television remote controls, accumulating encyclopedic knowledge of nineteenth-century railway transport engines. This tendency to become transfixed by surface causes may help us understand why, in families where autism appears to run in the bloodline, professions such as engineering, accounting, and the physical sciences tend to be curiously overrepresented in the genealogy.

In some cases, it seems, this form of physical causal expertise is very practically translated to social problem solving. That is to say, many autistics get by perfectly fine in the real world by exploiting their heightened knowledge of surface-level behaviors, never having to really think about the confusing mental states underlying other people’s actions. University of Sheffield psychologist Digby Tantum gives this intriguing example of a woman with Asperger’s syndrome trying to navigate her way around the use of a crowded ATM machine:

This woman’s understanding of the way people work was motivated by a desire to learn how they typically behaved in this particular social setting, not their mental reasons for doing so. Only by assessing and becoming extraordinarily sensitive to the way routines and conventional social rules intersect with people’s overt behavior could she enter the social environment, albeit inappropriately in this instance—she still couldn’t understand why those waiting patiently in line behind her would get so angry.

Several autobiographical accounts provide fascinating glimpses into the autistic person’s view of God. And because, as we’ve now seen, reasoning about God is fundamentally about using our evolved theory of mind to think about God’s mental states, it’s perhaps not surprising that these writings appear to reflect a very different kind of God than the conventionally maudlin version most of us are more familiar with. For instance, in her book
Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism
(1996), the autistic scientist and writer Temple Grandin speaks of her lifelong struggle with her belief in God:

Another case comes from autistic mathematician and computer programmer Edgar Schneider’s
Discovering My Autism
(1999). In chapters devoted to his religious beliefs, Schneider writes,