The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (27 page)

36
.
Ibid.

37
.
Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(London: Bantam, 2006), 289.

38
.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Diary of a Writer,
2 vols., trans. Boris Brasol (New York: Scribner, 1949), 96.

C
HAPTER
3

1
.
Brett Martel, “Storms Payback from God, Nagin Says,”
Washington Post
(January 17, 2006), www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2006/01/16/ AR2006011600925.html.

2
.
Banesh Hoffman,
Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel
(New York: Plume, 1972), 146.

3
.
This was one of the central points in William James’s
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902): that religion is quintessentially an individual, personal affair. James tightened his fists in thoughtful revolt at the overly simplistic, common scientific shorthand prevalent in his day (and ours) that tended to reduce God to a force that doesn’t concern itself with particular human problems: “The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.”
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
(New York: Megalodon Entertainment, 2008), 417. Originally published in 1902.

4
.
Simon Baron-Cohen,
Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

5
.
Simon Baron-Cohen, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Autism: Implications for the Evolution of the Male Brain” (2000), http://autismresearchcentre.com/docs/ papers/2000_BC_cognitive.pdf (accessed November 26, 2008).

6
.
Digby Tantum, “Adolescence and Adulthood of Individuals with Asperger Syndrome,” in
Asperger Syndrome,
ed. Ami Klin, Fred R. Volkmar, and Sara S. Sparrow (New York: Guilford, 2000), 382.

7
.
Temple Grandin,
Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Austim
(New York: Doubleday, 1995), 189.

8
.
Ibid., 191.

9
.
Ibid., 200.

10
.
Edgar Schneider,
Discovering My Autism: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (with Apologies to Cardinal Newman)
(London: Kingsley, 1999), 54.

11
.
Ibid., 72.

12
.
Ibid., 73.

13
.
Harvey Whitehouse,
Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission
(Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2004).

14
.
Jonathan Kenneth Burns, “An Evolutionary Theory of Schizophrenia: Cortical Connectivity, Metarepresentation, and the Social Brain,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
27 (2004): 840.

15
.
Albert Camus,
The First Man,
trans. David Hapgood (New York: Knopf, 1995), 314.

16
.
Tamar Szabó Gendler, “Alief and Belief,”
Journal of Philosophy
105 (2008): 634–63.

17
.
Ryan T. McKay and Daniel C. Dennett, “The Evolution of Misbelief,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
32 (2009): 493–561.

18
.
Chimpanzees display some rather enigmatic behaviors around other dead chimps, and cognitive theorists have yet to contribute seriously to the debate over just what exactly is occurring with these death responses. The primate ethologist Frans de Waal, however, made this provocative statement: “Seeing the termination of a familiar individual’s life, chimpanzees may respond emotionally as if realizing, however vaguely, what death means.” (
Peacemaking among Primates
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996], 55.) Surely the death of another with whom an animal is emotionally attached can lead to outward displays of intense grief, even bereavement. What causes these emotions, however, is not necessarily an awareness of what death
means
—but is perhaps an anxiety-laden response to the sudden and unexpected severing of the attachment relationship. The mother-infant bond is so strong in nonhuman primates, for instance, that the aesthetic horrors of decomposition are seemingly overridden by emotional attachment; mothers will often carry the carcasses of their deceased infants until the small body has undergone substantial decay. Yet De Waal’s statement refers more to the responses of chimps to fallen group members than to dead offspring or mothers. He writes of one group’s response to the death of a former alpha-male chimpanzee severely maimed by rivals: “They were completely silent during the time that Luit’s body was lying in his cage. The following morning, even at feeding time, hardly any sounds were heard. Vocal activity resumed only after the corpse had been carried out of the building.” (Ibid., 66.)
     Another primatologist, Geza Teleki, details how a group of chimpanzees at Gombe reacted to the accidental falling death of one of its own: at first there was raucous displaying and contagious fear response, followed by a period of intense quietude, careful visual inspection and overall attention directed toward the body, and finally, after several hours of corpse-centered activity, the reluctant moving off of the remaining group members. (“Group Responses to the Accidental Death of a Chimpanzee in Gombe National Park, Tanzania,”
Folia Primatologica
20 [1973]: 81–94.)
     Before we can credit chimpanzees with a conscious death concept, however, we must be careful not to fall prey to our own anthropomorphizing theory of mind. What are we to make of the “ceremonial” gathering of black-billed magpies in response to the sudden death of another bird? Are we willing to say that they, too, have a vague notion of what death “means”? Given what we are learning of the ostensible mind blindness of other animals, it is perhaps more prudent at this stage to say that neither chimpanzees nor black-billed magpies have the cognitive hard wiring needed to represent death as the end of personal existence. Rather, both species are probably engaging in a response that reflects their basic understanding of perceptual cues of animacy (self-propelled movement, respiration, and so on) in combination with the unexpected termination of a social relationship. But in any event, experiencing the dead as giving communicative signs to the living in the form of natural events seems an unlikely psychological attribute in other species.

19
.
Justin L. Barrett,
Why Would Anyone Believe in God?
(Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2004); Stewart Guthrie,
Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

20
.
“International Angel Day with Doreen Virtue and Charles Virtue,” Hay House, www.hayhouse.com/event_details.php?event_id=695.

21
.
Doreen Virtue and Charles Virtue,
Signs from Above: Your Angels’ Messages about Your Life Purpose, Relationships, Health, and More
(New York: Hay House, 1999), 45.

22
.
Jesse M. Bering and Becky D. Parker, “Children’s Attributions of Intentions to an Invisible Agent,”
Developmental Psychology
42 (2006): 253–62.

23
.
In fact, a recent set of unpublished data by University of Oxford psychologists Florian Kiessling and Yvan Russell reveals that preschoolers’ understanding of “invisible” probably translates to something more like “not present” than it does “transparent” (“Theory of Mind and Religion” [paper presented at the Second “Explaining Religion” (EXREL) Conference, Centre for Anthropology and Mind, University of Oxford, 2009]), so their failure to see Princess Alice as causing the picture to fall and the light to flash makes sense. If she’s not actually in the room, how could she act on objects inside of it?

24
.
All children were, of course, “debriefed” following their participation in the study—the experimenter made it clear to each child that Princess Alice was only pretend, and showed the child how the picture was made to fall by the magnet’s being lifted on the other side of the door and how the light was made to flash on and off by a pocket-sized remote control. Nevertheless, some parents claimed that upon similar, unexpected events happening in the child’s home (such as a lightbulb flickering or fuse blowing) children from the experimental condition would spontaneously invoke Princess Alice as the cause. It’s unclear, however, whether they were serious or only joking. Yet it is remarkably easy to create novel, difficult-to-extinguish supernatural agents. University of Texas at Austin psychologist Jacqueline Woolley and her colleagues, for example, invented a Halloween character named “The Candy Witch” for their study and discovered that, for many children, belief remained high a year after the study was completed, especially for those children who had received a “visit” from the Candy Witch as part of the initial experiment. Jacqueline D. Woolley, Elizabeth A. Boerger, and Arthur B. Markman, “A Visit from the Candy Witch: Factors Influencing Young Children’s Belief in a Novel Fantastical Being,”
Developmental Science
7 (2004): 456–68.

25
.
Josef Perner and Deborrah Howes, “‘He Thinks He Knows’: And More Developmental Evidence against the Simulation (Role-Taking) Theory,”
Mind & Language
7 (1992): 72–86.

26
.
God Hates Fags website, www.godhatesfags.com.

27
.
G. E. Newman, F. C. Keil, V. Kuhlmeier, and K. Wynn, “Sensitivity to Design: Early Understandings of the Link between Agents and Order,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA
(forthcoming).

28
.
Ibid.

29
.
William Kirby,
On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation of Animals and in Their History, Habits, and Instincts,
2 vols. (London: Pickering, 1835), 1:vii.

30
.
Ibid.

31
.
Ibid., 2:384–85.

32
.
Quoted in Philip F. Rehbock,
Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 56.

33
.
Michael Dowd,
Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World
(New York: Plume, 2009), 80.

34
.
“International Conference on Natural Theology: Beyond Paley: Renewing the Vision for Natural Theology, 23–25 June 2008, Museum of Natural History, Oxford University,” Thomist Tacos for the Soul, www.thomisttacos.com/?p=124 (accessed March 15, 2010).

35
.
Mark Williamson, “Haldane’s Special Preference,”
Linnean
8 (1992): 14.

C
HAPTER
4

1
.
André Gide,
The Counterfeiters: A Novel
(New York: Vintage, 1973), 249. Originally published in 1927.

2
.
Alan M. Leslie, “Pretense and Representation: The Origins of ‘Theory of Mind,’”
Psychological Review
94 (1987): 412–26.

3
.
Thomas W. Clark, “Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity,” in
The Experience of Philosophy,
ed. Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin, 3rd ed. (New York: Wadsworth, 1996), 480–90. Originally published in
The Humanist
54, no. 6 (1994): 15–20, www.naturalism.org/death.htm.