The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (30 page)

25
.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov,
trans. C. Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 360. Originally published in 1880.

26
.
Ibid., 374.

27
.
H. L. Mencken,
A Mencken Chrestomathy
(New York: Vintage, 1982), 617. Originally published in 1949.

28
.
Human sociality displays a number of characteristics revealing that our behaviors are designed to work for the good of the group, if only for selfish genetic reasons. For present purposes, it is useful to highlight two such categories of cooperative heuristics. With direct reciprocity, or “reciprocal altruism,” rational actors adopt a straightforward rule of thumb: do unto [specific] others as they have done unto you. Indirect reciprocity, or “third-party altruism,” by contrast, is of more direct relevance to the present discussion. Here, the rule of thumb is, do unto [specific] others as you have observed them do unto others. According to Harvard University mathematical biologist Martin Nowak and evolutionary game theorist Karl Sigmund of the University of Vienna, indirect reciprocity involves “information storage and transfer as well as strategic thinking and has a pivotal role in the evolution of cooperation and communication. The possibilities for games of manipulation, coalition-building and betrayal are limitless. Indirect reciprocity may have provided the selective challenge driving the cerebral expansion in human evolution.” (Martin A. Nowak and Karl Sigmund, “Evolution of Indirect Reciprocity,”
Nature
437 [2005]: 1291–98.)
     Nowak and Sigmund concede, however, that, “the co-evolution of human language and cooperation by indirect reciprocity is a fascinating and as yet unexplored topic.” (Ibid.) Indeed, Richard Alexander’s original 1987 definition of “indirect reciprocity” described it as “occurring
in the presence of
interested audiences—groups of individuals who continually evaluate the members of their society as possible future interactants from whom they would like to gain more than they lose” (Richard D. Alexander,
The Biology of Moral Systems
[Hawthorne, NY: De Gruyter, 1987], 110 [italics added]), therefore overlooking entirely the role of language in indirect reciprocity.

29
.
L. Festinger, A. Pepitone, and T. Newcomb, “Some Consequences of Deindividuation in a Group,”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
47 (1952): 382–89.

30
.
Andrew Silke, “Deindividuation, Anonymity and Violence: Findings from Northern Ireland,”
Journal of Social Psychology
143 (2003): 493–99. On the other side of the coin, an increased sense of being identifiable and knowable by others lends itself to “good” social behaviors. As University of Kent psychologist Jared Piazza and I reported in a 2009 issue of
Evolution and Human Behavior,
people share more money with a stranger when they’re under the impression that a bystander in the room might relay personally identifying information to the stranger, such as the participant’s name and degree major. Jared Piazza and Jesse M. Bering, “Concerns about Reputation via Gossip Promote Generous Allocations in an Economic Game,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
29 (2008): 172–78.

31
.
R. Pettazzoni, “On the Attributes of God,”
Numen
2 (1955): 1–27.

32
.
Benedict Sandin,
Iban Adat and Augury
(Penang, Malaysia: Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia for School of Comparative Social Sciences, 1980), xxviii.

33
.
Frans L. Roes and Michel Raymond, “Belief in Moralizing Gods,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
24 (2003): 126–35.

34
.
Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff, “The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality,”
Science
322 (2008): 58–62.

35
.
Jesse M. Bering, Katrina McLeod, and Todd K. Shackelford, “Reasoning about Dead Agents Reveals Possible Adaptive Trends,”
Human Nature
16 (2005): 360–81.

36
.
Jesse M. Bering and Jared Piazza, “Princess Alice Is Watching You: Children’s Belief in an Invisible Person Promotes Rule Following” (unpublished manuscript).

37
.
Pascal Boyer,
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
(New York: Basic Books, 2001), 40.

38
.
The primary paradigm within the cognitive science of religion for the past decade can be described as the “cultural epidemiological” model of religious concept transmission and acquisition. Conceptualized originally by the French anthropologist Dan Sperber, this approach has been most extensively developed by Washington University anthropologist Pascal Boyer. Boyer lays out a very elegant scientific model that shows how the evolved human mind is especially susceptible to religious concepts because they exploit our everyday, mundane, run-of-the-mill thought processes. What makes a particular concept “religious” or supernatural, says Boyer, is its counterintuitiveness—the extent to which it violates our innate assumptions about basic aspects of the natural world. Boyer sometimes uses the term “sticky” to describe religious concepts. They’re especially hard to shake, he says, because they are continually grabbing our attention by virtue of the fact that they challenge our innate understanding of the humdrum world. With Boyer’s catalogue of supernatural ideas, just about any religious concept you can conjure up has this same basic formula: take a run-of-the-mill bit of the everyday, and add a flash of color in the form of a contradiction in terms. (Pascal Boyer,
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
[New York: Basic Books, 2001].)
     The beauty of Boyer’s model is that it can account for otherwise mind-boggling cross-cultural variation in religious concepts. His counterintuitiveness formula explains why thousands of people flocked recently to a home in Bangalore city to witness what many hailed as a miracle. It seems a small marble statue of the nineteenth-century Indian saint Shirdi Sai Baba fluttered its lashes during a routine cleaning and decided to spring open its left eye to have a peak at the world. Boyer’s model can also explain the Lord Ganesha phenomenon that occurred a few months prior, just a stone’s throw away on the map, in Mumbai. Statues of this elephant-headed deity, who happens to be the Hindu patron of sciences among other things, started slurping milk from spoons offered by religious devotees. What possessed the very first person to raise a tablespoon of milk to a piece of stone carved into the shape of an elephant’s trunk we may never know, but like the one-eyed Sai Baba, these thirsty Lord Ganesha statues really got people talking.
     The reason such religious statues garner our attention, argues Boyer, is that we have an inborn concept of what makes an inanimate object inanimate. Moving on its own accord, seeing, and having biological functions just aren’t on that list. So when word gets out that a lifeless artifact has breached natural law—bleeding paintings, crying figurines, blinking statues—the news spreads like wildfire, propagating myths, sparking debate, and renewing faith.

39
.
In 1967, for example, a well-known philosopher from the University of Notre Dame named Alvin Plantinga wrote an influential little book titled
God and Other Minds.
Over the years, Plantinga has tinkered with some of the details of his argument for the existence of God, and he appears slightly embarrassed by the youthful brashness of his earlier writing, but his central position on the matter has not changed. “I remain unrepentant about the main epistemological conclusions of the book,” he wrote in the preface to a new edition twenty-three years later. “The chief topic of
God and Other Minds
is the question of the rationality, or reasonability, or intellectual propriety of belief in God. My contention was that the strongest argument for the existence of God and the strongest argument for other minds are similar, and fail in similar ways; hence my ‘tentative conclusion’: ‘if my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God. But obviously the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latter.’” (Alvin Plantinga,
God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God
[Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991], xi. Originally published in 1967.)
     Were it not for the focus of the present book, it would be rather cruel of me to dawdle unnecessarily over this quote of Plantinga’s, which I’ve admittedly cherry-picked as a shining example of the type of theological acrobatics of reason that tend to pass for logical argument. Yet, I really do think Plantinga ought to be not only repentant about this logic, but deeply so. Yes, as we saw in Chapter 1, philosophically, other human minds can never be proven to exist—hence the term “
theory
of mind.” But to say that the two cases—God’s mind and other human minds—are “in the same epistemological boat” (as Plantinga puts it) (ibid., xvi) is something of a stretch. More than the patent silliness of Plantinga’s argument, this sort of intellectualistic obfuscation of the God question seems to me almost deliberately made to cause confusion among readers.

40
.
Paul Bloom,
Descartes’ Baby: How Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human
(New York: Basic Books, 2004), 222–23.

C
HAPTER
7

1
.
“Did Darwin Become a Christian on His Deathbed?” Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry, www.carm.org/secular- movements/evolution/did-darwin- become-christian-his-deathbed (accessed March 25, 2010).

2
.
Ibid.

3
.
Voltaire,
Épître à l’Auteur du Livre “Des Trois Imposteurs”
[Epistle to the Anonymous Author of the Book, “The Three Impostors”] (1768).

4
.
Blaise Pascal,
Pensées,
trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1995). Originally published in 1670.