The GOD Delusion (27 page)

On
this model we should expect that, in different geographical regions,
different arbitrary beliefs, none of which have any factual basis, will
be handed down, to be believed with the same conviction as useful
pieces of traditional wisdom such as the belief that manure is good for
the crops. We should also expect that superstitions and other
non-factual beliefs will locally evolve - change over generations -
either by random drift or by some sort of analogue of Darwinian
selection, eventually showing a pattern of significant divergence from
common ancestry. Languages drift apart from a common progenitor given
sufficient time in geographical separation (I shall return to this
point in a moment). The same seems to be true of baseless and arbitrary
beliefs and injunctions, handed down the generations - beliefs that
were perhaps given a fair wind by the useful programmability of the
child brain.

Religious
leaders are well aware of the vulnerability of the child brain, and the
importance of getting the indoctrination in early. The Jesuit boast,
'Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the
man,' is no less accurate (or sinister) for being hackneyed. In more
recent times, James Dobson, founder of today's infamous 'Focus on the
Family' movement,* is equally acquainted with the principle: 'Those who
control what young people are taught, and what they experience - what
they see, hear, think, and believe - will determine the future course
for the nation.'
⁷⁹

* I
was amused when I saw 'Focus on your own damn family' on a car bumper
sticker in Colorado, but it now seems to me less funny. Maybe some
children need to be protected from indoctrination by their own parents
(see Chapter 9).

But
remember, my specific suggestion about the useful gullibility of the
child mind is only an example of the
kind
of thing
that might be the analogue of moths navigating by the moon or the
stars. The ethologist Robert Hinde, in
Why Gods Persist,
and
the anthropologists Pascal Boyer, in
Religion Explained,
and
Scott Atran, in
In Gods We Trust,
have
independently promoted the general idea of religion as a by-product of
normal psychological dispositions -many by-products, I should say, for
the anthropologists especially are concerned to emphasize the diversity
of the world's religions as well as what they have in common. The
findings of anthropologists seem weird to us only because they are
unfamiliar. All religious beliefs seem weird to those not brought up in
them. Boyer did research on the Fang people of Cameroon, who believe .
. .

. .
. that witches have an extra internal animal-like organ that flies away
at night and ruins other people's crops or poisons their blood. It is
also said that these witches sometimes assemble for huge banquets,
where they devour their victims and plan future attacks. Many will tell
you that a friend of a friend actually saw witches flying over the
village at night, sitting on a banana leaf and throwing magical darts
at various unsuspecting victims.

Boyer
continues with a personal anecdote:

I
was mentioning these and other exotica over dinner in a Cambridge
college when one of our guests, a prominent Cambridge theologian,
turned to me and said: 'That is what makes anthropology so fascinating
and so difficult too. You have to explain
how people can
believe such nonsense.'
Which left me dumbfounded. The
conversation had moved on before I could find a pertinent response -to
do with kettles and pots.

Assuming
that the Cambridge theologian was a mainstream Christian, he probably
believed some combination of the following:

• 
In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no
biological father being involved.

• 
The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had
been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.

• 
The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three
days.

• 
Forty days later, the fatherless man went up to the top of a hill and
then disappeared bodily into the sky.

• 
If you murmur thoughts privately in your head, the fatherless man, and
his 'father' (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and may act
upon them. He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody
else in the world.

• 
If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man
sees all, even if nobody else does. You may be rewarded or punished
accordingly, including after your death.

• 
The fatherless man's virgin mother never died but 'ascended' bodily
into heaven.

• 
Bread and wine, if blessed by a priest (who must have testicles),
'become' the body and blood of the fatherless man.

What
would an objective anthropologist, coming fresh to this set of beliefs
while on fieldwork in Cambridge, make of them?

The
idea of psychological by-products grows naturally out of the important
and developing field of evolutionary psychology.
⁸⁰
Evolutionary
psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for
seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a
collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of
specialist data-processing needs. There is a module for dealing with
kinship, a module for dealing with reciprocal exchanges, a module for
dealing with empathy, and so on. Religion can be seen as a by-product
of the misfiring of several of these modules, for example the modules
for forming theories of other minds, for forming coalitions, and for
discriminating in favour of in-group members and against strangers. Any
of these could serve as the human equivalent of the moths' celestial
navigation, vulnerable to misfiring in the same kind of way as I
suggested for childhood gullibility. The psychologist Paul Bloom,
another advocate of the 'religion is a by-product' view, points out
that children have a natural tendency towards a
dualistic
theory
of mind. Religion, for him, is a by-product of such instinctive
dualism. We humans, he suggests, and especially children, are natural
born dualists.

A
dualist acknowledges a fundamental distinction between matter and mind.
A monist, by contrast, believes that mind is a manifestation of matter
- material in a brain or perhaps a computer -
and cannot exist apart from matter. A dualist believes the mind is some
kind of disembodied spirit that
inhabits
the body
and therefore conceivably could leave the body and exist somewhere
else. Dualists readily interpret mental illness as 'possession by
devils', those devils being spirits whose residence in the body is
temporary, such that they might be 'cast out'. Dualists personify
inanimate physical objects at the slightest opportunity, seeing spirits
and demons even in waterfalls and clouds.

F.
Anstey's 1882 novel
Vice Versa
makes sense to a
dualist, but strictly should be incomprehensible to a dyed-in-the-wool
monist like me. Mr Bultitude and his son mysteriously find that they
have swapped bodies. The father, much to the son's glee, is obliged to
go to school in the son's body; while the son, in the father's body,
almost ruins the father's business through his immature decisions. A
similar plotline was used by P. G. Wodehouse in
Laughing Gas,
where the Earl of Havershot and a child movie star go under
the anaesthetic at the same moment in neighbouring dentist's chairs,
and wake up in each other's bodies. Once again, the plot makes sense
only to a dualist. There has to be something corresponding to Lord
Havershot which is no part of his body, otherwise how could he wake up
in the body of a child actor?

Like
most scientists, I am not a dualist, but I am nevertheless easily
capable of enjoying
Vice Versa
and
Laughing
Gas.
Paul Bloom would say this is because, even though I
have learned to be an intellectual monist, I am a human animal and
therefore evolved as an instinctive dualist. The idea that there is a
me
perched somewhere behind my eyes and capable, at least in
fiction, of migrating into somebody else's head, is deeply ingrained in
me and in every other human being, whatever our intellectual
pretensions to monism. Bloom supports his contention with experimental
evidence that children are even more likely to be dualists than adults
are, especially extremely young children. This suggests that a tendency
to dualism is built into the brain and, according to Bloom, provides a
natural predisposition to embrace religious ideas.

Bloom
also suggests that we are innately predisposed to be creationists.
Natural selection 'makes no intuitive sense'. Children are especially
likely to assign purpose to everything, as the psychologist
Deborah Keleman tells us in her article 'Are children "intuitive
theists"?'
⁸¹
Clouds are 'for raining'. Pointy
rocks are 'so that animals could scratch on them when they get itchy'.
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children
are native ideologists, and many never grow out of it.

Native
dualism and native teleology predispose us, given the right conditions,
to religion, just as my moths' light-compass reaction predisposed them
to inadvertent 'suicide'. Our innate dualism prepares us to believe in
a 'soul' which inhabits the body rather than being integrally part of
the body. Such a disembodied spirit can easily be imagined to move on
somewhere else after the death of the body. We can also easily imagine
the existence of a deity as pure spirit, not an emergent property of
complex matter but existing independently of matter. Even more
obviously, childish teleology sets us up for religion. If everything
has a purpose, whose purpose is it? God's, of course.

But
what is the counterpart of the
usefulness
of the
moths' light compass? Why might natural selection have favoured dualism
and teleology in the brains of our ancestors and their children? So
far, my account of the 'innate dualists' theory has simply posited that
humans are natural born dualists and ideologists. But what would the
Darwinian advantage be? Predicting the behaviour of entities in our
world is important for our survival, and we would expect natural
selection to have shaped our brains to do it efficiently and fast.
Might dualism and teleology serve us in this capacity? We may
understand this hypothesis better in the light of what the philosopher
Daniel Dennett has called the intentional stance.

Dennett
has offered a helpful three-way classification of the 'stances' that we
adopt in trying to understand and hence predict the behaviour of
entities such as animals, machines or each other.
⁸²
They
are the physical stance, the design stance and the intentional stance.
The
physical stance
always works in principle,
because everything ultimately obeys the laws of physics. But working
things out using the physical stance can be very slow. By the time we
have sat down to calculate all the interactions of a complicated
object's moving parts, our prediction of its behaviour will probably be
too late. For an object that really is designed, like a washing machine
or a crossbow, the
design stance
is an economical
short cut. We can guess
how the object will behave by going over the head of physics and
appealing directly to design. As Dennett says,

Almost
anyone can predict when an alarm clock will sound on the basis of the
most casual inspection of its exterior. One does not know or care to
know whether it is spring wound, battery driven, sunlight powered, made
of brass wheels and jewel bearings or silicon chips - one just assumes
that it is designed so that the alarm will sound when it is set to
sound.

Living
things are not designed, but Darwinian natural selection licenses a
version of the design stance for them. We get a short cut to
understanding the heart if we assume that it is 'designed' to pump
blood. Karl von Frisch was led to investigate colour vision in bees (in
the face of orthodox opinion that they were colour-blind) because he
assumed that the bright colours of flowers were 'designed' to attract
them. The quotation marks are designed to scare off mendacious
creationists who might otherwise claim the great Austrian zoologist as
one of their own. Needless to say, he was perfectly capable of
translating the design stance into proper Darwinian terms.

The
intentional
stance
is another short cut, and it goes one better than the
design stance. An entity is assumed not merely to be designed for a
purpose but to be, or contain, an
agent
with
intentions that guide its actions. When you see a tiger, you had better
not delay your prediction of its probable behaviour. Never mind the
physics of its molecules, and never mind the design of its limbs, claws
and teeth. That cat intends to eat you, and it will deploy its limbs,
claws and teeth in flexible and resourceful ways to carry out its
intention. The quickest way to second-guess its behaviour is to forget
physics and physiology and cut to the intentional chase. Note that,
just as the design stance works even for things that were not actually
designed as well as things that were, so the intentional stance works
for things that don't have deliberate conscious intentions as well as
things that do.

It
seems to me entirely plausible that the intentional stance has survival
value as a brain mechanism that speeds up decision-making
in dangerous circumstances, and in crucial social situations. It is
less immediately clear that dualism is a necessary concomitant of the
intentional stance. I shan't pursue the matter here, but I think a case
could be developed that some kind of theory of other minds, which could
fairly be described as dualistic, is likely to underlie the intentional
stance - especially in complicated social situations, and even more
especially where
higher-order
intentionality comes
into play-Dennett
speaks of
third-order intentionality
(the man
believed that the woman knew he wanted her),
fourth-order
(the
woman realized that the man believed that the woman knew he wanted her)
and even
fifth-order
intentionality (the shaman
guessed that the woman realized that the man believed that the woman
knew he wanted her). Very high orders of intentionality are probably
confined to fiction, as satirized in Michael Frayn's hilarious novel
The
Tin Men:
'Watching Nunopoulos, Rick knew that he was almost
certain that Anna felt a passionate contempt for Fiddlingchild's
failure to understand her feelings about Fiddlingchild, and she knew
too that Nina knew she knew about Nunopoulos's knowledge . . .' But the
fact that we can laugh at such contortions of other-mind inference in
fiction is probably telling us something important about the way our
minds have been naturally selected to work in the real world.