Why Darwin Matters (8 page)

—Mark Twain, “Was the World Made for Man?” 1903

Why do you believe in God?

I have been asking people this question for most of my adult life. In 1998, Frank Sulloway and I presented the query in a more official format—along with the question “Why do you think
other people
believe in God?”—in a survey given to ten thousand Americans. Just a few of the answers we received:

A 22-year-old male law student with moderate religious convictions (a self-rated five on a nine-point scale), who was raised by very religious parents and who today calls himself a deist, writes, “I believe in a creator because there seems to be no other possible explanation for the existence of the universe,” yet other “people believe in God to give their lives purpose and meaning.”

A 43-year-old female physician with a self-rated three on the nine-point scale of religious conviction says she believes in God
because “I experience peace and serenity in myself and my life. It is always there when I choose to allow the experience of it. This is proof to me of divine intelligence, a Higher Power, the Oneness of all,” yet “I think most people believe in God because they are taught to. It is, in fact, a
belief
rather than a direct experience for them.”

A 43-year-old male computer scientist and Catholic with very strong religious convictions (a nine on the nine-point scale) “had a personal conversion experience, where I had direct contact with God. This conversion experience, and ongoing contacts in prayer, form the only basis for my faith.” Other people believe in God, however, “because of (a) their upbringing, (b) the comfort of the church, and (c) a hope for this contact.”

A 36-year-old male journalist and evangelical Christian with a self-rated eight in religious conviction writes: “I believe in God because to me there is ample evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer of the universe.” Yet, “others accept God out of a purely emotional need for comfort throughout their life and use little of their intellectual capacity to examine the faith to which they adhere.”

A 40-year-old female Catholic nurse with very strong religious convictions (a nine on the nine-point scale) says that “I believe in God because of the example of my spiritual teacher who believes in God and has unconditional love for people and gives so completely of himself for the good of others. And since I have followed this path, I now treat others so much better.” On the other hand, she writes that “I think people initially believe in God because of their parents and unless they start on their own path—where they put a lot of effort into their spiritual part of their life—they continue to believe out of fear.”

When Sulloway and I noticed the difference between why people believe in God and why they think
other
people believe in God, we decided to undertake an extensive analysis of all the written answers people provided in our survey. In addition, we inquired about family demographics, religious background, personality characteristics, and other factors that contribute to religious belief and skepticism. We discovered that the seven strongest predictors of belief in God are:

1. being raised in a religious manner

2. parents’ religiosity

3. lower levels of education

4. being female

5. a large family

6. lack of conflict with parents

7. being younger

In sum, being female and raised by religious parents in a large family appears to make one more religious, whereas being male, educated, in conflict with one’s parents, and older appears to make one less religious.
¹
As people become older and more educated, they encounter other belief systems that lead them to see the connection between various personal and social influences and religious beliefs. This helps explain the differences we observed in reasons people give for their own beliefs versus the reasons they attribute to other people’s beliefs.

From the responses we received in a preliminary survey, we created a taxonomy of eleven categories of reasons people give for
their own and others’ beliefs. The five most common answers given to the question
Why do you believe in God?:

1. The good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of the world or universe (28.6%)

2. The experience of God in everyday life (20.6%)

3. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life (10.3%)

4. The Bible says so (9.8%)

5. Just because / faith / the need to believe in something (8.2%)

And the six most common answers given to the question
Why do you think other people believe in God?:

1. Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life (26.3%)

2. Religious people have been raised to believe in God (22.4%)

3. The experience of God in everyday life (16.2%)

4. Just because / faith / the need to believe in something (13.0%)

5. Fear death and the unknown (9.1%)

6. The good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of the world or universe (6.0%)

Notice that the intellectually based reasons offered for belief in God—“the good design of the universe” and “the experience of God in everyday life”—which occupied first and second place when people were describing their own beliefs dropped to sixth and third place, respectively, when they were describing the beliefs of others. Indeed, when reflecting on others’ beliefs, the two most common reasons cited were emotion-based (and fear-averse!):
personal comfort (“comforting, relieving, consoling”) and social comfort (“raised to believe”).

Sulloway and I believe that these results are evidence of an
intellectual attribution bias
, in which people consider their own beliefs as being rationally motivated, whereas they see the beliefs of others as being emotionally driven. By analogy, one’s commitment to a political belief is generally attributed to a rational decision (“I am for gun control because statistics show that crime decreases when gun ownership decreases”), whereas another person’s opinion on the same subject is attributed to need or emotional reasons (“he is for gun control because he is a bleeding-heart liberal who needs to identify with the victim”). This intellectual attribution bias appears to be equal opportunity on the subject of God. The apparent good design of the universe, and the perceived action of a higher intelligence in daily activities, are powerful intellectual justifications for belief. But we readily attribute other people’s belief in God to their emotional needs and how they were raised.

The intellectual attribution bias may be the result of evolution. Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. We are pattern-seeking as well as pattern-finding animals. One of numerous studies that supports this supposition was an experiment conducted by Stuart Vyse and Ruth Heltzer in which subjects participated in a video game. The goal of the game was to navigate the path of a cursor through a matrix grid using directional keys. One group of subjects were awarded points when they
successfully found a way through the grid’s lower right portion, while a second group of subjects were awarded points randomly. Both groups were subsequently asked to describe how they thought the points were awarded. Most of the subjects in the first group found the pattern of point scoring and accurately described it. Similarly, most of the subjects in the second group also found “patterns” of point scoring, even though no such patterns existed.
²

Finding patterns in nature may have an evolutionary explanation: There is a survival payoff for finding order instead of chaos in the world, and being able to separate threats (to fight or flee) from comforts (to embrace or eat, among other things), which enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce. We are the descendants of the most successful pattern-seeking members of our species. In other words, we were designed by evolution to perceive design. How recursive!

Of course, until 1859 when Charles Darwin explained the natural, bottom-up origins of design, the default explanation—reverted to by most peoples in most cultures throughout most of history—was God. Since the most common reason people give for why they believe in God is the good design of the world, Intelligent Design creationists are tapping into the intuitive understanding most people hold about life and the universe.

But there is a deep-seated flaw in this argument that undermines the entire endeavor. If the world is complex and looks intricately designed, and therefore the best inference is that there must be an intelligent designer, should we not then infer that an intelligent designer must itself have been designed? That is, if the earmarks of design imply that there is an intelligent designer, then the existence of an intelligent designer denotes that it must have a designer—a
super intelligent designer
. And by the same course of reasoning, any designer who can create a super intelligent designer must itself be a
superior super intelligent designer
.

Ad infinitum. Which brings us right back to the natural world, and the search for natural explanations for natural phenomena.

One day I was thinking about what we might find if we went in search of an intelligent designer when I remembered Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
³
This led me to consider what a sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) would be indistinguishable from, which led me to formulate
Shermer’s Last Law: Any sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is indistinguishable from God.
⁴

God is described by most Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Since we are far from the mark on these traits, how could we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely, from an Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence who has them in copious amounts relative to us? Thus, we would be unable to distinguish between absolute and relative omniscience and omnipotence. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than us, then by definition He
would
be an ETI! From this I conclude that there is no difference between Intelligent Design, Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and God, at least a God that is part of our world. This conclusion is derived from the following sequence of observations and deductions:

Observation
. Biological evolution is glacially slow compared to technological evolution. The reason is that biological evolution is Darwinian and requires generations of differential reproductive success, whereas technological evolution is Lamarckian, where change is inherited within the same generation.

Observation
. The cosmos is very big and space is very empty, so the probability of making contact with an ETI is remote. By example, the speed of our most distant spacecraft,
Voyager I
, relative to the sun is 17.246 kilometers per second. The speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second, so
Voyager I
is traveling at .0000574 percent of the speed of light. The Alpha Centauri star system, the closest to our sun, is 4.3 light-years away. This means that even traveling at a breakneck speed of 38,578 miles per hour, it would take
Voyager I
74,912 years to get there (and it isn’t even heading in that direction).
⁵

Deduction
. Ergo, the probability of making contact with an ETI who is only slightly more advanced than us is virtually nil. If we ever do encounter an ETI it will be as if a million-year-old
Homo erectus
were dropped into the middle of Manhattan, given a computer and a cell phone, and instructed to communicate with
Homo sapiens sapiens
. An ETI would be to us as we would be to this early hominid—godlike.

Observation
. Science and technology have changed our world more in the past century than it changed in the previous hundred centuries—it took ten thousand years to get from the cart to the airplane, but only sixty-six years to get from powered flight to a lunar landing. Moore’s Law of computer power doubling every eighteen months continues unabated and is now down to about a year. Some computer scientists, such as Ray Kurzweil, calculate that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II, and that as early as 2030 we may encounter the Singularity—the point at which total computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything that we can imagine that they will appear near infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience (note the suffix!).
⁶
When this happens the world will change more in a decade than it did in the previous thousand decades.