Perfectionist parent?

If we choose to create a life — a life that is capable of both joy and suffering — then it is our obligation as parents to help our offspring have happy, fulfilling lives.  Our children do not owe us.  They did not choose to be brought into the world.

Not surprisingly, when a parent makes a child feel unworthy of love, society thinks poorly of that parent.  One example of this is perfectionist parents, who pressure their kids and set unreachable standards.  The general consensus is that children who feel undeserving of love need therapy to learn to love and accept themselves.

I have noticed that many people who believe in God feel unworthy of the love that they believe God has for them.   Religious folks often say things such as “what did I do to deserve God’s love?”

So, is God like a perfectionist parent to them? Is God raising or lowering their self esteem?

Read Full Post »

folie à plusieurs

Silly naive children

If Rex, the family dog, dies, parents might tell their children “I know it’s sad, but Rex is in doggy heaven right now.”  This is a comforting lie, and parents know that children are naive enough to believe it.

Sticking with the pet theme, if parents’ decide to have the dog put to sleep, they might tell their kids that they took the dog to a farm where it can run around freely all day.

We all recognize that ‘put to sleep’ is a euphemism for death.  As adults,  we also know that ‘doggy heaven’ and ‘took the dog to a farm’ are also euphemisms for ‘Rex is in a permanent state of non-existence.’ Yet, we present the latter two euphemisms to children as if they are actual real things, just like we do with Santa Claus.

I picture parents talking to each other after the kids are in bed:  “Can you believe they fell for that?  I’m glad children are so trusting.”  Those silly naive children will believe anything!

Yet, even though we are aware that we tell children comforting lies, we do not seem to recognize that we might have been told the same type of comforting lies about life and death.  For example, religious folks might tell us that people do not really die, they just move on into a new state.  They go to people heaven!  Picture your local pastor as the parents telling kids about doggy heaven or the farm.

Mass delusion

Folie à deux refers to a psychiatric condition where two people share a delusional belief.  If the belief sounds crazy enough to the majority of people, then we recognize them as suffering from a psychiatric disorder.  Mass delusion seems more difficult to recognize.

Consider the following groups:

1. Heaven’s Gate group: believed that a space craft was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp and needed to commit suicide so that their souls could board the craft.

2. 9/11 conspiracy theorists:  believe that 9/11 was an inside job

3. Cult of Scientology: a financial pyramid scheme posing as a religion

4. Any popular religion

What are the differences between these groups?  Each of these groups believe/believed some things that we cannot test, and other things that we have tested and disproved.  Members of each group have their beliefs reinforced by other members of the group.   Why are some groups higher status than others?  I’ll take a stab at it, in order:

1.  We don’t like groups that advocate suicide.  Even people who believe we have a spirit that lives on cannot shake the strong desire to survive as a human (few phenotypes are more strongly correlated with genetic fitness than the desire to survive)

2. 9/11 happened recently. It’s pretty easy to make a strong evidence-based case that the Pentagon wasn’t hit by a missile or that the WTC wasn’t brought down by explosives.

3.  Religions invented in the last century suffer from a lack of social tradition inheritance and mystery.

4.  Most old, popular religions tell us things that we want to hear (we will live on, and there will be less suffering in the next world) and were created before the invention of image and voice recorders.  It’s easier to imagine huge miracles in times before there were cameras.

Smile for the camera

In general I think we have strong desire to delude ourselves into thinking the world is a better place than it actually is.

Consider:

• we have probably formed more euphemisms than dysphemisms:  a euphemism is a way of making something not sound as bad as it is
• we like optimists better than pessimists:  an optimist thinks things will work out better than they probably will
• we would rather see pictures of smiling people than frowning people:  someone smiling for a photo probably appears happier than they actually are

This does not seem like a bad strategy — I’m happier if I think the world is better place than it actually is.  Nevertheless, it’s interesting the line between perceptions about delusion and sanity, and how it relates to popularity and our needs.

Read Full Post »

Parenting advice

I think it is important to expose kids to a lot of different ideas.  If you are Christian, you shouldn’t prevent your kids from hearing about other religions.  Similarly, as an atheist, I want my kids to be exposed to many different beliefs, with as little prejudice as possible. I don’t presume to be right.  I want them to make up their own mind.

There is another reason to expose your kids to different religious ideas.  Teenage volunerability:

4. To avoid the “teen epiphany.” Here’s the big one. Struggles with identity, confidence, and countless other issues are a given part of the teen years. Sometimes these struggles generate a genuine personal crisis, at which point religious peers often pose a single question: “Don’t you know about Jesus?” If your child says, “No,” the peer will come back incredulously with, “YOU don’t know JESUS? Omigosh, Jesus is The Answer!” Boom, we have an emotional hijacking. And such hijackings don’t end up in moderate Methodism. This is the moment when nonreligious teens fly all the way across the spectrum to evangelical fundamentalism.

A little knowledge about religion allows the teen to say, “Yeah, I know about Jesus”—and to know that reliable answers to personal problems are better found elsewhere.

Christian ‘youth groups’ are a scary thing.  They attempt to get to kids when they are most vulnerable.  While I want my kids to be exposed to different ideas, I don’t want that first exposure to come from some cult trying to recruit them.

There is still the question of how much exposure we should give to ideas that we don’t agree with.  Robin Hanson asks

So is the principle here that parents should go beyond their simple judgment when choosing to what to expose our kids?  For example, should we let polygamists argue for their way of life directly to our kids?  Should we let pedophiles argue their case directly to our kids?  Or is the principle here that we know we are right and those other parents are wrong, obligating us to make those parents give their kids what we judge best?

We should distinguish here between exposing children to facts about what some people believe and to exposing them to people who are going to try to persuade them.  I want my kids to know what different groups believe and why they believe it.  I don’t necessarily want them to hear the sales pitch directly, though.  At least, not until they have developed their skills as judges of evidence.

I want my children to be well trained as rational thinkers.  I imagine exercises where they have to find the flaw in an argument. Or maybe we could play the Paranoid Debating game.   I’d like them to know about many of the different biases that we are all susceptible to.

I want my children to always be open to the possibility that they are wrong.  No matter what you believe, there are people out there who: (a) are  smarter and more experienced than you; (b) have a belief that contradicts your own; and (c) are just as confident that they are right as you are.  If you keep that in mind, you’ll be more open to different ideas.  It also helps if you think of belief as probability that can be updated, not as a binary fixed state.

Read Full Post »

Believing is seeing

During a recent friendly discussion about religion, someone pointed out that “believing is seeing.”  In other words, I probably will not see evidence of God until I first believe in him.  Once I believe in him, I will begin to see the evidence.  Apparently. 

Well, I agree that believing is seeing.  As Errol Morris put it

 If we want to believe something, then we often find a way to do so regardless of evidence to the contrary. Believing is seeing and not the other way around.

Yes, if you believe in something you will see evidence for it.  However, I do not consider that to be a good trait.  That is what happens with placebos.  We believe they are helping us, and it affects our psyche.  Placebos can improve our subjective well being.  A placebo will probably not, however, decrease an HIV patient’s viral load.  Similarly, belief in God does not increase the actual evidence in favor of God; it just affects our cognitive evidence selection mechanism.

An example

Let us consider a simple example involving superstition.  I have heard people say that “bad things come in threes.”  Some people are more specific, and believe that “deaths come in threes.”  I will focus on the latter phrase.  What does the phrase mean?  I believe they are saying that if someone close to you dies, then two other people close to you will die in the near future.  Deaths happen in groups of three.

If we were to graph the deaths of people close to us on a time line, it would look something like this (if the saying was true):

Here, D represents the death of a person who was close to you.  You will notice that the deaths are grouped in 3′s. 

Now, keep in mind that the death of someone who is close to you is also the death of someone who is close to a lot of other people.  It then becomes a very difficult math problem.  How could God makes sure that deaths occur in 3′s for everybody? You could pretty much rule out the factual basis of the claim on this argument alone.  Nevertheless, let’s proceed with the example.

In reality, the time line graph would look different.  A real time line of deaths of people close to you might look like this:

Here, the black D’s represent the deaths of people who were very close to you (e.g., a parent, best friend, etc.).  The brown D’s represent the deaths of people who were not as close to you (e.g., a cousin, a friend from years ago that you did not see too often).  You will notice that the deaths do not appear to occur in groups of 3.  However, believing is seeing!

Convienent thresholds

If you believe that deaths come in threes, you will see it.  You will become a victim of confirmation bias, due to an inconsistent application of thresholds.  Which deaths ‘count’ in the group of 3?  How much time has to pass between deaths before a new death is not counted as part of the group?  Threshold flexibility makes it easy to confirm your beliefs.  Behold!

An ‘X’ through a D means that we are ignoring that death.  We ignore some of the brown D’s on the grounds that the person wasn’t close enough to us to ‘count.’  We accept brown D’s in the set when convenient.  Also, notice the varying time window.  We are pretty generous with the time window in the third set. 

In some cases we might even ignore a black D if it clearly does not fit with the other groups.  We will just forget about that disconfirming evidence.  We tend to only remember evidence that confirms our beliefs.

Another example

The 23 enigma: “the belief that most incidents and events are directly connected to the number 23, some permutation of the number 23, or a number related to the number 23.”  Yes, the clever person can find a way to connect an event with the number 23.  However, the clever person could do the same with just about any other number they picked.  Believing is seeing.

Miracles

When something positive happens that seemed unlikely at the start, people will attribute it to God intervening.  But if that same event had turned out bad, they generally wouldn’t attribute it to God’s intervention.  An example of this occured in January 2006, where at first it was falsely reported that some miners had been rescued alive after being trapped for 4 days.  See the headline in the Boston Herald:

As Greg Saunders put it

Now that we know the twelve miners were killed, does this mean America’s prayers weren’t answered? Just like gambling addicts remember their big wins but not their losses, the fate of the twelve miners has transformed from a faith-inspiring act of God to another horrible tragedy in which it’s impolite to mention religion at all.

Again, here, we are talking about how evidence is selected.  Once you believe, it’s easy to see evidence of ‘miracles.’

Evidence

So far I have given reasons why you should be very skeptical of claims that rely on belief first.  In fairness, however, I need to consider the other side.  It is possible that some evidence in favor of God is very subtle and very difficult for a non-believer to notice.  If the evidence is real, however, the believer should be able to point out the evidence to the non-believer. What is it that the believer is seeing that confirms their belief?  Can they explain it to the non-believer?  And if not, is it really evidence?

Read Full Post »

God’s attributes

Let’s assume that God exists.  Let us also imagine that God did not write a book that described his wonderful attributes.  We would then be in the position of learning about God based solely on what he created.

If we look for God’s attributes based only on what he created, what would we conclude?

God is a fan of extreme sports

If you look around, you will see living things in violent, bloody competition of survival.  I would conclude that God enjoys extreme sports.  Think about it.  If you were to design a world with different living creatures, would you put them in survival competition against each other?  Imagine you created different types of artificial intelligence with unique purposes.  Picture robots performing different functions.  Would you create them in such a way where they have to try and destroy each other to survive?  Of course not. Not unless you enjoyed the battles (which is possible).

In response to this argument, one of my friends said “living things live and die… that’s the natural cycle of things.”  It seems natural to us, because that is what we know.  It doesn’t have to be that we though.  God could have created a world where animals weren’t trying to eat each other. 

Someone pointed out to me that all living things used to be peaceful, until the original sin ruined it all (I’m paraphrasing).  Apparently tigers used to be herbivores?  I don’t know.   However, we wouldn’t know that the world used to be a peaceful place had God not written a book telling us how wonderful he is.  

God is a poor engineer by human standards

Many living things are poorly designed.  You can find a long list here.  For example:

Crowded teeth and poor sinus drainage, as human faces are significantly flatter than those of other primates and humans share the same tooth set. This results in a number of problems, most notably with wisdom teeth.

Or this:

Male beetles of several Callosobruchus species have sharp edges on their sperm-delivery organs. The females’ ducts grow a bit of extra toughening but not enough to make sex safe from the risk of injury.

God is cruel

Even if you accept the premise that it is necessary for animals to kill each other in order to ‘maintain balance’ (which I don’t), you would still have to conclude that there is a lot of suffering that is completely unnecessary.  A designer who found it necessary to have animals kill each other could still have had them anesthetize their prey first.

Why is our conception of God different?

Most people think of God as loving, pure and just.  Why?  If we look at nature, that is not what we see.  Our opinion about God is apparently strictly based on what we learned about him from the book(s) he his written (or movies he has directed).  Should the inconsistency between what we see and what we are told be a concern for those who are searching for truth?

Read Full Post »

Creationist arguments

If you visit creationist websites, or discuss evolution with the ID crowd, you’ll see/hear arguments about why evolution couldn’t be true.  I was glad to see Steven Novella refute the most common claims made against evolution.  The most common one I have heard is that evolution does not increase genetic information, and therefore macroevolution (a popular term by the ID/creationist folks) is impossible.  Steven dismantles this claim:

All mutations increase genetic information…  If you start with one version of a gene and then it mutates in one offspring but not in another – now you have two versions of that gene. That represents an increase in information. Also, entire genes may be duplicated in the reproductive process. If you start with one copy of a gene and end up with two copies – that is an increase in information. This is especially pertinent to evolution, because one copy can continue to perform its original function while the redundant copy is free to mutate and evolve a new function.

…

The idea that natural selection removes variation from the gene pool is true but a non sequitur. Mutations, duplication, and recombination increase information and increase variation and then natural selection causes differential survival of that variation which is better adapted to its niche.

The whole post is worth a read, if you are interested in the topic.  As tempting as it is to ignore creationist arguments, we need to keep refuting them.  Especially when 39% of US adults believe it’s ‘definitely true’ that ”God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.”

update:  you can watch Intelligent Design on Trial (h/t Jim Emerson)

update 2:  new gallop poll on evolution

Read Full Post »

Religion and violence

I like a lot about The End of Faith. There are a few things that bother me, however, which I’ll get into now.

Religion leading us to extinction?

Sam Harris is very concerned that religious beliefs will lead to the extinction of humans. Quoting from the book:

We are fast approaching a time when the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction will be a trivial undertaking; the requisite information and technology are now seeping into every corner of our world. … we can see at a glance that aspiring martyrs will not make good neighbors in the future. We have simply lost the right to our myths, and to our mythic identities.

…

I pray that we may one day think clearly enough about these matters to render our children incapable of killing themselves over their books. If not our children, then I suspect it could well be too late for us, because while it has never been difficult to meet your maker, in fifty years it will simply be too easy to drag everyone else along to meet him with you.

There is certainly reason for concern. It is, however, a little unclear to me how much of the world’s violence is attributable to religion. Yes, in most conflicts religion does seem to play a role. However, I agree with Errol Morris that

Religion can certainly help good people to do evil things, but good people do evil things even without religion.

Even without religion, people would find other differences with their rivals that they could cling to. Groups often battle over control of resources. Members of opposing groups fall into the trap of correspondence bias — they attribute differences in action to differences in character. It’s not that your adversaries are like you, but have different experiences, perspective and interests that drive their action. It’s that they are innately evil. You don’t imagine that you would be like them if you were in their place.

With that said, I do think that religion can make the difference between a violent or non-violent protestor. There is something uniquely powerful about the belief that God is on your side. I can’t think of anything quite as powerful that doesn’t involve religion.

Islam

Harris is particularly tough on Islam. He has a chapter entitled The Problem With Islam, where he argues that Islam is a dangerous religion. Quoting from the book:

…Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest. The only future devout Muslims can envisage — as Muslims — is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, subjugated, or killed.

He goes on to quote from the Qur’an. He also cites a Pew study where a nontrivial percentage of Muslims said that suicide bombing in defense of Islam is justifiable (e.g., 43% of Jordanians said it’s justifiable).

There are some problems with his argument. First, there is a problem with the interpretation of the texts. I’ll quote my friend on this one

The texts that discuss fighting are all done in a historical context and has to be balanced against all the other verses that talk about peace. It’s not that hard to figure out…. and there are like 5 verses that discuss fighting… and it was to the Prophet, who was a head of state. I mean, you honestly don’t have to be a genius to figure that out.

The other issue has to do with how the perceived actions of people that believe in a certain religion affect your judgement about that religion. Harris seems particularly alarmed by suicide bombing. It seems to me that that is what is driving his opinion that Islam is a violent religion.

Cause and effect

We live in world where state violence is not considered terrorism. Take, for example, the US invasion of Iraq. We are a majority Christian nation. George Bush claims to be a Christian. There were reports that he said that God told him to invade Iraq. He certainly referred to God often when talking about foreign policy. Like suicide bombers, Bush thought he was fighting for a just cause (I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt). He thought he was on the side of God. Why isn’t US aggression, especially violence that was ordered by a Christian President who was inspired by God, used as evidence of Christian violence?

Or consider Israeli aggression:

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Why isn’t Israeli violence considered to be evidence that Judaism is a violent religion? As Nir Rosen put it:

The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

The reason is because the powerful write history.

Imagine things were different. Imagine that a majority Muslim nation was the major military superpower in the world. It worked to expand its wealth and power, at the expense of citizens of less powerful countries. Let us assume that one group of people that really suffered at the hands of this superpower happened to be Christian. Would some of these Christians fight back? Would they launch rockets into that nation if they could? Would some of them resort to terrorism? And if so, would they use the Bible to help justify it? I think so. People start with their bottom line. It wouldn’t be difficult to come up with passages in the Bible. I mean you could turn to Deuteronomy “you must kill him, your hands must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the people following” or John 15:6 “and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” Sure, maybe that is not the right interpretation of the text, but like my friend said, that’s what happens with the Qur’an.

Harris seems to be aware that people could use the Bible to justify violence. He said that:

A future in which Islam and the West do not stand on the brink of mutual annihilation is a future in which most Muslims have learned to ignore most of their canon, just as most Christians have learned to do [emphasis mine].

But would most Christians “ignore most of their canon” if they were in the position that the Palestinians are in?

If there was a majority Christian nation, a majority Muslim nation, a majority Jewish nation, a majority Hindu nation, etc., that all had similar power and resources, then we might be in a better position to judge the effect of the religion on violent behavior. We do not live in a ceteris paribus world, however.

I don’t think that any of these religions inherently inspire violence. Oppression is the breading ground of extremism. If the world community works together on education, human rights, democracy, freedom, and so on, I think we’ll see a reduction in violent, radical behavior. I’m not sure that Harris’ approach, which comes across as a call for a war against religion, is a winning strategy. I do share many of his concerns though.

Read Full Post »

The End of Faith

I’m currently reading Sam Harris’ The End of Faith.  I have mixed feelings about the book.  Perhaps I’ll discuss that another day.  For now, I’ll just quote from the book some things that I found interesting:

The belief that certain books were written by God leaves us powerless to address the most potent source of human conflict, past and present. … It is safe to say that few of us would have thought so many people could believe such a thing, if they did not actually believe it.  Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him.  Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars…  Could anything — anything — be more ridiculous?  And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in. 

…

The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom the wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.  To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview — however heroic the effort of redactors — is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture.

…

…it is merely an accident  of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.

…

The writers of Luke and Matthew…insist that Mary conceived as a virgin (Greek parthenos)…  Unfortunately for fanciers of Mary’s virginity, the Hebrew word alma (for which parthenos is an erroneous translation) simply means “young woman”…  It would appear that Western civilization has endured two millennia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors of Matthew and Luke could not read Hebrew.

Read Full Post »

The evidence puzzle

“Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book.”

–Sam Harris, The End of Faith

Continuing from parts one, two and three…

In general, two things should drive our state of belief:  how plausible the theory seems and how much evidence there is in its favor (prior and posterior probabilities). 

Plausibility depends on our current state of knowledge.  It’s fairly subjective. Yet, it’s a good starting point.  Imagine that, when you are told some theory or hypothesis, prior to seeing any evidence for or against it, you state how likely you think it is that the theory is true.  You just make an educated guess.  For example, if someone told me that listening to music causes liver damage, I’d be very skeptical, because it’s not easy to imagine the causal pathway from sound waves to liver damage (which is an organ that is seemingly unrelated).  Once you’ve decided on a prior degree of confidence, you then observe the evidence. Perhaps experiments on both humans and mice have investigated music and liver function.  Based on the evidence, you update your beliefs.  Weaker prior beliefs require stronger evidence to sway you.

I’ve noticed that humans have varying degrees of skepticism about equally plausible claims.  This variance depends on both the source of the claim, and on the implications of claim. 

Source of the claim

Who do you trust?  Scientists? The government? Your friends and neighbors?  The Bible?  The answer to this question seems to affect how skeptical you are.  If you believe in the Bible, for example, you are much less skeptical of scientists who claim to have evidence in favor of intelligent design than you are of scientists who present evidence in favor of evolution (confirmation bias).  Similarly, if you don’t trust authority figures, you might be far less skeptical of your neighbor who claims vaccines are dangerous than you are of scientists who say they’re not.  Alternatively, some people probably rely too much on experts.

Who you trust is probably driven to some extent by social networks, group cohesion and bonding.  It often feels good to go against the mainstream, and bond with your group.  Robin Hanson has written about this form of bias here:

emotional attachment… is a rationality no-no for factual beliefs, especially controversial ones. 

If you feel tempted to say “I believe X” and can feel your emotions swell with the evil pleasure of attachment via belief, watch out! 

And here:

You just can’t fight “conformity” by indulging the evil pleasure of enjoying your conformity to a small tight-knit group of “non-conformists.”  All this does is promote some groups at the expense of other groups, and poisons your mind in the process.  It is like fighting “loyalty” by dogged devotion to an anti-loyalty alliance.

Best to clear your mind and emotions of group loyalties and resentments and ask, if this belief gave me no pleasure of rebelling against some folks or identifying with others, if it was just me alone choosing, would my best evidence suggest that this belief is true?  All else is the road to rationality ruin. 

Implications of the claim

If pizza is my favorite food, I’m probably going to be very skeptical if someone tells me that consuming it will shorten my life.  I don’t want to believe anything bad about pizza consumption, because I don’t want to stop eating it.  This is a cognitive bias that I’ve observed many times.  On the other hand, if you like the implications then you are less skeptical of the evidence.  For example, if you are anti-abortion, you might be very quick to accept as true the claim that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, even though the evidence in favor of it is very weak.

Religious beliefs and evidence

There seems to be a puzzling relationship between the plausibility of a claim and the evidence required to convince someone it’s true.  As I said before, nearly all religions make claims that sound crazy, based strictly on what we have observed in our lifetime.  For example, we have never seen a talking snake, or a river full of blood, or really any miracles.  Claims of this nature should therefore be viewed with much skepticism.  It’s not that you rule them out, it’s that you require a lot of evidence in their favor. 

Surprisingly, though, people seem much less skeptical of claims made in religious texts, then they are of claims that at least appear to be physically plausible.  For example, if I said ”scientists now think that hot dog consumption causes stomach cancer,” most people would dismiss the statement.  Even though it does sound like something that could be true. The hot dog does spend some time in the stomach.  On the other hand, if I told people the story of Noah’s ark, many would nod their head in approval.  This approval would come despite the fact that we’ve never seen a human that would be capable of carrying out such a task.  The more absurd claim receives less skepticism than the more plausible claim.  Why?  Why are people, who otherwise are skeptical and cynical, so willing to accept as true these laws-of-physics-violating events?  Why are we more skeptical of things for which we have evidence?

Read Full Post »

Why religious beliefs?

Continuing from parts one and two…

Why do so many humans believe in the supernatural?  Why do they accept as true stories that involve unbelievable tales? 

Pascal Boyer consider this issue from a cognitive-evolutionary perspective in his book Religion Explained. Robin Hanson reviewed the book here.  From his review:

The first empirical regularity that Boyer describes is that each supernatural concept tends to violate a single ontological assumption. That is, human minds are endowed with many default assumptions about a few basic categories, including person, animal, plant, tool, and natural object. For example, an animal is assumed to have the same basic body plan throughout its life, and so a butterfly seems supernatural because it violates this assumption. By violating just one ontological assumption, supernatural concepts maximize the relevance of our other non-violated assumptions, and so make stories about these concepts easy and interesting to tell.

A second empirical regularity is that religious thinking tends to focus on people-like supernatural entities with great access to socially-relevant information. When a person assumes that these entities share her moral intuitions, and that they know about all the bad things she does, that person expects these entities to get mad and punish her for behaving badly. This makes these entities highly relevant subjects of thought and discussion.

A third empirical regularity is that religious rituals have a lot in common with cleansing rituals. Our mental systems for dealing with disease via disgust have had to accept the validity of specific procedures to protect us against unseen enemies, even when we had no direct evidence of those unseen enemies, nor any understanding of why each procedure protects us. Our mental systems for dealing with social rituals similarly required us to accept them without understanding their social function. Given these, it seems a small step to accept specific odd social procedures that protect us against supernatural entities.

Finally, human corpses are highly relevant entities that violate our ontological assumptions (being both person and natural object) and trigger our disease/disgust mental systems. They are thus prototypical religious objects, and are considered so the world over.

He also offers some criticism of the book in his review, which is worth reading.

Boyer recently wrote an essay on the topic which appeared in Nature (I have a pdf copy; email me if you want it).  Here are some highlights:

experiments reveal that most people entertain highly anthropomorphic expectations about gods, whatever their explicit beliefs. When they are told a story in which a god attends to several problems at once, they find the concept quite plausible, as gods are generally described as having unlimited cognitive powers. Recalling the story a moment later, most people say that the god attended to one situation before turning his attention to the next. People also implicitly expect their gods’ minds to work much like human minds, displaying the same processes of perception, memory, reasoning and motivation. Such expectations are not conscious, and are often at odds with their explicit beliefs.

…

Experiments suggest that people best remember stories that include a combination of counterintuitive physical feats (in which characters go through walls or move instantaneously) and plausibly human psychological features (perceptions, thoughts, intentions).  Perhaps the cultural success of gods and spirits stems from this memory bias.

…

Unlike other social animals, humans are very good at establishing and maintaining relations with agents beyond their physical presence; social hierarchies and coalitions, for instance, include temporarily absent members. … It is a small step from having this capacity to bond with non-physical agents to conceptualizing spirits, dead ancestors and gods, who are neither visible nor tangible, yet are socially involved. This may explain why, in most cultures, at least some of the superhuman agents that people believe in have moral concerns. … Experiments show that it is much more natural to think “the gods know that I stole this money” than “the gods know that I had porridge for breakfast”.

…

In addition, the neurophysiology of compulsive behaviour in humans and other animals is beginning to shed light on religious rituals.  These behaviours include stereotyped, highly repetitive actions that participants feel they must do, even though most have no clear, observable results

…

 

we now know that all versions of religion are based on very similar tacit assumptions, and that all it takes to imagine supernatural agents are normal human minds processing information in the most natural way.

He concludes:

Some form of religious thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems. By contrast, disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions — hardly the easiest ideology to propagate.

Robin Hanson wrote a fantastic post today, looking at why we like fictional stories and have religious beliefs.  It’s not a light read, but it is loaded with interesting ideas.  Here are some highlights:

we evolved a tendency to accept strange memorable group beliefs to create a high cost of leaving our group, and to show that we expect to be punished if we are not nice

…

both religion and fiction serve to reassure our associates that we will be nice.  In addition to letting us show we can do hard things, and that we are tied to associates by doing the same things, religious beliefs show we expect the not nice to be punished by supernatural powers, and our favorite fiction shows the sort of people we think are heroes and villains, how often they are revealed or get their due reward, and so on.  

…We love to tell associates about our favorite stories, and prefer them to love them too.

As with religion, the beliefs of ours that most reassure others are not necessarily the most accurate

 

Read Full Post »