If C. S. Lewis was right in saying that personal religious experiences come from within us, then from where within us? Surely not from our goozle, gonads, or gynecomastia. No, religious experiences trace back to the brain, the conduit of all our experiences.
That physiological fact prompts a question: Is there something about how the mind works that potentially gives rise to spurious religious experiences or makes us prone to bogus religious beliefs?
Absolutely. Let’s start with evidence that we are all natural-born animists. The developmental psychologist Kathleen Stassen Berger reported the following:
Attempts to measure children’s animism find that many children simultaneously hold rational and magical ideas. This was evident in a series of studies in the United States that explored children’s understanding of death. Young children saw a puppet skit about a sick mouse that was eaten by an alligator. When questioned afterwards, nearly all the children asserted that the mouse was dead and would never live again, but most of those under age 7 thought the dead mouse still felt sick: almost all the children thought the mouse still loved his mother.[1]
Note the facility with which children attribute minds and emotions to puppets. Studies conducted by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom reveal that infants attribute personalities even to triangles, squares, and circles that move in animal-like ways.[2] Note as well the quasi-immortality of the mouse’s consciousness in the studies.
Animism comes naturally to children, which is one reason to be skeptical of anthropologist David Eller’s notion that children are born atheistic.[3] As children mature, their animism gets eclipsed by higher reasoning. Practice improves thinking. Test subjects given analytic or mathematical tasks become less religious.[4]
Even as college-educated adults, however, we exhibit lingering traces of animism when we say electronic devices “want” to connect to the network or when we, like Frank Sinatra, croon “Luck Be a Lady.” We may embrace teleological arguments or Henri Bergson’s élan vital. We may perceive wispy shadows of a deistic conductor lurking behind the evolutionary process, infusing evolution with a larger purpose, the je ne sais quoi vaguely intimated by the milquetoast mystic and self-identified agnostic Robert Wright in verbiage that masterfully grants him plausible deniability.[5]
A study published in the journal Science found that test subjects, even without being prompted, seek patterns in their daily experiences.[6] Stressed-out people are especially inclined to see nonexistent patterns in grainy images or to fall for conspiracy theories. These are examples of apophenia, the temporal lobe-based tendency to see imaginary relationships. People are prone to spot the likeness of human faces in Martian rocks or hear voices whispering in the breeze. A shot of the neurotransmitter dopamine intensifies the propensity to detect such patterns.[7] Anxiety increases one’s inclination to see motive and purpose behind the universe and to endorse theories of intelligent design.[8] Schizophrenics exhibiting symptoms are more likely to express belief in God.[9] An article in Intelligent Life magazine reported:
If a rat is faced with a puzzle in which food is placed on its left 60% of the time and on the right 40% of the time, it will quickly deduce that the left side is more rewarding, and head there every time, thus achieving a 60% success rate . . . When Yale undergraduates play the game, they try to figure out some underlying pattern, and end up doing worse than the rat.[10]
Gambling casinos exploit our inherent tendency to see nonexistent patterns. According to game designer Chris Brune, “The [slot] machine may have had this [random] series of payouts in the past,” but drawing inferences about future payouts is merely “the human brain playing a trick on you.”[11] Not only do people falsely perceive patterns in randomness, but when asked to draw a random image of dots, humans space the dots too uniformly. We suck at appraising randomness.
Users of the Apple iPod complained that the shuffle function did not randomly shuffle songs.[12] Users cited the shuffle function’s tendency to sometimes play a string of songs by the same artist. In reality, such strings of songs do occur in a random sequence. Regardless, Apple modified the shuffle algorithm, making it less random, to satisfy users’ misconception about what constitutes a random sequence.
Our innate pattern-recognition faculty frequently runs in overdrive and is too aggressive for our own good. Michael S. Gazzaniga explains, “It is the [brain’s] left hemisphere that engages in the human tendency to find order in chaos, that tries to fit everything into a story and put it into a context. It seems that it is driven to hypothesize about the structure of the world even in the face of evidence that no pattern exists.”[13]
We also see patterns in one another. We don’t assume that a person’s actions arise randomly, but rather from a fairly organized way of thinking about their place in the world. Their behavior is interpreted as a product of intelligent agency.
Your ability to detect consciousness, motivation, and agency in your fellow humans is a generous gift you get from your brain’s right temporoparietal junction, a walnut-sized region above and behind your right ear. Deciphering our fellow humans’ thoughts and feelings is essential to our survival as social animals. Being naturally adept at social politics, we rarely appreciate how much intelligence it requires or how many of our waking hours are devoted to it.
The forensic psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson proposes that by the time Homo erectus evolved nearly two million years ago, the most challenging aspect of their environment was one another.[14] According to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, two-thirds of human conversation is devoted to social gossip.[15] Steven Pinker recommends that we keep a journal of our daily activities and then see how many of our thoughts and activities throughout the day would be relevant if we lived in isolation from others rather than being social creatures.[16]
I would not have written this book if I never expected to interact with others, nor would you be reading it. This book is therefore a monument to the same impulses toward pattern recognition, agency detection, and socialization that bolster religious belief and practice. (I’m suddenly feeling a tad conflicted.)
Personal experience of divine agency is facilitated by hyperactive agency detection (HAAD).[17] Kurt Gray, Daniel Wegner, and Pascal Boyer observe that HAAD, rooted largely in the superior temporal gyrus, is far less detrimental to our survival than is an underactive instinct to detect agency. It therefore makes sense that evolution endowed us with a bias toward perceiving agency even where it may not exist. Seek and ye shall find.
Many vertebrate species use their own minds as a template for understanding other minds. When monkeys watch other monkeys perform physical feats, neurons fire in the watchful monkeys’ brain regions that control physical actions: premotor cortex, supplementary motor area, primary somatosensory cortex, and inferior parietal cortex. This enables the audience of watchful monkeys to “feel” the actions performed by their compatriots. They’re not merely detecting agency. They are psychologically and emotionally communing with other agents.
I once witnessed a blue jay attack its reflection in a glass window pane. The attacks were launched tirelessly, day after day, for two weeks. I don’t know why the attacks finally ceased, whether because the blue jay decided to move on to new territory where the opposition wasn’t so relentless, or whether it retired to mend a pulled neck muscle. It seems unlikely that someone finally persuaded the blue jay that the being he was so focused on was only a reflection of himself. Similarly, religious believers will never be persuaded that the being they are focused on is only a vague reflection of themselves.
The dogged insistence by some humans on an animistic conclusion reflects a deep truth not about the cosmos, but about the psychology of social animals. Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles identifies in human nature a religious impulse that seeks a greater consciousness.[18] For that reason, he assures us that atheism will never achieve a total victory over the mind of man.
I agree with the rabbi that our species is predisposed toward a religious perspective, but I get no delight from knowing we are afflicted with this cognitive bias. Such an intellectual impairment does not provide a rationale for an accommodationist stance toward religion any more than the failure of an antiviral vaccine provides a reason to adore the virus. Our impulse to seek some greater consciousness is a toxic by-product of our evolutionary history, and we should counteract it as diligently as we do our false intuitions regarding statistics, geocentrism, and the physics of projectiles.
Recognizing that our innate predispositions can mislead us is admittedly humbling. Overcoming these predispositions is difficult and at times disorienting. Such self-correction is, however, the only path to philosophical clarity.
The weepy-eyed avowal that we can directly feel the presence of God is the ultimate hubristic folly of the unrepentant animist. William Lane Craig, in a book oxymoronically named Reasonable Faith, says that “the experience of the Holy Spirit is . . . unmistakable . . . [A] person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence . . . to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God . . . Such experience does not function in this case as a premise in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself.”[19] Craig is explicit that the perception of the Holy Ghost overrides all intellectual critiques and that “with most people there’s no need to use apologetics at all. Only use rational argumentation after sharing the gospel and when the unbeliever still has questions.”[20]
These words are from a man widely recognized as the intellectual standard-bearer of modern religionists. He explicitly relegates rational argumentation to the fallback strategy. If you are shaking your head and wondering why he would do this, he provides the answer. There is general agreement, in Craig’s words, that “the person who follows the pursuit of reason unflinchingly toward its end will be atheistic or, at best, agnostic.”[21] Craig states explicitly that only the operations of the Holy Spirit can make an unbeliever become a believer.[22]
Modern religious apologists do not view arguments as crucial for discovering the truth. Arguments are, instead, expedient tools to soften up potential converts. If you just caught a whiff of something rotten, it’s the corpse of natural theology. It is being gang-raped by theologians who smile and invite you to join them in having a “personal experience.”
[1] Kathleen Stassen Berger, The Developing Person through Childhood and Adolescence (1995), 273.
[2] Bloom, “The Moral Life of Babies.”
[3] Eller, Natural Atheism.
[4] Jason Koebler, “Study: Critical Thinkers Less Likely to Believe in God,” U.S. News and World Report, April 26, 2012, https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/04/26/study-critical-thinkers-less-likely-to-believe-in-god.
[5] Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Vintage Books, 2001).
[6] Jennifer A. Whitson and Adam D. Galinsky, “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,” Science 322, no. 5898 (October 3, 2008): 115–7, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/322/5898/115/tab-figures-data.
[7] “Patternicity, Causality and Distress: Why We Make Mistakes in Stressful Times,” OINTS (Old Issues New Thoughts), June 20, 2010, https://oints.wordpress.com/2010/06/20/patternicity-causality-and-distress-why-we-make-mistakes-in-stressful-times/.
[8] Jessica Tracy, Joshua Hart, and Jason Martens, “Death and Science: The Existential Underpinnings of Belief in Intelligent Design,” PLoS One 6 (2011), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0017349.
[9] Ronald Siddle, Gillian Haddock, Nicholas Tarrier & E. Brian Faragher, “The Validation of a Religiosity Measure for Individuals with Schizophrenia,” Mental Health, Religion & Culture 5, no. 3 (November 1, 2002): 267–84.
[10] Ian Leslie, “Non Cogito, Ergo Sum,” Intelligent Life, May/June 2012, accessed September 12, 2015, http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/node/4463 (source no longer live).
See also: Mark Liberman, “RATS BEAT YALIES: DOING BETTER BY GETTING LESS INFORMATION?” Language Log, December 11, 2005, accessed April 18.2023, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002700.html
[11] Chris Brune, interviewed by the Cambridge mathematician David Spiegelhalter, “Tails You Win: The Science of Chance,” BBC television documentary, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdcD3UY4ZI4 (video no longer available).
[12] John Fuller, “How the iPod Shuffle Works,” How Stuff Works, https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/ipod-shuffle.htm#pt2.
[13] Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 85.
[14] J. Anderson Thomson, Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith (Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishing, 2011).
[15] “Evolution: The Mind’s Big Bang,” Nova, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29u6XRY51Bk (video no longer available).
[16] Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997).
[17] Jan van der Tempel and James E. Alcock, “Relationships between Conspiracy Mentality, Hyperactive Agency Detection, and Schizotypy: Supernatural Forces at Work?” Science Direct 82 (August 2015): 136–41.
[18] DailyHitchens, “David Wolpe and Christopher Hitchens: The Great God Debate (9/9),” March 31, 2010, YouTube video, 10:14, https://youtu.be/CdQIaGhMxEo.
[19] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, rev sub edition (Crossway Books, 1994), 43.
[20] Craig, Reasonable Faith, 57.
[21] William Lane Craig, “Advice to European Christian Apologists: Tips to Budding European Christian Apologists,” Reasonable Faith with William Lane Craig, April 3, 2001, accessed June 5, 2014, http://www.reasonablefaith.org/advice-to-european-christian-apologists (link no longer live).
[22] drcraigvideos, Belief in God as Properly Basic – Part 3 – William Lane Craig, May 23, 2011, YouTube video, 32:52, https://youtu.be/NzQRDoZUtVA.