Guest post: So much for a “god gene”


Originally a comment by Blanche Quizno on Differences.

This is fascinating research, and it reminds me of a parallel I became aware of a few years ago. Some in the West insist there is a “god gene” and that believing in supernatural deities is instinctual among human beings, essentially.

Daniel Everett went into Brazil as an Evangelical Christian missionary, intent on converting the Pirahã people, a “stone age” tribe that had thus far proven immune to Christian missionary efforts. Everett was certain that HE could, with the help of God, succeed. He ended up becoming an atheist just like they were, because he realized, in a nutshell, that they were so content and so happy and such good people that he couldn’t offer them any promise of improvement through Christianity – they were already better off. And he felt wrong about attempting to coerce them into religious faith, realizing in the end that Christianity is all about coercion.

Here is the first article from which I learned about his adventure, in the New Yorker.

This is another good article – an interview at Freethought Today.

This tribe is absolutely, utterly atheist. They have no concept of “god”, and they have no interest in that subject. They are pretty much the most absolute pragmatists and literalists you’ll find (no, I’m not explaining well nor exactly) in that they demand personal experience. If not their own, then yours – and it must be actual and direct (beliefs need not apply). If not your direct experience, they’ll accept your father’s direct experience, but unless that direct experience is there (YOU *saw* it or *heard* it for yourself), they dismiss whatever it is.

It’s quite hilarious – I hope you’ll read it. So much for a “god gene” – that’s entirely a cultural construction just like what’s being described in this post. In fact, it might well be that there are other isolated tribes that are equally atheist – if we could only protect them from the predatory Christian missionaries long enough to learn about their belief systems before they’re destroyed forever!

Comments

  1. Lawrence C says

    I am an atheist, but I do think, even just from observing people, there is some sort of “belief gene” that makes humans desire – perhaps even makes some people sense – supernatural explanations and personalities.
    .
    As Julian Barnes said, “I do not believe in God. But I miss Him.”
    .
    Is it possible that this tribe’s isolation was also a genetic one, and they are an anomaly in having the “gene” weeded out of their population over the generations?

  2. sqlrob says

    All of those natives had dark hair, so much for a blonde gene.

    Is it a piece of evidence against? Yes. Does it rule it out? No. It does say that, if it does exist, that it wasn’t particularly early, or it can be lost. It does also imply that animals would be lacking in it. But yeah, it’s probably cultural with a possible slight predisposition to assume agency.

  3. Menyambal --- making sambal a food group. says

    I say that most cultures have weeded out those with skepticism genes. The weeding may have been done through culture, rather than through burning at the stake, in most cases. Simply, though, the force of religion has been so great that it surely has had some influence on our selection and genetics.

    Religion and culture as so often the same thing, BTW.

    These guys are good evidence that religion has poisoned all the rest of us.

  4. Enkidum says

    Lawrence – what would make you think that was genetic? As opposed to a tendency that is very, very easy to fall into given our cognitive architecture?

  5. Blanche Quizno says

    I agree with you, Menyambal. It is to civilization’s – and its stratified, kleptocrat classes’ – advantage to “weed out those with skepticism genes.” The Inquisition was a brilliant machine toward this end, no one can deny that! Those who wielded power in Christendom – rulers, nobles, and their clergy lapdogs – had every incentive to crush, root out, pursue, and take down all creativity, all imagination, and all intelligence. No wonder human progress ground to a halt while Christians were in power!

    Thanks to the Enlightenment (held in extreme contempt by fundamentalist Christians), the idea that humans have basic human rights and nobility of spirit spread throughout the world. We will never go back.

    It is clear why the Christian fundamentalists have targeted the public education system, attempting to replace science education with indoctrination into their religion. We must not allow our young people’s minds to be poisoned.

    A post for another day is how the nightmare of the Black Plague spawned an entire new genre of artistic expression (“Totentanz”, or “Dance of Death, including one of my favorites, Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Danse Macabre”, along with Rethel’s various images), while the cholera pandemic of the 1800s-early 1900s did not. WHY not? Because during the cholera pandemic, while Christian clergy across denominations were demanding official days of prayer, fasting, and (sometimes) humiliation, people who really had no interest in Christianity’s useless nonsense were looking at maps, plotting cases of cholera, and concluding that the disease agent, whatever it was, was spreading through human wastes. Even before the cholera bacterium was identified, the evidence was convincing enough that the city of London, for one, undertook public sanitation infrastructure programs, which enabled London to become virtually immune to cholera far sooner than its less enlightened neighbors, such as Germany (Hamburg), Russia, and New York City. These poor believing souls would need to suffer many more decades before the bacterium was discovered and they could eventually be convinced of the need to build proper sewage systems and to forget about the churchs’ exhortations, which were worthless. However, the church DID cause quite a lot more loss of life – that must count for SOMETHING…

    In the end, though, the fact that a real, verifiable cause for cholera was discovered (no thanks to the church), and then used as a basis for developing social programs to rid society of this plague, which was almost as severe as the Black Death in fact, meant that no new field of artistic expression arose to help people deal with the intolerable existential angst that had so terrified a populace devastated by the Black Death, whose Christian leaders had insisted was “God’s punishment” for “sin”, even though no one could figure out what the “sin” was or how to atone for it… Honestly, the germ theory of infection seems to me far more crushing to the Bible’s worldview, “sin” and “God’s wrath” and “punishment” and “forgiveness” and “jesus’s sacrifice” etc., than the theory of evolution, which really is only problematic for Genesis, and aren’t the Jewish scriptures pretty much discarded, since Christians are supposedly no longer bound by the Jewish law, what with their “NEW Covenant” and NEW godman?? Christians make no sense whatsoever…

  6. says

    I am an atheist, but I do think, even just from observing people, there is some sort of “belief gene” that makes humans desire – perhaps even makes some people sense – supernatural explanations and personalities.

    How about a genetic predisposition to accept authority (see Altemeyer) and a critical period in which children are more prone to accept authoritarian answers to questions? If you grant those two things and remember there are a whole lotta lotta believers who’ll tell an inquisitive child “goddidit” then you’ve got all the pieces of that particular puzzle staring you right in the face.

  7. Blanche Quizno says

    Lawrence C, Christianity has, for its entire existence, relied upon coercion and terror to force the various populaces into submission and obedience. If you are up on your US history, the way the European immigrants “tamed” the native Americans, solved “the Indian problem”, was to forcibly kidnap their children and ship them hundreds or thousands of miles away to boarding schools run by Christian clergy, where the children were traumatized and abused in the course of forcing them to learn and follow European norms, including Christianity. When they were finally allowed to go home, about age 15, they often arrived to find that they no longer spoke the same language as their extended family. They had lost their connection to their people and their heritage. We saw the same thing in Canada and Australia with those countries’ aboriginals. The film “Rabbit-Proof Fence” quite adequately illustrated this cruel crime against humanity.

    This is the beautiful treasure that is Christianity. This is why Christianity has to rely on indoctrinating children from infancy, why Christianity has to sink its malignant hooks into small children before their minds have developed to the point that they can begin to think critically and consider Christianity’s claims with a mature intelligence. There is no country in the world where Christianity is spreading via the conversion of educated adults – the long-awaited “revival” of Christianity throughout Western Europe is not going to happen, and the fact is that, in the US, about as many people actually attend church regularly as in England, though the Americans CLAIM to attend far more regularly than they do.

    How can there be a “belief gene” if the only way to pass along belief is to indoctrinate small children – and then claim all children born to members as full-fledged members from birth, and then keep their names on the membership rolls regardless of whether those children, upon reaching adulthood, even continue in the Christian faith they were born into? You see this across Christian denominations – claiming all children as permanent members, even when it is known that these people have joined other religions or rejected all religions, so Christian membership figures are outrageously padded and phony. But what else can one expect from Christianity?? It’s based on lies and misrepresentation from start to finish!

    If there is a “belief gene”, why is it, Lawrence, that the only category along the belief spectrum that is actually growing worldwide is “atheism/non-belief”? HOW could THESE be growing – spectacularly, in fact! – if there were a “belief gene”?

    See, when people still lived in small towns, Lawrence, the church was the central focus of social life. If you didn’t go to church, you were not part of your town’s social scene, and, since people in small towns are so much more interdependent upon each other than people in urban milieus, it could be detrimental, even fatal, for the person who chose to opt out. Thus, the small-town environment, centered upon the Christian church (every town had at least one) coerced everyone into membership.

    Fast forward to post-WWII. The exodus from small towns to urban areas accelerates. Interestingly, we see a coincidental freeze on numbers of baptisms – churches today are baptizing at the same absolute numbers as 60+ years ago, in spite of the population having more than doubled! Once people arrived in urban environments, they found abundant opportunities for socializing and connecting. No longer did any church hold the cards – now, people could meet at sports bars, and model train clubs, and civic organization, and I’m sure you can think of lots of others. As more and more people moved to cities, Christianity’s splintering into ever more, ever smaller sects accelerated as well. Christianity is crumbling around us, and the fact that people don’t care shows, instead of a “belief gene”, that there is *nothing* urging us toward religious belief, other than the coercion and threats of the religious.

    Studies have also concluded that the countries with the highest rates of organic atheism (naturally occurring, rather than imposed by a dictatorial regime that refuses to share any power with clergy) have the healthiest societies. If there is a “belief gene”, why have the Japanese, in particular, missed out on it? Some 90% of their population is atheist; only about 10% are certain that god/s exist/s. People need to remember that there is more to the world than Europe and the USA.

    Recommended reading: http://edge.org/3rd_culture/paul07/paul07_index.html
    http://moses.creighton.edu/jrs/2005/2005-11.pdf
    http://www.americanhumanist.org/hnn/archives/?id=219&article=7

  8. says

    I’ve hardly surveyed all the literature, but so far, I can’t say I’m that convinced that belief in deities is particularly innate, as yet.

    A tendency toward agency detection which errs on the side of agency, as a somewhat lesser but related claim, I think is a bit more solidly demonstrated. But, listen, even that I’m not quite as sold on yet, and even if I were, that’s not really the same thing. Oh, and I also think its actual significance to the whole history of religion is a bit overstated. Been on the subject before, but yeah, surprise. Still on it.

    I think also that religion has so long been so ubiquitous and so dominant in our cultures that it’s very, very hard for us to tell just how ‘innate’ it is or is not. Our cultures are certainly adapted to them. Yes, in places, it seems almost that our cultures are nearly made of them. How much we ourselves are so adapted, though, at any genetic level… this is far less clear. And it would by no means be surprising to find the former and not the latter. Culture generally adapts a lot faster than do genes. And we don’t even really know how long we’ve had ‘religion’, exactly…

    Speaking of: I’d say also, if you narrow the definition of religion to the organized, highly coercive variant that’s existed since we’ve had mass societies that were able to use it to political and organizational purposes, it’s not real likely we’re particularly genetically adapted to its presence at all. Seeing as that’s only a trifling several thousand years of history, and humans, being large, complicated metazoans, generally aren’t known for particularly rapid genetic adaptation. Our genes just haven’t had time. But it is a bit of a mug’s game just reasoning from that probability, fine… Gives you bookie’s odds, maybe, not so much a solid conclusion. And that’s a bit of an unfair narrowing, sure, since I don’t think anyone’s even arguing that. Or at least no one serious and honest who isn’t themselves selling one of those gods, behind the bafflegab about god genes. Still, let’s draw that line, at least. Adapted to organized mass religions? Right. We’re about as likely to be ‘adapted’ to Lego. That something religion-esque that redated all that, in shamans around campfires, okay, maybe that’s more bred in the bone. But what does that tell us? Humans like a good story that explains the world? And don’t mind if you throw in a little ritualistic song and dance when you’re telling it? Colour me flabbergasted.

    Anyway. Less flippantly: I’ve banged this drum before, but I’ll bang it again: I think it’s worth knowing to what degree and in what way religion could ever been seen to be ‘innate’. But it’s really a richer vein studying how it spreads and maintains itself, socially…

    And note also it’s being ‘innate’ or not isn’t a defense of its actual value to us. Lots of things are ‘natural’. Haemorrhagic fever viruses are quite natural. Doesn’t mean you want to recommend everyone should have one, or that it’s somehow a fool’s errand to try to prevent their spread. We have tonsils prone to unpleasant infections too… So do we say, hey, you without the tonsillitis, just what’s your problem, anyway?

    My broad picture of it right now is roughly: yes, people apparently are pretty ready to swallow the stories culturally and socially dominant institutions sell, but I find this about as startling as the finding that falling in water will get you damp. That certain themes to seem to stand out, might be saying something, but I’d hardly call it solidly demonstrated. Invisible supermen do seem oddly popular the last few millennia. But the social reasons invisible supermen are so popular against other possible popular myths you might imagine as an exercise may also have a lot to do with, among other things, their utility to the strongmen who have made them their sponsors over thousands of years of recorded history, and the fact that there are established, highly coercive institutions that make it very socially costly not to believe in them…

    … and really, again, I think it’s very important always to keep in mind: innate propensity or no, religions are frequently stiflingly, viciously coercive, in keeping themselves going. How they compel those defending the dogma to treat those who demur or resist is pretty much brutal, even when it doesn’t progress to the stake and to the iron maiden. There is ongoing misery in this, and a very contemporary and real misery, how people are silenced and threatened and ostracized, for speaking their intellectual conscience. It’s no particular defense of this behavior that oh, humans are suckers for cosmic supermen, even if this does turn out to be so. Oh, and yeah, in this stuff I keep seeing around innate propensities, there’s this underlying insinuation I keep seeing wrapped around this stuff, in popular media, at least, that oh, anyone opposing religion, anyone criticizing religion, what this really means is they’re naively and hopelessly at war with human nature. Just going to cause trouble. Probably go a lot better for ’em if they just gave that up…

    Odd, how many things do seem to keep coming out to that suggestion.

    My picture of it, for what it’s worth: this is how innate it really is: the best description probably isn’t oh, that superman story specifically hits some weakness in the human brain. There’s a general weakness, there–or several, even–that can be exploited–and so they are. The whole of the organization–the stories, the traditions, the institutions, the social practises–are now fairly well adapted to play on those. But those weaknesses are by no means specifically for invisible supermen–they’re much more general things, and they’re mostly things we already have generally observed are there: a propensity for fitting in, telling your parents what you think they want to hear, learning by imitating what others do, and possibly, yes, also, simply the human fondness for any suitably lively story. Give the god superpowers, the ability to shoot lightning from its fingertips, and it appeals and spreads more readily the same way a story about a larger fish gets repeated more than a story about catching a minnow. It’s no wonder these are the gods still have followers today. That we also might have some preference for our causes to have agency, okay, maybe. But that’s still a long way short of any kind of ‘god gene’. And, apparently, as demonstrated above, even that’s not especially universal…

    Oh and here we go again. Here’s this new discovery. It’s fascinating, yes. It’s rather a stark contrast, too stark to ignore entirely…

    But it’ll be the same damned explanation as certain others who’ve been difficult to ignore. They’re ‘abnormal’. They’re outliers. In this case, not so much at war with nature, but okay, their nature is just different.

    I doubt that, actually, for what it’s worth, if by nature, you mean genes. Culture, yeah, obviously. But that’s far more likely, again, to be the whole of what this is really about.

    … but anyway, yeah, all the same, it’s oddly nice to see, yes. Seconding Meynambal #3 on that last line, very much so.

  9. Blanche Quizno says

    “My broad picture of it right now is roughly: yes, people apparently are pretty ready to swallow the stories culturally and socially dominant institutions sell, but I find this about as startling as the finding that falling in water will get you damp. That certain themes to seem to stand out, might be saying something, but I’d hardly call it solidly demonstrated. Invisible supermen do seem oddly popular the last few millennia. But the social reasons invisible supermen are so popular against other possible popular myths you might imagine as an exercise may also have a lot to do with, among other things, their utility to the strongmen who have made them their sponsors over thousands of years of recorded history, and the fact that there are established, highly coercive institutions that make it very socially costly not to believe in them…

    … and really, again, I think it’s very important always to keep in mind: innate propensity or no, religions are frequently stiflingly, viciously coercive, in keeping themselves going. How they compel those defending the dogma to treat those who demur or resist is pretty much brutal, even when it doesn’t progress to the stake and to the iron maiden. There is ongoing misery in this, and a very contemporary and real misery, how people are silenced and threatened and ostracized, for speaking their intellectual conscience. It’s no particular defense of this behavior that oh, humans are suckers for cosmic supermen, even if this does turn out to be so. Oh, and yeah, in this stuff I keep seeing around innate propensities, there’s this underlying insinuation I keep seeing wrapped around this stuff, in popular media, at least, that oh, anyone opposing religion, anyone criticizing religion, what this really means is they’re naively and hopelessly at war with human nature. Just going to cause trouble. Probably go a lot better for ‘em if they just gave that up…

    Odd, how many things do seem to keep coming out to that suggestion.”

    AJ Milne, your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

    Srsly, though, I *LOVED* your commentary. Spot on, sir, well done. Your insights are deeply appreciated.

  10. StevoR : Free West Papua, free Tibet, let the Chagossians return! says

    if we could only protect them from the predatory Christian missionaries long enough to learn about their belief systems before they’re destroyed forever!

    Don’t you mean their non-belief systems? 😉

    Great real life story.

  11. suttkus says

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people

    The wikipedia article suggests that the claim that they’re without religion is exaggerated. They believe in spirits and emblems that ward off spirits and spirits that warn them not to enter the jungle at certain times and which are present even though other people can’t see them. They may not believe in a single over-god, but they certainly seem to have a lot of small ones.

  12. Blanche Quizno says

    Alas, StevoR, scuttled by my own lack of appropriate terminology!

    Indeed, sir! What Everett (and other visitors who have observed the Pirahã) have commented upon is how *happy* they are. There is rarely a time when most of them aren’t smiling, for example. There are few disagreements or conflicts. They tend to build flimsy huts, so if a nighttime storm blows in and blows their house down, they will all converge on whoever’s house remains standing – and everyone will be laughing uproariously and turn it into a spontaneous house party. Plenty of time to sleep in in the morning and afternoon, after all! And it takes so little time to rebuild a flimsy hut that there’s no pressure to hurry or get right to it.

    Hunter-gatherers tend to meet their caloric needs within just a few hours, so they spend the rest of their time relaxing, lying around talking and telling jokes and laughing and stuff. Plus, they tend to have more nutritious diets than those of us who have no choice but to rely upon our few cultivated species. Granted, modern food distribution networks have made a far greater assortment of products available than ever before, but it still takes money to access, and more and more of our populace is too poor to do so….

    Here is an article about Everett’s thesis about “The Grammar of Happiness”: http://boingboing.net/2012/03/26/the-grammar-of-happiness-an-i.html

    There is a video embedded, and early on, you hear a missionary talking about his obligation to convert others. Listen closely – it’s all about Jesus. If Christians don’t convert everybody else, they’re disrespecting Jesus and his sacrifice. REALLY??? Jesus was supposedly a GOD! GODS CAN’T DIE!! But they can PRETEND to, I suppose O_O

    Anyhow, the Pirahã language is based on the here and now, on the observable. They don’t talk much about the past, beyond a little while back, and they don’t talk about the future. They have no experience in the future, so there’s no point in talking about it. Imagine if we could do away with baseless speculation – there would be no religion as we know it, would there??

    But the deeper implication of restricting oneself to the present, for all extents and purposes, is that it apparently leads to a much deeper and more abiding happiness and contentment than we speculators seem able to experience:

    “I believe that they’re happy because they don’t worry about the past, and they don’t worry about the future. They feel that they’re able to take care of their needs today. They don’t want things that they can’t provide for themselves. At least they never have in my experience. In other words, I take in things and they will ask for a few little things that I have that they don’t make, such as pots and pans or matches. And if I give it to them, fine, and if I don’t give it to them, fine. They’re not materialistic. They value being able to travel quickly and lightly. I’ve never met another group, not even another Amazonian group, that is so little concerned with material objects.”

    Notice that the Buddha supposedly discouraged speculation as well, considering such idle thoughts as “fruitless”, not contributing to any positive outcome, and instructed people to focus on the present. (/random parallel)

    “If you’re going along the river and you see bubbles coming to the top of the water, they can tell you whether that’s a fish or whether it’s the rock underneath. And every Pirahã child that I’ve ever asked is able to give me the same information. So everyone learns about nature and their environment very early on in their lives. Each individual Pirahã is fully capable of providing for themselves. Any Pirahã child, a boy, can provide for himself from the time he’s nine or ten years old.”

    Notice the similarity, temporally, to the statement: “Give me the boy until he is 7 and I will give you the man” attributed to the Jesuits, or perhaps Francis Xavier – some Catholic or other, in other words. There is a point beyond which children have developed the ability to think for themselves and are, thus, no longer fair game for indoctrination. Of course we hope that the indoctrination to that point will be useful information, as described in the Pirahã observation above, but there’s no reason to think that indoctrination must be restricted to what is useful and true. A great many despicable persons take advantage of young children’s gullibility in order to exploit them.

    I think this ties directly into the “age of accountability” some Christians point to in order to evade the abhorrent concept of infant damnation. That’s despicable and disgusting, to be sure, but if you hold that a person must make a *conscious* decision to acceptjesusashispersonalsavior, then, well, that entails infant damnation, because no infant is developmentally able to make such a decision! So these kind-hearted Christians set up an “age of accountability” before which any children who die of illness or accident will go straight to heaven, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

    Problem is, if you are a Christian and a parent and you REALLY believe in this “age of accountability,” you will wait until the evening before that all-important birthday, and you will murder your child. There’s no way around it – you know that you, personally, are forgiven absolutely *everything* (because of Jesus and cross etc.), so you’re personally at no eternal risk, and Jesus Himself said that most people go to “hell” (see Matthew 7:13-14, for example). We already see through many different studies that each generation is less likely to identify as Christian than the generation before, and each subsequent generation is FAR less likely to be involved with any Christian church, even if they nominally identify as “Christian”. What parent who loves his/her children would not gladly go to “hell” in their beloved child’s place, if the “crime” of sending their child straight to heaven entailed this consequence? Yet the theology of Christianity is that Christians are forgiven for ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!! I have heard it explained thusly: Jesus died before today’s Christians were born, so he obviously died not only for those “sins” these Christians committed before they converted, but for all the sins they would continue to commit and commit in the future, because he died equally before all of those sins! They were all “future” from the perspective of the supposedly dying “jesus”, right? Nice, huh?

    Obviously, no one who is a parent actually believes in the “age of accountability” enough to think it through to its logical end. Or has the balls to take the appropriate action. Either they don’t believe it, or they don’t really love their children enough to want to guarantee them an eternity of bliss. Perhaps they don’t believe there is any eternity of bliss! Bottom line: Christian parents do NOT routinely murder their young children, so there’s something wrong with the whole “age of accountability” argument.

  13. Blanche Quizno says

    suttkus, I checked the source you cited, and it does not say what you appear to think it does. The Pirahã may believe that there are “spirit people” or some other imagery consistent with animist belief, which is what we would probably describe as “spiritualism” or “spirituality”, but it is nothing that relates in any meaningful way to the, say, Abrahamic religions and their “creator god” and all that nonsense. The fact that the Pirahã live in the here and now is not affected by the fact that they regard some sort of spiritual essence within the living things around them – you have drawn an erroneous conclusion about religion. Religion, after all, as defined is: “Religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence.[note 1] Many religions have narratives, symbols, and sacred histories that are intended to explain the meaning of life and/or to explain the origin of life or the Universe. From their beliefs about the cosmos and human nature, people derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

    That is not the case with the Pirahã.

    This is the only paragraph from the article you cited that is remotely related to your comments:

    “According to Everett, the Pirahã have no concept of a supreme spirit or god, and they lost interest in Jesus when they discovered that Everett had never seen him. They require evidence based on personal experience for every claim made. However, they do believe in spirits that can sometimes take on the shape of things in the environment. These spirits can be jaguars, trees, or other visible, tangible things including people. Everett reported one incident where the Pirahã said that “Xigagaí, one of the beings that lives above the clouds, was standing on a beach yelling at us, telling us that he would kill us if we go into the jungle.” Everett and his daughter could see nothing and yet the Pirahã insisted that Xigagaí was still on the beach.”

    Where did you get the idea that they “believe in…emblems that ward off spirits”? The word “emblem” isn’t used anywhere in that Wikipedia article you cited. And the article clearly states that these people have “no concept of a supreme spirit or god.” If they are not participating in rituals or claiming beliefs beyond what can be experienced or observed, then it’s not “religion” per se.

  14. Dave Ricks says

    The “god gene” is a pop science concept in our Abrahamic culture; it assumes a limited set of options: A) people believe in the monotheistic god of Abraham, or B) they believe in some vague monotheism or deism, or C) they’re agnostic in their inability to know about monotheism and deism, or D) they’re atheist in their disbelief or lack of belief in monotheism or deism.

    But the Greeks and Romans had polytheism; did they lack the “god gene” in my first paragraph?

    My first point is the “god gene” is pop science in the limits of my first paragraph, so I have trouble with it scientifically.

    My second point is the Quran 98:6 says the god of Abraham reserves his eternal hell for unbelievers and polytheists, because they are the worst of creatures. At first I laughed because eternal hell for polytheists seemed archaic. Then I realized, polytheism contradicts the cultural framing of my first paragraph, so no wonder the Quran says the god of Abraham gives it his worst punishment!

    I saw Rebecca Goldstein give a talk at a CFI meeting, and my simple and powerful takeaway was how she put religions around the Mediterranean on an equal footing, the polytheism and the monotheism. Now I can dismiss both equally. It’s only cultural that today we can dismiss polytheism easily but we agonize about my first paragraph.  The “god gene” idea exists in our cultural agonizing.

    But I can still agree with the other comments here, about authority, and detecting agency, etc.

  15. Maureen Brian says

    I agree, Blanche Quizno, there’s some good stuff in A J Milne’s @ 7 – a wee bit hard to read at this stage but well worth working on. (This is a compliment, AJM, and I’m not getting at you. Have you got time to do some work on it?)

    As for Dan Everett, he’s a very intelligent man who has given a good account of his experience. He deserves better than to be dismissed in a couple of sentences by people who have clearly never heard of him.

    Come to think of it, we all deserve better than that. This is where morality and theology begin to get in each other’s way, a clash which became inevitable once we began to to attribute to god(s) any sort of quasi-human personality. To repeat, we attributed a personality which we could understand to god and that is a relatively recent development – hard to trace back even 3,000 years.

    One thing I have been certain of for a very long time – if by any chance an omnipotent creator god should exist she would be mightily pissed off to see all that power and complexity was being edited down to what one human could understand. For reasons of population control i.e. politics.

    That’s the sort of category error which allows people to start a major war – one still killing people – on the basis of a document about yellowcake which had already been proved a forgery before a shot was fired.

  16. Maureen Brian says

    On a separate topic:

    BBCtv has a series on now called The Bible Hunters – recommended it you can get it – where part one was about the early search for older manuscripts and how those discoveries raised questions. Like, the end of Matthew a millennium ago is not the one in the King James etc so where did that extra story come from?

    Part two I haven’t seen yet – will need an alert brain – seems to be about the process by which they decided which versions of assorted cults and mysteries were going to be synthesised into Christianity and which were outrageous heresies which would get you killed. Nastily!

  17. Shatterface says

    It’s not a ‘god gene’, as such, its a genetic predisposition towards ascribing intentionality (or ‘theory of mind)’ to natural phenomena.

    The grass is moving: could be the wind but might be a predator.

    Our ancestors who made the second assumption might have got tired running from the wind but they also lived to pass on their genes because they didn’t get eaten so often.

    And that’s why those of us with difficulty interpreting actual people also correlate with atheism.

    Religion is basically a cognitive bias towards anthropomorphising the weather. Forget Darwin and Coppernicus; it’s meteorology that will defeat religion in the end.

  18. Shatterface says

    I think this is another case where, because psychologists and cognitive scientists bracket off people with atypical neurology to one side, they generally miss something important about people in general.

    People with autistic spectrum disorders are generally less religious (there are exceptions like the Amish and Ashkenazi Jews, who have a higher incidence of Aspergers than the general population but that’s probably because of intermarriage) while people with schizophrenia or temporal lobe epilepsy (Geschwind syndrome) may suffer from hyper-religiosity.

    There are studies which show that the same parts of the brain involved in social interaction are involved in prayer: that suggests religion may be a spandrel, like reading. Nobody claims there’s a reading gene, despite the possibility that dyslexia is genetic. Rather we understand that reading and writing are byproducts of adaptations associated with language.

    Religion then, is a byproduct of the ‘social’ mind. It’s attributing human characteristics to phenomena that are not actually human and attributing meaning to coincidences or things we have not yet explained.

    Where the tendency to connect events with intention is muted (as in autism) religion is often missing; where the tendency to make connections is heightened (as in schizophrenia) religion is heightened.

    The mistake proponents of the god gene hypothesis are making is that, because psychology deals largely with people with ‘neurotypical’ brains, they assume that if an attribute is common it must be normal.

  19. sc_770d159609e0f8deaa72849e3731a29d says

    Not so much a “god gene” as a gullibility/theory gene- the ability to reach conclusions on limited evidence depends on it. Imagine such a gene and its opposite, the scepticism gene. Faced with unknown fruit, the bearer of the gullibility gene eats it at once, every one else waits to see if they stay alive and then eats it, but the bearer of the scepticism gene waits so long that none remains for them. Gods are the result of a series of inferences and hypotheses pushed much further than the evidence warrants.
    Do the Pirahã have any cosmological beliefs or theories at all, or do they just assume “The world is everything that is the case” and that there’s no point going beyond “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here…”? How does their language deal with “maybe” and “might”?

  20. Blanche Quizno says

    Ooh! Maureen Brian, comment #16! I am SOOO into those subjects – have been researching them for years. You realize that there are scans of Sinaiticus available online, right? If you want to go geek out, that’s the place. But srsly, here is a link to one of the sites that summarizes a lot of the early supposedly Christian artifact content, and the reason I’m recommending it is because there is link to a petition asking for C14 dating of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, two of the purportedly oldest codices but which were only found a coupla hundred years ago and lack any sort of reliable provenance: http://www.mountainman.com.au/essenes/chrestians%20christians.htm

    Just as you pointed out with the missing end of Mark (was THAT the missing ending you were talking about? Everything after 16:8?), which includes the all-important Great Commission prototype AND the proof texts for the snake-handlers and poison-drinkers, it’s missing from the earliest copies (no originals exist, of course, so who knows what any of them originally said??): http://www.mountainman.com.au/essenes/chrestians%20christians.htm

    Also, an article on the pressure to treat Christian texts differently (more reverently) than other ancient texts is clearly articulated in a reading-between-the-lines kind of way in the article, “HISTORICAL CRITICISM AND THE GREAT COMMISSION” by Robert L. Thomas, if you’re interested. If it is THAT ending to Matthew that you were referring to, with the trinitarian baptismal formula that is apparently not used ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT, then yes, that is a contentious topic indeed. The problem with this field of inquiry is that it has always been heavily dominated by believers, Christians, who won’t consider that Jesus might be a made-up literary figure because of their religion, and by scholars who are paid to arrive at the conclusions demanded by their Christian employers. Either way, we’re not getting anything close to an honest, scientific, go-where-the-evidence-leads kind of investigation. Now, though, more and more nonbelievers are entering the field, and when they go where the evidence leads, they often end up in a place that is very distressing to a great many believers. But should a group’s distress dictate what conclusions are allowed to be reached based on an objective examination of the evidence? I think not!

  21. Blanche Quizno says

    Oops – I don’t know why I linked twice to that same site in Comment #20 – please overlook. Thanks!

  22. sc_770d159609e0f8deaa72849e3731a29d says

    Well, had a quick skim of the New Yorker article- yes! I should have looked first-and it really is fascinating. Good to know Sapir-Whorf are still around: people have always wanted them to be right but never been able to find evidence for it.
    Everett’s remark “We ask the questions that our theories tell us to ask.” applies to Pirahã language- probably to every language.
    The other odd thing is: can the Pirahã tell lies? It doesn’t sound as if they can but no-one seems to gave checked- and how do they respond when other people tell lies- do they merely regard it as an error or mistake or the sort of stupidity they expect from outsiders? My own guess has always been that lying- saying something you know is untrue- is the distinguishing feature of human language and thought and it looks like that’s gone too.

  23. Blanche Quizno says

    “It’s not a ‘god gene’, as such, its a genetic predisposition towards ascribing intentionality (or ‘theory of mind)’ to natural phenomena.” – Shatterface

    That’s exactly it – a tendency to think of phenomena in terms of design and purpose: The purpose of trees is to shade us from the sun and provide us with something to cling; the purpose of clouds is to cause rain; the purpose of wind is to blow leaves away – that sort of thing.

    Shatterface, your comments reminded me of some important research on a subject that has been called “promiscuous teleology”. http://www.edge.org/conversation/why-do-some-resist-science

    “Unlike educated adults, young children demonstrate a “promiscuous” tendency to explain objects and phenomena by reference to functions, endorsing what are called teleological explanations. This tendency becomes more selective as children acquire increasingly coherent beliefs about causal mechanisms, but it is unknown whether a widespread preference for teleology is ever truly outgrown. The study reported here investigated this question by examining explanatory judgments in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), whose dementia affects the rich causal beliefs adults typically consult in evaluating explanations. The results indicate that unlike healthy adults, AD patients systematically and promiscuously prefer teleological explanations, suggesting that an underlying tendency to construe the world in terms of functions persists throughout life.”

    So, while we can override this tendency to think of phenomena in such teleological terms, particularly with appropriate education providing us with the information we can substitute in the teleology’s place, if our brains are damaged in certain ways, we revert to that childlike way of thinking. I’m also reminded of that passage from scripture: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” (1 Corinthians 13:11) So true. The ramifications are quite interesting, I’m sure you’ll agree.

  24. Blanche Quizno says

    “Religion then, is a byproduct of the ‘social’ mind. It’s attributing human characteristics to phenomena that are not actually human and attributing meaning to coincidences or things we have not yet explained.

    Where the tendency to connect events with intention is muted (as in autism) religion is often missing; where the tendency to make connections is heightened (as in schizophrenia) religion is heightened.

    The mistake proponents of the god gene hypothesis are making is that, because psychology deals largely with people with ‘neurotypical’ brains, they assume that if an attribute is common it must be normal.”

    Terrific information and insight, Shatterface. Thank you.

  25. Shatterface says

    Terrific information and insight, Shatterface. Thank you.

    Thanks.

    The irony is that such attributions are an example of teleo-functional thinking – and the belief that the gene for teleo-functional thinking (the God gene) must be there for a purpose is itself an example of teleo-functional thinking!

  26. says

    Blanche and Maureen, thanks. Blushing, now.

    And I know it’s a bit disorganized, Maureen. To borrow an excuse, I did not have time to write a shorter letter. But maybe it’s getting time I made time.

    And thanks for bringing it in, Blanche. As said: it’s quite the illustration.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *