Oxford University is getting $4 million from — who else? — the Templeton Foundation to study “why mankind embraces god”. I hope that what I’m seeing is mere journalistic sloppy truncation, but knowing the Templeton Foundation and the usual crap I read from theologians, I fear that this does reflect their starting premise:
He [Roger Trigg, director of the program] said anthropological and philosophical research suggests that faith in God is a universal human impulse found in most cultures around the world, even though it has been waning in Britain and western Europe.
“One implication that comes from this is that religion is the default position, and atheism is perhaps more in need of explanation,” he said.
“Universal human impulse,” my left butt cheek. There are a lot of us who find ourselves quite content once we’ve shed religious indoctrination, and feel not one iota of desire to participate in supernatural foolishness. We happen to be human; there hasn’t been a wave of X-Man-style mutations sweeping the globe, transforming a subset of the human race into trans-human beings with the super-power of being able to see through lies. “Faith in God” is also a peculiarly Abrahamic view of religion — I’m surprised that any anthropologists behind this scheme haven’t been jumping up and down, trying to explain that there are many cultures in this world other than the Islamo-Judea-Christian axis of monotheistic intolerance, and the concept of a domineering paternalistic sky daddy is not universal.
There are human universals. We are curious or concerned about the world around us; we look for causal explanations for events; we like explanatory narratives that link sequences of events together; we tend to anthropomorphize and project our motivations and our expectation of agency on objects in our environment. That’s human nature, and religion isn’t at all intrinsic to it. Far from being the default, religion is a pathologic parasite that rides along on those human desires by promoting the illusion of agency as an all-encompassing explanation for everything, and by providing a framework for story-telling. Basically, it’s a nice collection of lies that makes for a self-serving story — it’s the original Mary Sue. Religion is like badly written fan fiction (in the case of the Abrahamic religions, in the fantasy/horror genre), and is no more an intrinsic component of human nature than is Star Trek slash, although it certainly is a warped reflection of human tendencies.
Maybe someone ought to stop and think that any universal explanation of human nature must include both theists and atheists, rather than treating the latter as a mere exception to be disregarded. Maybe they ought to notice that one good reason for rising godlessness is that entirely secular explanations succeed in providing a satisfying causal narrative, and have the added virtue that they’re actually true. Science works, quite unlike prayer.
Starting with the assumption that “religion,” that chaotic potpourri of diverse false starts in comprehending the universe, is a natural element of humanity and that it is the default position, whatever that is, was probably a necessary bit of pandering to milk money out of that blithely ideological promoter of happy lies called the Templeton Foundation, but it sounds to me like a proposal to build a research program on a false foundation. Maybe they’ll surprise me (and horrify Templeton), but I don’t expect anything but useless noise from such a proposal.
Maybe they should just give me the $4 million. It would help me get this damn book done.
…is a universal human impulse found in most cultures around the world, even though it has been waning in Britain and western Europe….
And so is Racism?
Why not 4 million to study why God never shows himself except in grilled cheese sandwiches?
Atheism “needs explanation” in the same way that electronics need explanation, since the default is the lack of electronics.
So yeah, explain why we have electronics, which is due to leaps in understanding and the accumulation of knowledge. And sure, explain atheism, which is due to leaps in understanding and the accumulation of knowledge.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
If by “universal” they mean found in all cultures rather than found in all individuals, then it should be noted that lack of belief is also universal; as lack of religious belief has been found in all cultures.
Oh yeah? I saw him in grease stain on my patio. And then there was acid…, course, the trees were thinking and breathing then too.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Sure, just as soon as you accumulate the sort of clout that Richard Dawkins has. Richard Dawkins’ Follow-Up to God Delusion Sold to Free Press for $3.5 Million
(.)(.)
Sorry PZ, but it seems undeniable that religion is a human universal: it’s almost as defining for homo sapiens as language.
This doesn’t help any particular religion though, on the contrary, surely it weakens their claim to be the unique truth.
..yes quork@4, you got in first, and I agree, it would be nice to think that scepticism is a human universal as well – difficult to prove because of the coercion and suppression that has gone on through the ages. Someone ought to write a history of scepticism. There was plenty of it around when we first have candid records of human thought, in ancient Greek times. That suggests to me that it may also have been widespread.
Peter
RichardDawkins.Net reported on a Times article by Ruth Gledhill the other day.
The RichardDawkins.Net item is here:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,2283,n,n
The original article is here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3393198.ece
The Times article seems to be a put light on things.
If by “universal” they mean found in all cultures rather than found in all individuals, then it should be noted that lack of belief is also universal; as lack of religious belief has been found in all cultures.
Yeah, but it’s more interesting to study Abrahamic religion’s existence than its absence. That’s because it’s so bloody bizarre. I guess even the Templeton folks acknowledge that on some level.
Why not just give that money to the poor?
Here’s the results of the ‘study’:
Mankind embraces God because he exists! Duh!
God makes us believe in him, then provides no evidence that he’s real to test us. If you still believe, you win!
(sarcasm)
Damm my finger not doing what my tells them to.
The last sentence should have read “The Times article seems to put a better light on things”.
You know what they should do with that money? Through it right back in the Templeton Foundation’s face! (I’m not surprised Oxford took the moolah.)
This is faulty thinking even by religious standards. The premise is as absurd as statements I have read from Christians that other religions are cults or something – not really religions. And Buddhism is a major counterexample: millions of people who do not believe in any God. Do these people know anything about religion?
Peter @8:
Try Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht.
http://www.amazon.com/Doubt-Doubters-Innovation-Jefferson-Dickinson/dp/0060097957/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203525818&sr=1-2
There, I fixed it so it doesn’t read like something written by a product of the Texas or Florida education systems.
I think people may have some misconception about what this study will be doing.
To quote from the opening paragraph of Gledhill’s article in The Times:
“Researchers at the University of Oxford will spend £1.9 million investigating why people believe in God. Academics have been given a grant to try to find out whether belief in a deity is a matter of nature or nurture.”
Now you can argue that if £1.9 million is looking for a home that there are better things to research but it strikes me trying to find out why people believe in religion is a good thing.
Pieces like this one are why I keep coming back here, PZ. Love it, and keep up the great work.
wow…ask, and it shall be given!
Thanks a million, ..er..shaggy Maniac@14.
Is it more precise to say belief in the supernatural seems to be (nearly) universal? Either way, I don’t see how acknowledging this while pointing to the absurd variety of beliefs does anything but undermine religion.
Peter
Although I also reject the notion of branding atheists as the “exception to the rule”, I like the general idea of studying the existence and evolution of religion by scientific means, as a human cultural phenomenon. I mean, scientists study all kinds of cultural phenomena. They study election behaviour, organization of human groups, consumer behaviour, even sexual behaviour, without judging it as good or evil, just as simple observable phenomena. They make theories about those phenomena. I mean scientific theories, with the power to predict. It’s a strange thing that almost no such research exists for the phenomenon of religion. And I think this is a pity too.
Imagine there would be precise scientific theories about the development of religions in relation to other cultural, political, economic and maybe ecological aspects. Say those theories also had predictive power. This would help people to see the more ominous decisions and statements of religious leaders in a different light. It would probably be less “mystical”. While religious fanatics would ponder about why their guru said this-and-that, the scientific explaination would clearly show the connections in the big picture.
I would really embrace and appreciate this kind of science on religion. But of course, I don’t think that Templeton’s sponsoring will lead to anything as valuable as that.
Given Templeton’s track record, I suspect PZ Myers is wise to expect little more than “useless noise” from this study. If the study was directed to ask the question “why does a vast majority of the human population believe in the supernatural?” I would tend to be less skeptical, but the study is contaminated from the get-go merely by the framing and wording of the question. The term “why mankind embraces god” is a loaded term; it stipulates the existence of “god” in the first place, but that question is not only unanswered, it is likely unanswerable at all, and so is an illegal question, like trying to divide by zero.
We need to be asking the question “why does the majority of mankind believe in the god-idea?”. After all, the best we’ve been able to do so far as determing the existence of god is that it’s nothing more substantial than an idea, a product of the human imagination and nothing more.
Who’s going to fund the necessary research on the universal human yearning for a pony?
There may be genetic causes for god belief:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/1/6
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,995465,00.html
That still doesn’t excuse religion for taking advantage of it.
I can well believe that the “null hypothesis” for early man was that there was an omnipotent creator in the same way that a flat Earth at the center of the universe was assumed until we learned differently (ala Douglas Adams’ parable of the puddle).
In light of all that science has learned in the past 2000 years or so it really is hard to give any credit at all to the notion of any kind of god(s). I believe the main reason that silly religious beliefs persist is because we are all exposed to our parents’ belief systems long before we are given access to any kind of scientific education (if ever). It is very hard to overcome prejudices that were instilled in childhood.
There may be biological reasons for belief:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,995465,00.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=434D7C62-E7F2-99DF-37CC9814533B90D7&page=1
Doesn’t mean that religion should take advantage of it.
Well whether or not something akin to a religious impulse is part of human nature, because of our evolutionary heritage, says nothing about whether that impulse is desirable. Violence and prejudice are also likely impulses that are part of our nature. Also, a religious impulse says nothing about whether any such god exists.
Theologians? Why theologians? Since the stated field of inquiry falls roughly under the heading of human psychology, what expertise would theologians have to contribute? And don’t they have a vested interest in a certain interpretation of the results?
“Well whether or not something akin to a religious impulse is part of human nature, because of our evolutionary heritage, says nothing about whether that impulse is desirable. Violence and prejudice are also likely impulses that are part of our nature. Also, a religious impulse says nothing about whether any such god exists.”
This is true but it helps when dealing with undesirable behaviour in people to understand why they behave the way they do. Science is not going to tell us if religious belief is desirable or not, but it can tells us why people have religious belief. That knowledge could well be useful in finding ways of combating those beliefs, or at least the most dangerous of them.
The God Gene
The “impulse” to believe something doesn’t validate the belief. We are pattern-seekers. We categorize. We stereotype and generalize. These shortcuts are survival traits, but they only reveal enough “truth” to help us get by. Religion is a by-product of the universal impulse to understand and explain a universe we necessarily experience subjectively. Every god is a god of the gaps.
Xenophobia is at least as universal as religion is, and appears to be its flip side. My responses are: Intellectually-So what? And emotionally-How can we mitigate this sad state of affairs?
If interested, one can listen to this podcast, where Trigg speaks about the relationship between religion and public office ; Should we make a clear distintion between public office and private belief?
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/audio/?podcastItem=religion.mp3
From his highly negative opinion on the French model of Laicité, (absolute separation of church and state), and his defense of the church of England as an umbrella for all types of faith, it is clear that the results of whatever study he will make, are already rigged.
Just another religious wingnut in disguise…
Of course people are compelled to believe in God… by their parents. They’re also encouraged to believe in Santa Claus, UFO’s, ghosts and that the government knows what’s best. It doesn’t make any of those a “universal” human yearning.
That last quote is exactly the type of ignorance that will lead to the demise of mankind. Does this guy realize that 400 years ago, it was common knowledge that witches were mingling among everyone, working with the devil to cast spells on unsuspecting victims. And if you didn’t believe, you were the crazy one.
I also demand that Roger Trigg defend his lack of belief in unicorns, which we all know to be real. A lack of evidence will not sufficiently support his view that they are imaginary, according to the standards he uses.
Fowler’s Stages of Faith Development
Bah, I can write this study for them in two sentences.
The majority of people brought up in religious communities become religious.
The majority of people brought up in non-religious communities do not become religious.
Next.
Damn, here we go again with more nonsense studies to try
and understand why people are fixated on the tooth fairy,
mother goose and all the other conglomeration of non-
existent crap because they will not give serious thought
that their deranged minds are capable to reason it out.
If it was not for the length and entrenchment of all
freaking religions, we would have advanced far more than
we are restricted at present. Think of this, as I have
maintained for years: we can be exploring the planet Mars
right now and determining with almost exactitude if Mars
were a watery planet that we have surmised it to be for
many years now. We have to walk around and use other mobile
means to determine for sure. We should have been doing
this presently if it wasn’t for the time wasted that
science has been battling that deranged religion, the
most stultifying force to reason on this planet. The hell
with that crap; let’s jettison the religious nonsense and
eplore Mars as we should have been doing years ago and
laugh at the freaking deranged retards from the surface of
Mars. “We got up here without your freaking god, you
insane morons!”
> There may be biological reasons for belief:
What I wonder is, how much of that is the result of several millenia of treating the unreligious as subhuman animals and either shunning or just plain killing them. Not just Inquisition-type stuff, but a there’s a good argument that religious belief served a purpose of letting humans organize into groups much larger than kin and tribe. It allowed complete strangers to identify each other as belonging to the same clan (and thus give them a reason to not kill each other) on the grounds that they’ve got this religion in common.
The downside is that people who are genetically less capable of believing in religious nonsense would be more likely to meet a violent end and thus not breed. So religion becomes a meme that actively selects against people who are immune to it.
Of course, you’d eventually create a strain of humans with a survival mechanism: innately capable of publicly mimicking religious belief to ensure their own survival but without ever actually buying into it at all.
Say, I think I’ve figured out where the neocons came from! Anyone else think that would be the most deliciously ironic conclusion? That the existence of double-high authoritarians who would ruthlessly dominate the religious and manipulate them for their own ends is a direct result of religious oppression of nonbelievers? Damn, I’m having a hard time containing my schadenfreude…
I was thinking “sexism” or “belief in magic” when I first saw the story…
Yep, religion’s in great company…
Maybe they could research why a universal impulse wouldn’t show up in all cultures.
Why does religion predominate?
Coercion, indoctrination, community psychology, deliberately engineered ignorance, fear of death, epilepsy, psychotropic plants.
Possibly, natural selection for the assumption of purpose in our environment.
Have I left anything out?
I’d take them more seriously if they came up with a sensible definition of “God” before flatly declaring belief in It to be universal.
Holbach,
“Damn, here we go again with more nonsense studies to try
and understand why people are fixated on the tooth fairy,…”
If only it were that ! Come on, this Mr Trigg has been claiming for a while already that we need religion in public office in order to referree between multicultural communities on all the major moral issues.
This is a new attack on the absolute separation of church and state (french model). They are just claiming to perform yet another study, the conclusions of which are already fixed beforehand.
Check the podcast I linked to in #31.
This is not an innocent nice guy trying to understand why some believe in God. This is a religious wingnut who wants to increase the influence of religion in governement in W. Europe.
In Britain, these guys are trying as hard as they can to revamp the influence of the church of England in public office.
In France, we are seeing now a rank attack comming principally from the USA and Britain on our concept of Laicity. They will stop at nothing.
The greatest American of all times answered that question more than a century ago:
“Suckers. There’s one born every minute.”
Phineas Taylor Barnum
.
Argh! I’m eating lunch here!
It’s good to see that other sources reveal at least a faint tinge of skepticism to the proposal, but it’s still not enough.
An honest proposal would be to examine the propensity of human beings to accept the shortcuts provided by myths, superstition, and lies — starting with that proposition rather than accepting religion as a given would help slice through the bullshit the theologians in the group will be shoveling.
It’s also a title that wouldn’t have gotten them any Templeton money.
Accepting religion as a monolithic trait inherent in all people makes it easier for the faithful to connect the sophistimacated talk of God choosing the mass of the electron and “sustaining the Universe” (the sort of talk beloved in Templeton territory) with the medieval claptrap of Haggard and Dobson. It’s the sort of meme which helps the survival of other memes by deactivating the bullshit detector.
It’s possible that something like awe in the face of the universe and some need to explain it may be a human universal. That this specifically translates to belief in God of a monotheistic construction – not so much. They are looking for the wrong basis. Belief in God is a result of confronting the unknown, not a cause and by no means a universal one. Some people will no doubt argue that a belief in some kind of cosmic order is a belief in God but that requires stripping away all personal characteristics and I don’t think that’s what the theists have in mind.
I was watching Nova Ape Genius last night, and they had an experiement where they showed chimps how to get a treat by tapping on a box with a stick, pushing some rods through some holes, etc., and finally opening a door in the box and retrieving the treat from inside. The difference between the chimps and the human children (four-year-olds?) was that once the box was made out of clear plastic and you could see where the treat was the chimps quit the first steps and went straight to the door, whereas the children kept doing the extraneous steps.
My first thought was, so this is how superstitious behavior starts! The explanation for the childrens’ continued behavior was that they were willing to be taught by adults, whereas the chimps just wanted the treat. That is, the big evolutionary difference between humans and primates is the willingness to learn, and the eagerness to teach. I guess superstitious behavior (and beliefs) are just a side-effect (they didn’t talk about that).
Anyway, it was a revelation to me, but I’m just a layperson.
I meant other primates :-)
Does anyone wonder if sometime in the future, people are going to find the FSM Bible and praise His Noodliness with all the fervor and death that is attributed to Jeebus today? I mean if Joseph Smith can find golden tablets and _not_ sell them to the highest bidder…
The founder if founder is the right term and not funder was John Templeton was a very good investor and made a lot of money investing in international businesses for his his mutual funds. He may have been a “devote Christian” and a moral human being. That his investing insight had nothing to do with “god” nor religion unless it help him to maintain a sense humility is understood.
the fund that he founded does not seem to have “inherited” any of his wisdom. The study of “religion” as an anthropological subject sounds like a good idea as does a study of the mechanisms and function of belief in general. I have to wonder about research that is structured like this before hand sounds like a study that is being funded by a drug company that has a specific drug in the “race”.
So that’s why they had to get rid of Richard Dawkins. He’d have cost them the handout by giving the game away too soon, ie that we already know a lot about why a subset of the population is particularly prone to that sort of shared delusion and retardation.
I think that’s more or less true at the cultural level, and that PZ’s third paragraph (“There are human universals…” is an excellent explanation of why. Care to respond to it?
It is only universal because most parents teach their children to believe in whatever god they were taught to believe in. My daughter does not believe in any god because she was not taught to. I was taught to believe in god. I chose not to after reading and finding out for myself that the religion I grew up in is nothing but BS. None of the other religions I investigated were any more believable, so I don’t bother with it.
Humans believe in god because most of us are scared to death to die. We want to make sure we have something after death that is better or at least as good as what we have in life. We feel justified in condemning those not as good as us to being reincarnated as a slime mold or them going to hell.
I don’t buy any of that crap either.
I just treat everyone how I’d like to be treated and leave it at that.
“Science works, quite unlike prayer.”
I half expected you to say, “Science. It works, bitches.”
This sounds like a subject for abnormal psychology, not theology:
hearing voices
feeling watched
sexual hangups
continual lying
behavior radically inconsistent with stated beliefs
violent attempts to impose delusions on others
denial of the evidence of their own eyes
etc.
What I would like to see is the correlation between religiosity, racism, nationalism, and sports fanaticism. I’d bet those are all branches off the same root of tribalism. I’d also bet that there’s a selective advantage to perceiving an attack on a member of ‘us’ as an attack on ‘me’.
Secondly, almost every time I hear about someone enduring awful circumstances, they attribute their ability or willingness to endure to ‘faith’ or ‘god’. In the evolution of intelligence, it seems like something has to interrupt the chain of thought; “my life sucks” + “it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better” + “if I jump off this cliff here, I don’t have to suffer any more” = absence from the gene pool. In other words, irrational faith is a necessary insanity in a creature capable of suicide. Does this make sense to anyone besides me?
“Science works, quite unlike prayer.”
Freaking awesome.
YetAnotherKevi asked:
Do you know if atheists commit suicide more frequently than theists? If it’s true there would have to be some data to back it up.
When I first read of this study in a separate article,* I was more encouraged because it sounded like they would be exploring the factors that spawn religious belief. But this article makes the study sound really flimsy and touchy-feely.
It’s unfortunate, because I think there needs to be much more exploration of how and why religious beliefs are formed.
*http://www.richarddawkins.net/article,2283,Why-do-we-believe-in-God-2m-study-prays-for-answer,Ruth-Gledhill-Times-UK
PZ wrote:
Are you sure there hasn’t been a wave of X-Man-style mutations sweeping the globe, transforming a subset of the human race?
According to to this NYT article, “Researchers Say Human Brain Is Still Evolving,” there has been a lot of evolution in the human brain recently.
There is some interesting work that shows that children seem hard-wired to see purpose in things – like that rocks are for animals to scratch their backs on, etc.- that’s been termed ‘promiscuous teleology’. I think Dawkins discusses it in TGD. Anyway, it provides a possible explanation for why children are so easily led into the seductive Designer notion.
http://atheism.about.com/b/2005/02/02/teleology-intelligent-design-and-children.htm
Many of the commenters (including PZ in #44) seem to think that Templeton is some sort of taint that automatically is only associated with ULTIMATE EVIL BADNESS or something.
I don’t really know that much about the aggregate kookiness of the Templeton Foundation, but a year or two ago Charles Ofria mentioned to me that they had given him money for his work on alife evolution with Avida (which PZ uses as a counterexample to creationist baloney.)
Charles said that in his experience, they were very reasonable, gave him money with no strings attached, did not push any sort of agenda, and don’t have a problem with him espousing Darwinian evolution or anything else in his work, even though their name is on it in the acknowledgments.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that all things supported by the Templeton Foundation are legitimate/good/whatever, but a knee-jerk reaction that anything associated with them is awful would seem to exclude some good work.
One might argue that Charles shouldn’t take money from them for some sort of “political correctness” reasons, but IMHO anyone claiming that his work isn’t in line with real biology, Darwinian evolution, or secular science is full of shit. And it appears that they fund a number of people I have some respect for listed here: I like Chris Adami‘s and Steven Benner‘s work, and I’ve never seen any indication that either of them, or Charles (who I know better) has religious inclinations, agendas, or anything of the sort (although I’ll admit that the title “Purpose in the Cosmos as Indicated by Life’s Origins” is a little odd, Benner’s Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution has EVOLUTION IN THE NAME!) It sounds suspiciously like the Templeton folks are actually allies of evolution, in some regard, in the evolution-vs-creation wars, although perhaps enemies of a sort in the theist-atheist wars.
Maybe instead of complaining, you should ask the Templeton folks if they’ll sponsor your research, PZ… it would be interesting to find out if they’re willing to give you 4 million dollars to do zebrafish evo-devo (although I doubt they’d be enthusiastic to give you money specifically to push Atheism.)
Don’t be too hard on Templeton, It did declare that it wanted to give money to ID research but gave up because there wasn’t any.
I’ve never found it too hard to understand why religion exists (the belief in one or more gods, God or other supernatural beings is clearly an effect, not a cause). We’re social, hierarchical, smart animals who as individuals aren’t terribly good at surviving. We need to be in the tribe. How do you keep a tribe of intelligent individuals together? You evolve a natural sense of deference to authority. That will keep you and everyone else alive: imagine human survival if none of us ever did what we were told. And we’re good at spotting patterns, so good that we’ll easily see one where none is warranted.
Put that together, and you have beings who are very much predisposed to see patterns of authority and power where none exists – and are also predisposed to belong to the authority structure with the most power, that being another survival bonus. So, there’ll be an authoritarian power structure in nature and it’s best to belong to it.
The fact that just about every god is terribly human is also evidence that we’re reading our programming into nature. Sometimes this is almost painfully transparent – God the Father, the Lord of Lords?
That doesn’t mean we all play the game that way by any means but seen as an evolutionary mechanism, religion makes a lot of sense.
Can I has mai fore megabux now, pls?
R
Norman,
There may be a minor correlation between secular countries and suicide rates. Compare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
and
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=pzuckerman_26_5
If anything, the message is this: countries that have had atheism forced upon them by totalitarian regimes have higher suicide rates than countries which are naturally atheistic (except Japan, where ritual suicide was an expected practice for centuries), but it does seem true that the prevalence of religion correllates to lower suicide rates.
IMHO, it’s because equating suicide with punishments of sin and hellfire in a highly religious environment are strong disincentives to offing yourself.
Basically, it’s a nice collection of lies that makes for a self-serving story — it’s the original Mary Sue.
YES! Haha! I KNEW I wasn’t the only one who saw the connection there.
Academics have been given a grant to try to find out whether belief in a deity is a matter of nature or nurture
Yet another fallacy. Do fallacies mutually attract, and tend to aggregate?
It’s not “nature vs. nurture” for ANY TRAIT IN ANY ORGANISM. Variation in phenotype (e.g. “worships God” vs. “watches football on Sundays instead”) comes from the additive effects of variance in genotypes, plus variance in the environment, plus variance in the INTERACTION between genotype and environment. “Nature” (genes) and “Nurture” (environment) MULTIPLY to cause a phenotype, it’s not a case of either-or at all!
Additionally, no influence of genetics (i.e. heritability) can be detected in non-varying traits. So if a trait is truly universal (at the individual level, all individuals have exactly the same phenotype), the estimate of heritability will be exactly zero. So if this study comes out and concludes that the God Delusion is 80% genetic (or something), they’ll be wrong for the reason above, and they’ll be gainsaying their previous assertions about a human universal!!!
Thanks for picking up on this, PZ. Every day, I rediscover Einstein’s confidence statement about infinity.
Obviously, people are inclined to believe in God because they don’t want to burn in Hell with the infidels!
A Prayer Request: I’d like to ask everyone here to pray for my niece, who is 14 years old. Her parents are unable to provide her with orthodontics, so if everyone will pray for her teeth to straighten, I will appreciate it greatly.
#56 wrote “What I would like to see is the correlation between religiosity … and sports fanaticism.”
I have been thinking about this relationship for a while now, in part because they are both behaviors that I find completely irrational. The existence of sports fanaticism leads me to believe that, even if religion did not exist, people would find **something** irrational to dwell upon.
Allegiance to a sports team (of which you are not a member) makes no sense. How does it meaningfully affect your life if a particular sports team wins or loses a game? Why do people adorn themselves with the logos of their favorite team, or adorn their vehicles with said logos? Why do people feel the need to waste hours of their lives watching these teams, and financial resources buying tickets and trinkets, and then, on occasion, riot in response to the outcomes of these games? (it probably has something to do with tribalism and sense of purpose)
Religion may be the more dangerous of the two, because of the “stakes” involved (eternal damnation, etc.) but sports fanaticism shows that, even if religion didn’t exist, people would still find some irrational diversion.
(Before I get attacked by sports fans, I am not referring to people who watch sports merely as entertainment and understand it as such)
I call naturalistic fallacy. Just because religion is the default position of human nature does mean it should be.
Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon sounds as if it addresses the main question beautifully, if they’re really asking “why is religion so prevalent?” Of course, the sappy “why mankind embraces God” title seems to rule out “religion as a natural phenomenon.” It sounds as if they think every child around the globe wakes up from a nap at around 4 years old and asks “I love Jesus, who is He?”
This study is actually a double-edged sword for them, because once you start really asking serious questions about “why we believe” you’re going to end up naturalizing religious belief, and framing it in terms of human propensities, neurology, biology, needs, tendencies, politics, and motivations. No God needed.
On the other hand, if they come up empty handed, that would be more supportive of religion’s truth, not less. Answer “why does mankind embrace God?” with “Damned if we can figure it out, it makes no sense, and is not consistent with anything we learn about human nature or cultures or education or anything” — then that’s when we’d REALLY need to consider “Gee, then it could only be because God exists and gave us supernatural God-sensing ESP.”
He’s right, but not in the sense that the burden of proof is shifted, and now it’s up to atheists to ‘prove there’s no God’ because God’s existence is the accepted starting assumption we reason from.
No, this statement is right in the sense that superstition is the default position, and reason takes work. Accepting anecdotal evidence is the default position, and forming and testing hypotheses takes work. Believing what you’re told by parents and authorities is the default position, and analyzing such messages to see if they’re true takes work. Good ol’ Common Sense is the default position, and science is not ‘common sense’ — it’s a rigid, systematic attempt to avoid the sloppy errors and biases we’re prone to, by going against human nature’s inherent subjectivity and trying to be objective. It takes work.
Atheism takes work. Reason sloppy, think like a child, go for easy answers, follow intuition, seek the most satisfying conclusions, go along with the majority — there’s the default. Fine; they can have it.
Sastra – yeah! I bump my head on that stuff all the time. I have tried telling some of my (older, wiser) theist friends that common sense doesn’t really exist, that it’s a generally useful intutitive/subconscious thought process that has serious limitations in that it can rarely help us reach conclusions about things we know nothing about; its usefulness is bounded by what one knows. (There was a time when it was indeed sensible to conclude that the earth was flat.)
When confronted with the incredible, common sense tells us to be incredulous. I think this is is one reason why creationism is so successful, even amongst otherwise, ah, sensible folk. When they start to “really think” about evolution, it does start to seem incredible. The mistake is in believing that pondering is an adequate substitute for learning and that common-sense conclusions are equivalent to knowing. Furthermore, I think most of us are prone to that. Reason does, as you say, take work.
Why not just spend a few Earth Currency Units on “Why People Believe Weird Things” by Michael Shermer – and have a huuuge party with the rest of the grant?
*bing*
don’t forget the rampant use of projection.
Hey, what a coincidence! I discovered the answer this morning while surfing the Internet:
“…scientists believe the religious preoccupations associated with mania stem from a part of the brain’s temporal lobes that lights up like a Christmas tree with electrical activity, because of the massive over-production of the neurotransmitter dopamine.”
Show me the money!
Sastra,
I think one should define a quantitative index to measure superstitious belief in a given subject. Let’s not forget that Atheists are not necessarily imune to superstitious belief. On of my best friend is an Atheist, but is convinced about Astrology.
On on another hand, one could also define a quantitative index to measure the level of litteracy (whatever is relevant) of a given subject.
It would be interesting to see a statistical analysis between these two parameters. I would expect a very high negative correlation. But it’d be nice to see this done. And it would be nice to map the different religions and Atheists, profiles of people, etc…
Don’t know if this has ever been done.
hmm, interesting. ADHD is tied to an underproduction of dopamine (in the sense that it is a necessary precursor for norepinephrine).
I wonder if there has been an increase in religious extremism associated with the over-prescription of anti-adhd drugs?
God Alone Knows
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article3393161.ece
Also from the Times, only involving a giant amphibian :)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3393154.ece
If you start with the original “religion” of Animism you can find a particularly good example of utility: The Andaman Islanders who “believed” that a sudden recession of the water meant that a dragon had swallowed much of the ocean and he was going to spit it out in a while survived. They ran for high ground and climbed trees. Those who had become “modern” rejected the dragon. I suspect that some tales recover some real dangers which have been forgotten since the situation is no longer applicable. These “Animist” observations probably marched fight along with human development for a long time. I understand tsnaumi indications without the Dragon but my response would be the same.
Kseniya #70:
One of my favorite books is Alan Cromer’s Uncommon Sense: The heretical nature of science, which makes a similar point. As you say, creationism tends to appeal to the “hey, does that make sense to you?” line of argument — as if expertise and in-depth knowledge was unnecessary window-dressing overlaying a rock-solid core of The Good Sense God Gave Us.
negentropyeater #74:
You’re right. I was more or less assuming the ‘atheist’ was a science-based secular humanist-type whose non-belief in God is based on the entire rational approach in world view — and that’s not a given. I’ve known plenty of atheists myself who were into conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, and were no easier to reason with than creationists.
A lot of those boasts about Europe being “non-religious” fail to take account of the high belief in psychic powers, alternative medicine, and other beliefs which re-enchant the world into magic and wonder. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just religion in a different package.
I think there have been several studies recently written up in magazines like Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic which look at level of education, level of science education, and then separate a whole slew of different supernatural or paranormal beliefs, ranging from Young Earth Creationism to flying saucers. As I recall, the results showed that belief in demons and creationism went down as education went up — but belief in homeopathy and ESP was actually higher as you increased the education level. It wasn’t until you narrowed it down to graduate students in science that you saw a wholesale rejection of the entire bunch of woo.
Women outranked men on belief in pretty much every form of pseudoscientific and spiritual crap except one: more men than women believe we are currently being visited by space aliens, and the government is covering it up. Oh joy.
They’re more likely to give you $4 million NOT to finish the damn book.
Serious anthropologists should indeed be screaming and howling and jumping up and down over this one. Not the least because previous attempts to locate a sort of Broca’a-area for religiosity have been so thoroughly scoffed at by the anthro community.
The universality of religion remains one of the biggest unanswered questions in the discipline of Religious Studies. We have more possible answers than we know what to do with – and the damning thing is that they’re all a little bit right. Religions propositions are sustained by the kinds of “natural bad logic” that we have before we learn the rules of logical reasoning. They have a basis in evolutionary psychology. They’re bolstered by their community-building effect. They provide a forum for the creation of literature, music, pomp, and pageantry. They help people structure the events of their lives. They offer easy answers for the justification of personal tragedy. They are systems of symbolic communications. And so on, and so on, and so on.
But that doesn’t mean that “Religion” has to be the end result. It’s just the name we give to these things when they all act in concert. None of the great Religionists admit it in their writings, but whenever they try to define religion, it really boils down to “the vast cultural complex that stems from and relates to a non-materialist world-view” – i.e. the belief systems of people who aren’t atheists like us. Even now, no one is willing to come out and say it, because the Academy doesn’t want to explicitly call itself atheist, since so few atheists remain interested enough in religion to pursue it as an academic focus, and since it would cause quite a ruckus.
So yeah – the question of “why are so many people religious” is a, if not THE burning question at the heart of the disciplines of the History and Anthropology of Religions — but as always, the Templeton Foundation is asking the question from a flawed premise, with flawed reasoning, and will surely have flawed results that no self-respecting Religionist will take seriously.
They ought to fund a study that explains why rich assholes found organizations like “Let Freedom Ring” to con millions of people into swallowing a bunch of moronic right-wing propaganda.
Shame on Oxford for taking money from those assholes.
…scientists believe the religious preoccupations associated with mania stem from a part of the brain’s temporal lobes that lights up like a Christmas tree with electrical activity, because of the massive over-production of the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Ok, but if that’s true, shouldn’t Christians be better at comedic impressions? Another project for the Templeton folks!
Ok, but if that’s true, shouldn’t Christians be better at comedic impressions? Another project for the Templeton folks!
actually, there does seem to be a common lack of understanding of irony and satire within the religiophiles.
many of us have made note of it on occasion.
I’m being serious in saying that it would indeed be worthy of study. Far more interesting and informative than the current Templeton funded study will be.
I partly disagree. Europeans are superstitious, but people rarely define their whole lives*, choose their political affiliation, etc. based on their superstition. I think of ‘religion’ as more of a system of belief than some fluffiness for your spare time. (*Horoscopes and such feature in self-definition, though)
Still, I wish I had a Euro every time I heard or read “I am not religious but I believe in some higher force”…
Comes the dark ages:
LONDON – University of Oxford researchers will spend nearly $4 million to study just how many angels can (as opposed to may) dance on the head of a pin. The grant to the Ima Dufuss Unit of the Ann Coulter Center for Niscience and Religion will bring artapologists, theomagnons, phosphorphilites, and Burt and Ernie together for three years to study whether the answer to this question should be an integral part of mankind’s makeup kit and to determine the answer. “There are a lot of issues. “Why is it that inane human nature will address this question rather than spend monies in actual research or charity work, whether the answer is a simple or complex number, whether angels are something superhuman or supernatural when doing the actual dancing (Wu Li Masters need not apply)” said Roger Rabbit, play acting director of the center.
Oxford?? what a bunch of Loafers.
There, improved the accuracy.
Mothra
phosphorphilites
heh, that’s me!
I think I have radiation burns from my CRT.
:p
I love that you used the phrase “not one iota,” and hope your readers truly appreciate your genius.
Here’s a ripped off explanation (cut and paste)(citation method not very respectable) of fourth citizen’s comment
During the 3rd century debates among Christians as to the exact status of the relationship between Jesus as Son and God as Father, in order to make the sameness-within-distinction that was thought necessary, some came up with Greek idea of homoousios, meaning that God as God and Jesus as human/divine reality shared the same “substance”, ousios, divine stuff. There was a large plurality that thought this took the relationship too far and offered up a compromise – the Father and Son were homoiousios, “of similar substance”. The addition of that smallest of Greek letters, iota, made all the difference in the world. Or not, according to which resident of Nicaea you spoke to. Thus the saying – “not one iota.”
Give me the four million. I know why people believe in dog. Because it is easy. We spend most of our money and time trying to find easier ways to do everything and this one takes the cake; the cake with infinite layers. Done deal. Gimme da money.
Whose to say that atheism wasn’t selected against. With the religious history of killing the infidel, atheism didn’t stand much chance. Leaving the people with the mindset to believe authority blindly to become the majority in the world. Maybe someone should point that out in their $4 million study, that its possible that believers are common because they had previously wiped off the unbelievers.
Azkyroth@52
..late reply, but don’t others round here have to work and sleep?
I take your and PZ’s point. But something really worries me: is there a selective advantage to a belief in the afterlife?
The debate about altruism and group selection is reviving (way over my head): do such beliefs produce more people prepared to sacrifice their life for the community, giving it an advantage ..if so, where does it leave us?
Just tell me I worry too much..
Peter
..see that’s effectively the point Jan Chan@92 and others with their memes are making..
Peter
I take your and PZ’s point. But something really worries me: is there a selective advantage to a belief in the afterlife?
there certainly could be.
if all of your local peers believe that you are going to hell if you don’t believe in heaven, then I think you might find it a bit hard to date if you stated you don’t believe in an afterlife.
this is an example of sexual selection, which of course is an interesting subset of natural selection.
yes, if there is a genetic predisposition towards religious behaviors (there is some limited evidence to support this), it easily could be selected for.
However, the most likely mode of transmission still remains peer pressure. Just like with an alcoholic, there might indeed be a genetic predisposition towards addictive behaviors, but exposure to peer drinking is usually the thing that ends up trigger the actual alcoholism itself.
And also, it is not because a particular belief (in afterlife) may have well provided us with an advantage in our early history (did it cause us to burry our dead ?), that this particular belief will continue providing us with an advantage (now we know that we need to dispose of the corpses for other, more evident reasons).
As stupid and highhly unlikely as it is, I still hope for an afterlife. I don’t actually believe in one because there’s no evidence for it and, as far as I’m concerned, plenty against it.
But I still hope for it and I probably always will. I want to think that all these memories I’ve accumulated and events that meant more to me than I could put into words… I want to think they mean something, I guess. Or that they won’t all be “deleted” the second my brain dies.
It’s kind of silly, but I still hope for it in spite of that.
October Mermaid,
there is nothing “silly” in hoping for an afterlife. At least you have the intellectual honesty to say that it is a wish, a desire, and nothing more (BTW, I happen to have similar longings).
But what is “silly” is to state that one knows that there is an afterlife, or that one knows what are the rules that will enable some to benefit from it, and others not. Or that some have seen what afterlife is, and have come back from there, to explain to us how it looks like, or what are the conditions to benefit from it.
No more so than hoping for a pony, or that Natalie Portman will have sex with me.
But no less so, either.
But I wonder, how valuable would our memories from this life be after an eternity of afterlife?
There’s more detail in the Times (London) story than the Yahoo news abbreviation of the AP release. See
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3393198.ece
Excerpts:
“The existence of sports fanaticism leads me to believe that, even if religion did not exist, people would find **something** irrational to dwell upon.”
“Member of religion X” and “fan of team Y” always seemed equivalent to me — simple tribal identities. The crucial difference is that fans of one team need the other teams to exist, or the sport can’t exist. Religions, on the other hand, want to destroy all other religions. (Except for the “moderate” religions, whose fandom is much too lukewarm for burning anyone at the stake.)
Of course they got the $4 million, because everyone else (S. Atran, P.Boyer, D.Dennett, D.S. Wilson, et al.) is wrong.
Justin Barrett, “Is the Spell Really Broken? Bio-Psychological Explanations of Religion and Theistic Belief,” Theology & Science, 5:1 (2007)
Abstract Recent advances in the evolutionary and cognitive sciences of religion have raised questions about whether the assumptions and findings of these fields as applied to religion conflict with belief in gods. Specifically, three scientific approaches to religion (Neurotheology, Group Selection, and Cognitive Science of Religion) are sketched, and five arguments against theistic belief arising from these approaches are discussed and evaluated. None of the five arguments prove formidable challenges for belief in gods.
My parents and grandparents were of a certain religion because their ancestors were conquered by people with that religion. This is how the “revealed” religions spread around the world, by conquest. If anything my natural impulse is to upchuck when I hear religious mumbo jumbo
“Basically, it’s a nice collection of lies that makes for a self-serving story — it’s the original Mary Sue.”
Religion = the original Mary Sue. That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day. I’m just glad my parents didn’t impose any religion on me. I would rather look up to those who taught me, raised me,and let me choose for myself than those who would threaten me with eternal torture.