In New Scientist, Michael Brooks investigates our natural inclination toward religious belief:
Even so, religion is an inescapable artefact [sic] of the wiring in our brain, says [psychologist Paul] Bloom. “All humans possess the brain circuitry and that never goes away.” [Olivera] Petrovich adds that even adults who describe themselves as atheists and agnostics are prone to supernatural thinking. [Jesse] Bering has seen this too. When one of his students carried out interviews with atheists, it became clear that they often tacitly attribute purpose to significant or traumatic moments in their lives, as if some agency were intervening to make it happen. “They don’t completely exorcise the ghost of god—they just muzzle it,” Bering says.
The fact that trauma is so often responsible for these slips gives a clue as to why adults find it so difficult to jettison their innate belief in gods, [anthropologist Scott] Atran says. The problem is something he calls “the tragedy of cognition”. Humans can anticipate future events, remember the past and conceive of how things could go wrong—including their own death, which is hard to deal with. “You’ve got to figure out a solution, otherwise you’re overwhelmed,” Atran says. When natural brain processes give us a get-out-of-jail card, we take it.
That view is backed up by an experiment published late last year (Science, vol 322, p 115). Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas in Austin and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, asked people what patterns they could see in arrangements of dots or stock market information. Before asking, Whitson and Galinsky made half their participants feel a lack of control, either by giving them feedback unrelated to their performance or by having them recall experiences where they had lost control of a situation.
The results were striking. The subjects who sensed a loss of control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none. “We were surprised that the phenomenon is as widespread as it is,” Whitson says. What’s going on, she suggests, is that when we feel a lack of control we fall back on superstitious ways of thinking. That would explain why religions enjoy a revival during hard times.
So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as [anthropologist Justin] Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.
It does, however, suggests that god isn’t going away, and that atheism will always be a hard sell. Religious belief is the “path of least resistance”, says [psychologist Pascal] Boyer, while disbelief requires effort.
Read the full article here.
[Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily]