is god an accident.pdf

8/14/2019 is god an accident.pdf

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THE TL NTIC MONTHLY

Despite the vast number ofreiigiom nearly everyone in the world believes in thesame thi?igs: theexistenceof asoul anafterlife miracles and the divine creation ofthe universe.

Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered txvo relatedfacts that may account for this phejiomenoji. One: human bcifigs come into the world with

a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predispositionis an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leadsto the question

IS GOD AN ACCIDENT?BY PAUL BLOOM

lllustraiiom byGreg Clarke

I. GODISNOT DEAD^ % 7~hcnIwasateenager% ^ / my rabb i be l ieved

T Tthat the LubavitcherRebbe , who was living inCrown Heights , Brooklyn,wastheMessiah, and thattbeworld wassoon to end. Hebelieved thattheeartb wasafew thousand yearsold, andthat the fossil record was aconsequence ofthe Great Flood.He could describetheafterlife, and wasable to answer adolescent questionsaboutthefateofHitler's soul.

My rabbi was nocrackpot;he was an intelligentandamiab le man , a teacher and a scholar. But he held views thatstruckme as strange, even disturbing. Like many secularpeople,I am comfortable with religionas asourceofspiri-tuality and transcendence, tolerance and love, cbarityandgood w orks. Who can objectto tbefaithofMartin LutherKingJr. or theDalai Lamaat leastaslongas that faithgrounds moral positionsonealready accepts?Iam uncomfortable, however, with religion whenit makes claims about the natural world, let alonea world beyond nature.It iseasyforthoseofuswho reject supernatu ral beliefstoagree with Ste-phen Jay Gould tbattbebest waytoaccorddig-nityandrespect tobotb scieneeandreligionis

PaulBloom a profe i mrofpsychologyand lin-guistics at Yale is theauthor of Descar t es 'Baby: How th e Scienceof Child DevelopinentE.xplains What MakesUs Hiiiuaii and[low

magisteria : science getsthrealm of facts, religion therealmofvalues,

Forbetter or worse, thou gbreligion ismuch more tbauasetof etbical principlesor avague senseoftranscendenceThe anthropologist EdwardTyiorgot it right in 1871,whenhe noted thatthe minimumdefinition of religion is a

belief in spiritual beings,in the supernatural. My rabbi'sspecific claims were a minority viewinthe cultureinwhichI was raised.,butthose jori'j'of viewsaboutthecreationofthe universe, the end ofthe world, the fates of soulsdefinereligion as billions of people understand and practiceit.

Tbe United Statesis aposter child for supernaturalbelief. Just about everyotie in tbis country96 percentinonepoll-believesinGod. Well over halfofAmericansbelieveinmiracles,tbedevil,andangels. Most believeinan afterlifeand notjustin themushy sense thatwewill

liveon in thememoriesof other people,or inour good deeds; when asked fordetails, mostAm ericans say they believe that after de ath theywill actually reunite with relatives and get tomeet God. Woody Allen once said, Idon't wantto achieve immortality through my work. wan


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But America is an anomaly, isn't it? These statistics aresometimes taken as yet another indication of how muchthis country differs from, for instance, France and Germany,where secularism holds greater sway. Americans are fun-dam entalists, the claim go es, isolated from the intelleetualprogress made by the rest of the world.

There are two things wrong with this conclusion. First,even ifagap between America and Eu rope exists, it is notthe United States that is idiosyncratic. After all, the restof the worldAsia, Africa, the Middle Eastis not exactlyfilled with h ard-c ore ath eists. If one is to talk about exeep-tionalism, it applies to Europe, not the United States.

Second, the religious divide between Americans andEuropeans may be smaller than we think . The sociologistsRodney Stark, of Baylor University, and Roger Finke, of Penn-sylvania State Ihiiversity, write th at th e big difference has todo with church attendance, which really is much lower inEurope. (Building on the work of the Chicago-based soci-ologist and priest Andrew Creeley,they argue that this is because theUnited S tates has a rigorously freeI eligiousmarket in which churchesactively vie for parishioners andconstantly improve their prod-uct, whereas European churchesare often under state control and,like many government monopo-lies,have becom e inefficient.) Mostpolls from European countriesshow that a majority of the ir peopleare believers. Consider Iceland. Tojudge by rates of churchgoing, Ice-land is the most secular country onearth,with a pathetic two percentweekly attendance. But four out offiveIcelanders saythat theypray, and the same proportion believe in life after death.

Iu the United States some liberal scholars posit a dif-ferent sort of exceptionalisni, arguing that belief in thesupernatural is found mostly in Christian eonservativesthose infamously described by theWashington ostreporterMiehael Weisskopf in 1993 as largely poor, un edu cated ,and easy to comm and. Many people saw the 20 04 presi-dential election as pitting Americans who are religiousagainst those who are not.

An article by Steven Waldman in the online magazineiS/a eprovides some perspective on the divide:

As you may already know, one of America's two politi-cal parties is extremely religious. Sixty-one percent ofthis party's voters say they pray daily or more often. Anastounding 92 percent ofthemhelieve in life after death.And there's a hard-core siibjiroup in this party of super-religious Christian zealots. Very conservative on gay mar-

Enthusiasm is buildingam ong scientists forth e view tha t religionem erged not to servea purposenotasanopiate or a social g l u e -but by accidentItisa by-product ofbiological adap tationsgone awry.

believe God gave Israel to the Jews and that its existencefulfills the prophecy about the second coming ofJesus.

The gro up that Waldman is talking abou t is Dem ocrats; thehard-core subgroup is African-American Democrats.

Finally, consider scientists. They are less likely than non-scientists to be religiousbut not by a huge a mo unt.A1996poll asked seientists wh ether they believed in C od, and tbepollsters set the bar highno tnealy-mouthed evasions suchas I believe in the totality of all tbat exists or in whatis beautiful and unknown ; rather, they insisted on a realbiblical Cod, one believers could pray to and actually getan answer from. About 40 percent of scientists said yes to abelief in this kind of Godabout the same percentag e foundin a similar poll in1916.Only when we look at the most elitescientistsmembers of the National Academy of Sciencesdo we find a strong majority of atheists and agnostics.

These facts are an embarrassment for those who seesupernatural beliefs as a culturalanachronism, soon to be erodedby scientific discoveries and thespread of cosmopolitan valuesThey req uire a new theory of whywe are religiousone that drawson research in evolutionary biology, cognitive neu roscience . anddevelopmental psycbology.

TT.OPIATE S ANDFRATERNITIESne traditional approach

the origin of religiousbelief begins with tbe

observation that it is difficult tobe a p erson. There is evil all arou nd; everyone we love wildie;and soon we ourselves will dieeither slowly and proably unpleasantly or quickly and probably unpleasantly. Foall hilt a pam pered and lucky few life really is nasty, bruti shand short. And if onr lives have some greater meaning, it ishardly obvious.

So perhaps, as Marx suggested, we have adopted relgion as an opiate, to soothe the pain of existence. As thephilosopher Susanne K. Langer has put it, man cannot deawith Chaos ; supernatural beliefs solve the problem of thichaos by providing meaning. We are not m ere thing s; ware lovingly erafted by God, and serve bis purposes. Relgion tells us that this isajust world, in which the good wibe rewarded and the evil punish ed. Most ofall,it add resseour fear of death. Freud summed it all up by describing

three-fold task for religious beliefs: they must exorcisthe terro rs of nature, they must reconcile men to the crueltof Fate, particularly as it is shown in d eath, and they m us


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Religions can sometimes do all these things, and itwould be unrealistic to deny that this partly explains theirexistence. Indeed, sometimes theologians use the forego-ing arguments to make a case for why we should believe:if one wishes for purpose, meaning, and eternal life, thereis nowhere to go but toward Go d.

One problem with this view is that, as the cognitivescientist Steven Pinker reminds us, we don't typically getsolace from propositions that we don't already believe to betrue.Hungry people don't cheer themselves up by believ-ing that they just had a large meal. Heaven is a reassnringnotion only insofar as people believe such a place exists;it is this belief that an adequate theory of rehgion has toexplain in the first place.

Also, the religion-as-opiate theory (its best with themo notheistic religion s most familiar to us. But what aboutthose people (many of the religious people in the world)who do not beheve in an all-wise and just God? Everysociety believes in spiritualbeings, but they are oftenstupid or malevolent. Manyreligions simply don't dealwith metaphysical or teleo-logical questions; gods andancestor spirits are calledupon only to help cope withsuch mundane problems ashow to prepare food andwhat to do with a corpsenotto elucidate the Meaning ofIt All. As for the reassu ranceof heaven., justice, or salva-tion, again, it exists in somereligions but by no means all.(In fact, even those religionswe are most familiar with are not always reassuring. 1know some older Christians w ho were made m iserable aschildren by worries about eternal damnation; the prospectof oblivion w ould have heen far preferable.) So the opiatetheory is ultimately an unsatisfying explanation for theexistence of religion.

The m ajor alternative th eory is social: religion bringspeople together, giving them an edge over those who lackthis social glue. Sometimes this argum ent is presented incultural terms, and sometimes it is seen from an evolu-tionary perspective: survival of the fittest working at thelevel not of the gene or the individual but of the socialgroup. In either ease the elaim is that religion thrivesbecause groups that have it outgrow and outlast thosethat do not.In this conception religion is a fraternity, and the anal-

have painful initiation ritesfor example, snipping off parol the penis. Also, certain puzzling features of many religions, such as dietary restrictions and distinctive dressmake perfect sense once they are viewed as tools to ensu regroup solidarity.

The fraternity theory also explains why religions areso harsh toward those who do not share the faith, reserving particular ire for apostates. This is clear in the OldTestament, in which a jealous God issues comm andssueh as

Should your brother, your mother's son,oryoursou or yourdaughter or the wife of your bosom or your companionwho is like your own self incite you in secret, saying 'Letus go and worship othergods'... you shall surely kill him.Your hand shall be against him first to put him to deathand the hand of all the peoplelast And you shall stone himand he shall die, forhesoughttothrust you away from theLORDyour odwho broughtyou out of the land of Egypt,from the house of slaves.Deuteronomy 13,7-11

Th i s t heo r y e xp l a in salmost everything ahout religionexcept the religiouspart. l( is clear that ritualsand .sacrifices can bring peo-ple together, and it may wellbe that a group that does suchthings has an advantage overone that does not. But it is notclear why ar ligionhas to beinvolved. Why are gods, souls,an afterlife, miracles, divinecreation of the universe, andso on broug ht in? The theorydoesn't explain what we are

most interested in, which is belief in the supernatural.I I I . BODIES AND SOULS

nthusiasni is building among scientists for a quitedifferent viewthat religion em erged not to serve aIpurpose but hy accident.

This is not a value judgtnent. Many of the good thingsin life are, from an evolutionary perspective, accidents.People sometimes give money, time, and even blood tohelp unknown strangers in faraway countries whom theywill never see. From the perspective of one's genes this isdisastrousthe suicidal squandering of resources for nobetiefit. But its origin is not magical; long-distance altruismis most likely a by-prodnct of other, more adaptive traits,such as empathy and abstract reasoning. Similarly, thereis no reproductive advantage to the pleasure we get from


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in the real world, can respond to two-dimensional projec-tions on a canvas or a screen.

Snpernatural beliefs might be explained in a similar way.This is the rehgion-as-accident theory that emerges from mywork and the work of cognitive scientists such as Scott A tran,PascalBoyer. Justin Barrett, and Deborah K elemen. One ver-sion of this theory begins w ith the notion that a distinctionbetw een th e physical and the psychological is fundam entalto human thought. Purely physical things, such as rocks andtrees, are subject to the pitiless laws of Newton. Throw arot k, and it will fly through space on a certain path; if youput a branch on the ground, it will not disappear, scamperaway, or fly into space. Psychological th ing s, such as peo ple,possess mind s, intentions, behefs, goals, and desires. Theymove nnexpectedly, according to volition and whim; theycan chase or run away. There is a moral difference as well:a rock cannot be evil or kind; a person can.

Where does the distinction between the physical andthe psychological come from? Isit something we learn throtighexperience, or is it somehow pre-wired into our brains? One wayto find ont is to study babies. Itis notorionsly difficult to knowwhat babies are thinking, giventhat they can t speak an d havelit t le control over their bodies.(They are ha rder to test than ratsor pigeons, because they cannotrun mazes or peck levers.) Bntrecently investigators have usedthe technique of showing themdi f fe ren t even t s and record -ing how long they look at them,exploiting the fact that babies,like the rest of us, tend to look longer at something theyfind unusual or bizarre.

This has led to a series of striking discoveries. Six-month-olds understand that physical objects obey gravity.If you put an object on a table and then remove the table.,and the object just stays there (held by a hidden wire),babies are surprised; they expect the object to fall. Theyexpect ob jects to be solid, and contra ry to what is still beingtaught iu some psychology classes, they understand thatobjects persist over time even if hidden. (Show a baby anobject and then put it behind a screen. Wait a little whileand then remove the screen. If the object is gone, the babyis surprised.) Five-month-olds can even do simple math,appreciating that if first one object and theu another isplaced behind a screen, when the screen drops there shouldbe two objeets, not one or three. Other experiments findthe same numerical und erstanding in nonhum an prim ates,

We see th e worid ofobjects as separate firomthe wo iid of minds,allowing us to envisionsouls and an afterlife;and ou r system ofsocial unde rstand inginfers goals and desireswhere no ne exist,m aking us animistsand creationists.

understanding ofthe social world. Newborns prefer tolook at faces over anything else, and the sounds they moslike to hear are hum an voicespreferably t he ir mo thersThey quickly come to recognize different em otions, suchas anger, fear, and happiness, and respond appropriatelyto them. Before they are a year old they cau determinethe target of an adnlt s gaze, and can learn by a tten din gto the em otions of others ; if baby is crawling toward anarea that might be dangerous and an adtilt makes a horrified or disgusted faee, the baby usually knows enoughto stay away.

A skeptic might argu e that th ese social capacities canbe explained as a set of primitive responses, but thereis some evidence that they reflect a deeper understanding. For instance, when twelve-month-olds see one objecchasing another, they seem to understand that it really ichasing, wi(h the goal of catching; they expeet the chaseto continue its pursuit along the most direct path, and ar

surprised when it does otherw iseIn some work Fve done with thpsychologists Valerie Knhlmeieof Queen s University, and KarenWynn, of Yale, we found thawhen babies see one character ia movie help an individual and different eharacter hnrt that indvidual, they later expect the indvidual to approach the charactethat helped it and to avoid the onthat hurt it.Understanding ofthe physicaworld and understanding of thsocial world can be seen as akin ttwo distinct computers in a babybrain, running separate program

and performing separate tasks. The understand ings develoat different rates: the social one em erges somew hat latethan the physical one. They evolved at different points iour prehistory; our physieal understanding is shared bmany species, whereas our social understanding is a reltively recent adaptation, and in some regards might buniquely human.

That these two systems are distinct is especially appaent in autism, a developmental disorder whose dominanfeature is a lack of social understanding. Children witautism typically show impairments in communicatio(about a third do not speak at all), in imagination (thetend not to engag e in imaginative play), and most of all isoeialization. They do not seem to enjoy the company oothe rs; they don t hug ; they are hard to reach out to. Ithe most extretne cases children with autism see people anothing more than objectsobjects that move in unpr


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impaired., thoiigli tbeir understanding of material objectsis fully intact.

At this point the religiori-as-accident theo ry says noth ingabout supernatural beliefs. Babies have two systems thatwork in a cold-bloodedly rational way to help them antici-pate and understandand., when they get older, to m anipu-latephysical and social entities. In oth er wo rds, both thesesystems are biological adaptations tbat give human beings abadly needed head start in dealing with objects and peo ple.But these systems go awry in two important ways that arethe foundations of religion. P'irst, we perceive the world ofobjects as essentially sepa rate from the world of mind s, mak-ing it possible forusto envision soulless bodies an d bodilesssouls. This helps explain why we believe in gods and anafterlife. Second, as we will see, our system of social under-standing overshoots, inferring goals and desires wbere noneexist. This makes us animists and creationists.

IV. NATURAL-BORNDUALISTSor those of us who arenot autistic, tbe separ-ateness of tbese twomechanisms, one for nnder-standing tbe physical worldand one for unders tandingtbe social world, gives rise toa duality of experience. Weexperience the world of mate-rial things as separate fromtbe w orld of goals and desires.The biggest consequence hasto do with the way we thinkof ourselves and others. Weare dualists; i t seems intui-tively obvious that a physicalbody and a conscious entitya iriind o r soulare genuinelydistinct. We don't feel that we ar eour bod ies. Rather, wefeel tbat weoccupythem., wepossessthem, weow nthem.

This duality is imm ediately apparent in our imaginativelife. Because we see people as separate from their bodies,we easily understand situations in which people's bodiesare radically changed while their personhood stays intact.Kaika envisioned a man transformed into a gigantic insect:Hom er described tbe plight of tnen transformed into pigs;in Shrek2 an ogre is transformed into a human being, anda donkey into a steed; in StarTreka scheming villain forc-ibly occupies Captain Kirk's body so as to take commandof tbe Enterprise; in Th eTaleofthe Body Thief Anne Ricetells of a vampire and a human being who agree to tradebod ies for a day; and in 15 Going on50 a teenager wakes upas thirty-year-old Jennifer Garner. We don't think of theseevents as real, of course, but the y are fully und ersta nda ble;

from tbeir bodies, and similar transformations show up inreligions around the world.

Tbis notion of an immaterial soul potentially sepa-rable from the body clashes starkly witb the scientificview. For psychologists and neuroscientists, the brain isthe source of mental life; our consciousness, emotions,and will are tbe produ cts of neural p rocesses. As the claimis sometimes put. The mind is whatthebraindoes I don'twant to overstate the consensus he re; there is no acceptedtheory as to precisely bow tbis happens, and some sebol-ars are skeptical that we will ever develop sucb a theory.But no scientist takes seriously Cartesian dualism, whichposits that thinking need not involve the brain. There isjust too much evidence against it,

Still, \\ feels right, even to tbose who have never badreligious training., and even to young children. Tbis becameparticularly clearto me one night wben I was arguing with

my six-year-old son. Max. [was telling him that he had togo to hed, and he said, "'Youcan make me go to bed, butyou can't make m e go to sleep.It's my brain " This piquedmy interest, so began to askhim quest ions about whatthe brain does and does notdo . His answers showed aninteresting split. He insistedthat the brain was involved inperceptionin seeing, bear-ing, tasting, and smellingand be was adamant tbat itwas responsible for thinking.But, he said, the brain was notessential for dreaming, forfeeling sad, or for loving bis

brother. "That's what / do," Max said, "though my brainmight help me out."

Max is not unusual. Children in our culture are taugbtthat tbe brain is involved in thinking, but they interpretthis in a narrow sense, as referring to conscious problemsolving, academic rumination. They do not see the brainas the source of couscious experience; tbey do not iden-tify it with their selves. They appear to think of it as acognitive prosthesisthere is Max the person, and thenthere is bis brain, w hieb he uses to solve problems just ashe might use a computer. In this commonsense concep-tion the bra in is, as Steven P ink er pu ts it, ""a poc ket PCfor the soul."

If bodies and souls are thought of as separate, therecan be bodies without souls. A corpse is seen as a bodythat used to have a soul. Most tbingschairs, cups, trees


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as what Descartes described as "beast-machines," or com-plex automata. Som e artificial cre atnres , snch as industrialrobots, Haitian zombies, and Jewish golems, are also seenas soulless hein gs, lacking free w ill or mo ral feeling.

Then there are souls without bodies. Most people 1know believe in a God who created th e iniiverse, performsmiracles, and listens to prayers. He is omn ipotent and om ni-scient., possessing infinite kindness, justice, and mercy. Buthe does not in any literal sense have a body. Some peoplealso believe in lesser noncorporeal beings that can tempo-rarily take physical form or occupy human beings or ani-mals:examples include angels, ghosts, poltergeists, succubi,dybbu ks, and the dem ons that Jesus so frequently expelledfrom people's bodies.

This belief system opens the possibility that we our-selves can survive the death of our bodies. Most peoplebelieve that when the body is destroyed, the soul lives on. tm ight aseend to heaven, descend to hell, go off into somesort of parallel world, or occupysome other body, human or ani-mal. Indeed, the belief that theworld teems with ancestor spir-itsthe souls of people who havebeen liberated from their bodiesthrough deathis common acrosscultures. We can imagine our bod-ies being destroyed, our brainsceasing to function, our bonesturning to dust, but i t is harder-some would say impossibletoimagine the end of our very exis-tence. The notion of a soul withouta body makes sense to us.

Others have argued that ratherthan believing in an afterlifebecause w e are dualists, we are dualists beca use we want tobeheve in an afterlife. This was Freud's position. He specu-lated that the "do ctrine of the s oul" emerged as a solution tothe problem of death : if souls exist, then conscious experi-ence need not come to an end. Or perhaps the motivationfor belief in an afterlife is cult ural : we believe it becau sereligious authorities tell us that it is so, possibly because itserves the interests of powerful leaders to control the massesthrough the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell. But thereis reason to favor the religion-as-accident theory.

In a significant study the psychologists Jesse Bering,of the University of Arkansas, and David Bjorklund, ofFlorida Atlantic University, told young children a storyabout an alligator and a mouse, complete wilh a series ofpictures, that ende d in tragedy: "Uh oh M r AUigator seesBrown Mouse and is coming to get him ' ' [The childrenwere shown a picture of the alligator eating the mouse.]

Nobodyisbo m witbtbe idea tbat bum anitystarted in die Gardenof Eden, or tbat martyrswillbe rewarded inbeaven; tbese ideasare learned . But

tbe universal tbem esof religion a re n otlearn ed Tbey are partof bum an nature.

The exp erimenters asked the children a set of questionabout the mouse's biological functioningsuch as "Nothat the mouse is no longer alive, will he ever need to gto the bathroom? Do his ears still work? Does his braistill work?"and about the mouse's mental functioninsuch as "Now that the mouse is no longer alive, is he stihungry? Is he thinking about the alligator? Does he stiwant to go home?"'

As predicted, when asked about biological propertiethe children appreciated the effects of death: no need fbathroom breaks; the ears don't work, and neither doethe brain. The mouse's body is gone. But when askeabout the psychological properties, more than half thchildren said that these would continue: the dead monscan feel hunger, think thoughts, and have desires. Thsoul survives. And childrenbelieve this morethan adultsuggesting that although we have to learn which specifafterlife people in our culture believe in (heaven, reinc

nation, a spirit world, and so onthe notion that life after death poss ible is not learne d at all. It a by-product of how we naturalthink about the world.

V. WE'VE EVOLVED

TO BE CREATIONISTShis is just half the stoOu r d u a l i s m ma k e s possible for us to think

supernatural entities and evenit is why such thing s m ake senBut there is another factor thmakes the percept ion of thecompel l ing, of ten i r res is t ibWe have what the anthropolog

Pascal Boyer has called a hypertrophy of social cogtion. We see purpose, intention, design, even when it not there.

In 1944 the social psychologists Fritz Heider aMary-Ann Simmel made a simple movie in which geomric figurescircles, squares, trianglesmoved in certasystematic ways, designed to tell a tale. When shown thmovie, people instinctively describe the figures as if thwere specific types of people (bullies , victims, heroes) wgoals and desires, and repeat pretty much the same stothat the psychologists intended to tell. Further research hfound that bo und ed figures aren't even necessaryone cget much the same effect in movies where the "characteare not single objects but moving groups, such as swarof tiny squares.

Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham Uversity, was the first modern scholar to notice the imp


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anecdotes and experiments showing that people attributehuman characteristics to a striking range of real-worldentities, including bicycles, bottles, clouds, fire, leaves,rain, volcanoes, and wind. We are hypersensitive to signsof agencyso much so that we see intention where onlyartifice or accident exists. As Guthrie puts it, the clotheshave no emperor.

Our quickness to over-read purpose into things extendsto the perception of intentional design. People have a ter-rible eye for randomness. If you show them a string ofheads and tails that was produced by a random-numbergenerator, they tend to think it is riggedit looks orderly tothem , too orderly. After9/11people claimed to see Satan inthe billowing smoke from the W orld Trad e Genter. Beforethat some people were stirred by the Nun Bun, a bakedgood that bore an eerie resemblance to Mother Teresa. InNovember of 2004 someone posted on eBay a ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwichthat looked remarkably likethe Virgin Mary; it sold for$28,000. (In response prank-sters posted a grilled cheesesandwich bearing images ofthe Olsen twins, Mary-Kateand Ashley.) There are thosewho listen to the static fromradios and other electronicdevices and hear messagesfrom dead peoplea phenom-enon presented with greatseriousness in the MichaelKeaton movie White NoiseOlder readers who lived theirformative years before GDsan d MP ECS might rememberlistening intently for the sig-nificant and sometimes scatological messages that weresaid to come from records played backward.

Sometimes there really are signs of nonrandom andfunctional design. We are not being unreasonable whenwe observe that the eye seems to be crafted for seeing,or that the leaf insect seems colored with the goal oflooking very much like a leaf The evolutionary biologistRichard Dawkins begins The Blind Watchmaker by con-cedin g this point: Biology is the study of complicatedthings that give the appearance of having been designedfor a purp ose. Dawkins goes on to suggest that anyonebefore Darwin who did not believe in God was simplynot paying attention.

Darwin changed everything. His great insight was thaione could explain complex and adaptive design withoutpositing a divine designer. Natural selection can be simu-lated on a computer; in fact, genetic algorithms, which

table computational problems. And we can see naturalselection at work in case studies across the world, from theevolution of beak size in Galapagos finches to the a rms racewe engage in with many viruses, which have an unfortunatecapacity to respon d adaptively to vaccines.

Richard Dawkins may well be right when he describesthe theory of natural selection as one of our species' finest accomplishments; it is an intellectually satisfying andempirically supported account of our own existence. Butalmost nobody believes it. One poll found that more thana third of college undergradu ates believe that the G ardenof Eden was where the first hum an being s appea red. Andeven am ong those who claim to endorse D arwinian evolution, many di stort it in one way or ano ther, often seeing itas a mysterious internal force driving species toward perfection. (Dawk ins writes that it app ears almost as if thehuman brain is specifically designed to misunderstand

Darwinism. ) And if you aretempted to see this as a redstate-blue state issue, thinkagain: although it 's true thatmore Bush voters than Kerryvoters are creationists, justabout half of Kerry votersbel ieve that God createdhuman beings in their pres-ent form, and most of therest believe that although weevolved from less-advancedlife forms, God guided theprocess. Most Kerry voterswant evolution to be taughteither alongside creationismor not at all.

What's the problem withDarwin? His theory of evolu-tion does clash with the religious beliefs that some peoplealready hold. For Jews and C hristians, God willed theworld into being in six days, calling different things intoexistence. Other religions posit m ore physical processes onthe part of the creator or creators, such as vomiting, pro-creation, masturbation, or the molding of clay. Not muchroom here for random variation and differential reproduc-tive success.

But the real problem with natural selection is that itmakes no intuitive sense. It is like quantum physics; wemay intellectually grasp it, but it will never feel right tous . When we see a complex structure, we see it as theproduct of beliefs and goals and desires. Our social modeof und ers tan din g leaves it difficult for us to make sense ofit any other way. Our gut feeling is that design requires ade sig ne r-a fact that is understandably exploited by thosewho argue against Darwin.


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are found in young children. Four-year-olds insist thateverything has a purpose, including lions ( to go in thezoo ) and clouds ( for raining ). When asked to explainwhy a butich of rocks are pointy, adults prefer a physi-cal explanation, while children choose a functional one,such as so that animals could scratch on them w hen theyget itchy. And when asked abo ut the origin of anim alsand people, children tend to prefer explanations thatinvolve an intentional creator, even if the adults raisingthem do not. Creatioiiisniand belief in Godis bredin the bone.

VI. REIJCION AND SCIENCEWILL ALWAYS CLASHS ome might argue that the preceding analysis ofreligion, based as i t is on supernatural beliefs,does not apply to certain non-Western faiths. Inhis recent book.TheEnd ofFaith, the nenroscientist Sam

Harris mounts a fierce attack onreligion, much of it directed atChris t iani ty and Is lam, whichhe criticizes for what he sees asridiculous factual claims and gro-tesque moral views. But then heturns to Buddhism, and his toneshifts to adm iration it is themost complete methodology wehave for discovering the intrinsicfreedom of consciousness, unen-cum bere d by any dogma. Surelythis religion, if one wants to callit a religion, is not rooted in thedualist and creationist views thatemerge in our childhood.

Fair enough. But while it maybe true that theologically corr ect Bud dhism explicitlyrejects the notions of body-soul duality and immaterialentities with special powers, actual Buddhists believe insuch th ings. (Harris himself recognizes this; at one pointho complains about th e m illions of Budd hists who treat th eBuddha as a Christ figure.) For that m atter, although manyChristian theologians are willing to endorse evolutionarybiologyand it was legitimately front-page news when PopeJohn Paul conceded that Darwin's theory of evolutionmig ht be correctthis should n ot distract us from iho factthat many Christians think evolution is nonsense.

Or consider the notion that the soul escapes the bodyat death. There is little hint of such an idea in the OldTestament, although it enters into Judaism later on. TheNew Testament is notoriously unclear about the afterlife,and some Christian theologians have argued, on the basisof sources such as Paul's letters to the Corinthians, thatthe idea of a soul's rising to heaven conflicts with biblical

Tbe tbeory of naturalselection is anempirically supportedaccount of our existence.But almost nobodybelieves it W e mayintellectually grasp it,bu t itwillnever feelrigb t O ur gu t feelingis tbat designrequires a designer.

think of heaven not as an actual place but, rather, as a formof existeucethat of being in relation to God.

Despite all this, most Jews and Christians, as notedbelieve in an afterlifein fact, even peop le who claim tohave no religion at all tend to believe in one. Our afterlifebeliefs are clearly expressed in popular books such as Th eFive PeopleYouMeet in Heaven andA Travel GuidetoHeaveAs the uide puts it.

Heaven is dynamic. It's Ijiirsting with excitement andaction. It's the ultimate plavg:round. created purely forour enjoyment, by someone who knows what (.'njoymcntmeans, because H e invented it. h's Disney W orld, Hawaii,Paris, Rome, and New York all rolled up info one. And it'sfor v r Heaven truly is the vacation that never ends.

(This sounds a bit like hell to me, but it is appareutlyto some people's taste.)

Religious authorities and scholars are often motivatedto explore and reach out to scienceas when the pope em braced evolution and the Dalai Lama becaminvolved with neuroscience. Thedo this in part to make theiworld view more palatable to others, and in part because they arlcgitiuiateiy concerned about anclash with scientific findings. Nhonest person wants to be in thposition of defending a view thamakes manifestly false claims, sreligious authorities and scholaroften make serious efforts towarreconciliationfor instance, try into interpret the Bible in a way thais consistent with what we know

about the age of the earth.If people got their religious ideas from ecclesiastica

authorities., these efforts might lead religion away from thsupernatural. Scientific views would spread through relgious communities. Supernatural beliefs would gradualldisappear as the theologically correct version ofareligiogradually became consistent with the secular world vieAs Stephen Jay Gould hoped, religion would stop steppinon science's toes.

But this scenario assumes the wrong account of wherSLipernalural ideas come from. Religious teachings certainshape many of the specific beliefs we hold; nobody is borwith the idea that the birthplace of humanity was the Gaden of Eden , or that the soul enters the body at the m omeof conception, or that martyrs w ill be rewarded with sexuaccess to scores of virgins. These ideas are learned . But thuniversal themes of religion are not learned. They emergas accidental by-products of our mental systems. They a


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Documents

is god an accident.pdf