BellaOnline Forums Religion and Spirituality Atheist NY Times Magazine Article

Did anyone else happen to catch an article in the NY Times Magazine (March 4 Edition)? The article is Darwin's God by Robin Marantz Henig. It has some really interesting stuff:

"Which is the better biological explanation for a belief in God - evolutionary adaptation or neurological accident? Is there something about the cognitive functioning of humans that makes us receptive to belief in a supernatural deity?"

There is a chapter on this in The God delusion by Richard Dawkins. He talks about the evolution of religion as a necessity of survival. An example is that in order to survive children must unquestioningly believe what they are told by there parents or elders. If you are told "Don't swim with crocodiles" and choose not to believe it then natural selection may remove you from the gene pool. Therefore even if the stories are not necessary to survival (ie religion) it is ingrained to believe because that is the survival mechanism.

On a related, but lighter, note - have you seen M Night Shyamalan's The Village? It's a really clever study of how a "religion" might get started, similar to the idea of a need for parents to easily control their children.

I think folkpsychology would explain the crocodile (and subsequent natural selection), but it doesn't explain belief in the supernatural. Did Dawkins go into spandrels in his book? I found the part about mental architecture fascinating in relation to the topic.

I don't recall any talk of spandrels however it is not really a biology book, anyway I am not sure I see the connection there.
How does "folkpsycology" explain the crocodile?

Spandrels have to do with evolution of the brain itself. Using a cognitive tool like agent detection, an adaptation that may have occurred is belief in the supernatural because our brains are geared for it. Same thing for causal reasoning. In other words the biology of the brain may have initially misled some to the conclusion of the supernatural and the subsequent adaptation made the conclusion plausible.

The folkpsychology may be a misdirection on my part. It is used to get others to believe as you do. Let me think on that a bit more and see if I can write what I was thinking at the time I wrote the initial post. I've been busy watching the clever repartee going on in here. It has so boggled my mind I'm afraid all coherent thought has fled.

This is an interesting article, to be sure. I am especially interested in the assertion that the human brain is primed to attribute intelligence (in the form of an unseen agent) to events which it cannot explain. Why shouldn't this propensity evolved simply as part of some self-defense mechanism?

After all, if you don't know how something that is potentially dangerous, such as lightning, works, isn't it safer to exaggerate its capacities rather than to underestimate them? By attributing lightning with a supernatural intelligence, we are better able to pump up our fight-or-flight mechanism, and the resulting fear associated with lightning will keep us safer in the long run.

You see this all the time with other irrational subjects. Take extraterrestrials, for example. Why do humans always seem to assume that if there is life on any other planets, that life would probably be intellectually superior and more technologically advanced than we are, and that it would probably be a threat to our entire existence? Isn't it more rational to assume that if there aren't any flying saucers landing here to take over the world at this point, then any life on other planets must either be at or below our own intelligence level or too far away to reach us? Why must all life on other planets be assumed to be intelligent? Is it simply because imagine life on other planets as slow-moving extraterrestrial fungi is more interesting? Or could there be some survival instinct involved in this?

If you think about it enough, you realize that attributing lightning with supernatural powers certainly functioned on some level as a survival instinct. I imagine that primitive humans who were actually frightened of the terrifying powers of the lightning god were probably a lot less likely to get struck down by a lightning bolt than those who had no fear of lightning at all.

Unfortunately, the instinct to attribute supernatural causes to unexplained phenomena doesn't work quite as well as actually researching and understanding the real causes. But given that even in the modern world, fear is a tremendous motivator, you can see how this propensity might still persist. Just as a fear of heights contains both rational and irrational elements, so to does a fear in an angry god.