Human Hardwiring and Religion
Human Hardwiring and Religion
In recent years some psychologists have gone even further, arguing that in addition to many of our fundamental moral beliefs and desires, many of our natural dispositions toward religion are also hardwired into our brains. In fact a wide range of evidence from psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory has been mustered as a way of showing that, like the aspects of morality described above, God is hardwired into our brain. And some scientists have argued that this fact leads to devastating conclusions for religious believers.
Does recent psychology and neuroscience show us that belief in God is the result of a hardwired natural psychological process? The answer to that question is “probably.” Evolutionary and cognitive psychologists have recently developed a number of different naturalistic explanations of religion. These explanations aim to show that human beings are naturally disposed toward religious belief and ritual because of certain innate or native “mental tools.” Some theorists go on to argue that we have these mental tools because they, or the religion that they spawn, are and/or were adaptive for our ancestors and were thus passed down to us.
What sort of evidence is there for such a claim? The answer to that question depends on which of the six major models of explanation one adopts. The most popular model (which we can call the “Cognitive Model”) argues that human beings have specific and identifiable mental tools that make religious belief easy and natural. For example, we have a mental tool that makes us think there are agents around when we detect certain sounds (bumps in the night), motions (rustling in the bushes), or configurations (crop circles) in nature. This “Hyperactive Agency Detection Device” (or “HADD”) leads us to hypothesize invisible agents that, for example, control the forces of nature. And this disposes us to belief in the supernatural.
In addition, our minds are naturally disposed to remember and transmit ideas that violate certain innate expectations we have about the workings of the world. For example, we are born (it is claimed) thinking that agents are physical things. When we (through HADD) are led to hypothesize agents causing the lightning or the wind, we assume that these are invisible, supernatural agents. But invisible supernatural agents are, given our innate categories, counterintuitive and strange. And because of their distinctive strangeness, we easily remember them and talk about them, and this makes these religious concepts spread rapidly from mind to mind (thus explaining the tendency of religious concepts to spread quickly).3
In addition, there is strong evidence that we are naturally disposed from an early age to see goal-directedness in everything, including the natural world. Cognitive theorists call this tendency “intuitive theism” or “natural teleology” since it is a tendency to see purposiveness as a pervasive feature of our world. This naturally disposes us to believe in a purpose-giving force in the universe, that is, to believe in gods or a God.4
Some advocates of the Cognitive Model further argue that religious beliefs and behavior carry useful benefits for religious individuals and religious groups. For example, it is argued that religious individuals and groups are much more inclined to abide by moral rules and engage in cooperative behavior, traits that are useful in large interacting groups where individuals specialize and are forced to rely on one another for survival.5 This claim is based not only on commonsense beliefs or anecdotal observation but on systematic empirical study. For example, Jesse Bering6 has shown that, even from an early age, children tend to follow rules more consistently when they are primed to believe that a supernatural agent is watching them. In one experiment subjects were brought into a room and shown a box under two conditions. In one condition the child is told that there is an invisible princess in the room named Alice, who is carefully watching the whole experiment. In the control condition, children are not told any story about Alice. The children were then told that inside the box was a special prize and that they could have the prize only if they could guess what it was without looking. After giving the child the instructions, the experimenter tells the child that he needs to step out of the room for the moment. Children who had received the Alice prime cheated significantly less than those who did not, and even among cheaters it took much longer for primed subjects to cheat than subjects who were not primed.
Evidence indicates similar effects in adults. Norenzayan and Sharif had pairs of students play the dictator game. In this game one subject is given a sum of money which he can share with his partner. The game is played only one time, and the giver can choose to give the receiver all of the money, only some of it, or none of it. The giver then keeps the rest. Prior to playing the game, students are required to read scrambled sentences. In one condition the scrambled sentences contained one or more of the following words: spirit, divine, God, sacred, and prophet. In the other condition the sentences contained no words with religious connotations. Givers were provided with $10 to distribute. The results showed the student primed with the religious words before the start of the game gave, on average, $2 more to the receiver than those without the prime ($4.56 vs. $2.56). This is at least some indication that distinctively religious concepts dispose us toward greater cooperative behavior and thus enhance the “usefulness” of religion.7