Why Belief?

           

Anthropologists have long observed that every society that ever existed developed some form of religious belief which includes various doctrines and rituals to explain  major life events such as marriage, birth, death, and the hereafter.  They all included some form of creation theory of the universe and man.  Scholars of many disciplines have struggled with the question as to why this is true.  Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces and James Frazier in The Golden Bough wrote about the vast variety of the various belief systems and their works are considered classics. Theologians and people of faith have argued that since all cultures develop some form of  religious belief, they take this as proof for the existence of some supernatural force.  Voltaire went so far as to say, “That if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

Darwinian evolutionists have entered the fray with the observation that over time evolutionary and cultural accouterments must contribute something to the survival of any species.  One such artifact is the  Hyperactive Agent Detection Device (HADD).  Tufts philosopher and evolutionary biologists Daniel Dennett and psychologist and author Michael Shermer have both written and spoken about it extensively.  Michael Shermer gave a most interesting and entertaining talk about HADD titled The pattern behind self-deception on TED TALK.  Use the following to view the video: Shermer Ted Talk.

HADD is the tendency to attribute some cause or agency to any observation or event.  Evolutionary theorists see this as an innate feature of  human beings that served a useful tool for survival.  The classical example is the case of the  hominids walking on the plains of Africa and noticing some  movement in the brush.  There are two possible causes (agency) for the observed movement. It could be the wind or it could be a predator prepared to attack.  There is not any costs to thinking that it was a predator when it is in fact just the wind.  This is called a Type 1 error or a “false positive.”  On the other hand if the movement is thought to be the wind and it turns out to be a predator, this is a Type 2 error or a “false negative.” The cost of making a Type 2 error could easily result in a nice meal for the predator. Michael Shermer characterized this as  a case of the unfortunate hominid earning a “Darwin Award” along with their removal from the gene pool.  The  point here is those  prone to making false negative errors will produce fewer descendants and over time the ones more prone to making false positive and harmless errors will dominate the gene pool.

 HADD contributes to the idea that belief is the default position, an idea that Michael Shermer exploits in his book The Believing Brain.  Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia social psychologist uses a metaphor to make a related point.  He uses a rider on an elephant where the rider represents reason and the elephant represents passion or emotion.  The result is that the elephants controls the direction of movement with the rider making some adjustments or corrections.  In the words of Haidt, “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”

Neuroscientists such as Sam Harris note that the part of the human brain responsible for critical thinking is not fully developed until some time in the early twenties.  The famous Jesuit quote, “Give me the child for seven years and I will give you the man” recognized this truth.  Evolutionary theorists observe that the idea of delayed critical thinking in the humans has a  survival value.  Given the fact that the human animal is the most helpless of all manuals at birth and totally dependent on its parents for survival, there is real survival value for the offspring not  questioning the authority of the parents or other adults.  Again, those with this tendency are more likely to survive and pass this genetic feature on to future generations.
 
This idea of agency gave rise to the law of first cause where the basic premise is that everything has a cause and if you follow all the causes regressively (backwards),  you will eventually come to the first cause which is a supernatural power such as God.  Bertrand Russell, one of the world’s greatest thinkers and mathematicians and an avowed atheist admitted that in his youth that he was convinced by this argument until he realized that he could “defeat” it by asking the question, “Who or what created God?”

Sources:

1.  The Believing Brain (2011) by Michael Shermer
2.  The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949) by Charles Campbell
3.  The Righteous Mind (2012) by Jonathan Haidt
4.  Why I Am Not a Christian (1957) by Bertrand Russell