Light On Dark Water

Wired for Belief

We—my wife and I—subscribe to too many magazines.
We don’t have time to read them all, and the time we do
spend on them leaves too little for reading books. Magazines are
by nature bound up with current events and therefore create a
certain pressure on one to read them within a reasonable time
after they’re received, so if you have more coming in than
you can read, you’re perpetually behind and perpetually
putting off something that will probably be of more lasting
value, such as the Evelyn Waugh novels I got for Christmas and
haven’t yet taken up.

A shakeout is needed, and now and then I think I’ve
settled on a magazine that’s expendable. But then something
appears in it that I would be sorry to have missed, so it gets a
reprieve. This has happened a couple of times with The
Atlantic. A typical issue has a few things of great interest
to me, a few that I would consider a waste of time at best (like
the food and travel columns), and a good many of relatively minor
interest. But I’d hate to lose those few in the first
category: Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Hitchens on books,
Caitlin Flanagan on men, women, marriage, and family. (Hitchens
requires his own partitioning of really good from pretty bad
stuff, owing to the weird assortment of ideas he holds, but
that’s another story.)

And then there’s the occasional piece from which I learn
something significant that I wouldn’t have encountered
otherwise, such as Paul Bloom’s “Is God an
Accident?” in the December 2005 issue. I expected this to
be just another predictable materialist’s attempt to
explain away religion, and it is that, or at least attempts to
be. But Bloom, a professor of psychology and linguistics of Yale,
instead offers some pretty impressive reasons why an atheist
might want to reexamine his position.

The particular object of Bloom’s study is the psychology
of religion—why do people believe? And although he comes at
the question with a Darwinian materialist’s
presuppositions, the research findings he presents give us a
picture of religion as a much more peculiar and anomalous thing
than traditional atheistic opinion (wishful thinking, primitive
science, etc.) would have it. His argument is much too big and
rich for me to summarize, but here’s the intro:

Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the
world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an
afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe.
Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants
have discovered two related facts that may account for this
phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a
predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two:
this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive
functioning gone awry.

The whole piece is only online to subscribers, but if
you’re not one it’s well worth your while to go find
it at the library. The research and reasoning supporting his
first point are fascinating for a believer. The assertions
supporting the second point are pretty thin stuff for anyone who
doesn’t already accept Darwinian doctrine. Let me quote his
final statement:

But the universal themes of religion are not learned. They
emerge as accidental by-products of our mental systems. They are
part of human nature.

That’s a huge admission, because the second of those
three sentences is by no means proved between the opening summary
and the final sentence, and in fact is probably unprovable. Bloom
does provide plausible arguments for religion being an error of
the same type that leads us to infer social purpose and design
where there is none, as in the famous case of the grilled cheese
sandwich that was said to bear the image of Mary. But the fact
that the intuition of purpose sometimes or even often goes awry
doesn’t mean that it’s always or mostly wrong. And
the perception of purpose is not the only important intuition
Bloom discusses (you really should read the article). In the face
of these universal intuitions, Bloom can offer little more than
the assertion of materialist dogma.

I see no compelling reason, on the face of it, to pick that
dogma over the religious one. There will never be a scientific
proof for the existence or non-existence of God, so if
you’re the sort of person who wants to appropriate
consciously the fundamental axioms on which your world-view is
based, you have to make a deliberate choice. You have to have
faith. Bloom and his fellow researchers are actually making the
case that religion is a reasonable choice, because it’s
clear that they have no firm factual foundation for choosing
materialism: it’s a doctrine they bring to the data, not
something they derive from it. In this case the data actually
suggest to me that they could be wrong.

Non-believers typically think of themselves as the questioners
of convention, and in a provincial situation where most people
are religious believers by default, this may indeed be true. But
in scientific-industrial societies it really isn’t anymore.
How many village atheists can there be before it becomes an
atheist village, and the religious person the maverick? I like
Professor Bloom: he’s a hard-headed fellow who’s
instinctively impatient with dismissive and reductive explanations of
mysterious phenomena, even as he tries to prop one up.
If he continues to question the
conventional wisdom he may find himself in a difficult
position.