Religion: A temporary phase in mankind’s history?

I don’t often write on science and religion. That’s because it seems to me that everything that can be said was said about a million times already. But much of what I read recently tries to argue for or against the compatibility of religion and scientific research. The outcome is either some justification for denial of scientific facts or what’s become known as the “god of the gaps:” religion confined to these areas where scientific explanations are still lacking; an inevitably shrinking range of operation for god. But I believe that’s the wrong way to think about it.

Religion and science are not two different approaches to explain the world that need to be made compatible, possibly by discarding one entirely. Instead, religion (as well as other superstitious believes) is a historical pre-phase to scientific thinking. It’s a primitive exercise in story-telling and sense-making, that has proven to be of advantage for its practitioners. Religions are part of our historical legacy, but the wide spread of religion we currently witness is a temporary phase. Both are not compatible in the same sense that an MP3 player isn’t compatible with living in the Stone Age. But then, people in the Stone Age were happy even without MP3 players.

As an atheist, my interest in religion stems from them having a major influence on our history and their lasting effect in shaping our societies. It is an interesting question: Why is it that so many people, all around the globe, believe in some god when that god and its tales are in outright conflict with scientific evidence or, in the better case, without evidence whatsoever?

In an earlier post, I reported on results of a study looking for the neurological origin of religion. There have been a lot of studies in that direction during the last decade. Almost all of them however do not so much look for the origins of religiosity as more for the origins of supernatural thinking, or call it jumping to conclusions. The human brain looks for explanations, tries to find patterns, and to construct theories. These are skills that have proven very useful to our survival. Inventing gods arguably serves as some sort of explanation. Yet, superstition generally serves that purpose too, and at the end of the road, if you carefully follow up on the explanations, if you construct correct theories, where you inevitably arrive is: science! And over the course of history, that’s the path we’ve taken: Starting from gods and superstition towards science by continuing to ask and to look for better and more useful explanations.

Thus, one could equally well say our looking for patterns and aiming to construct explanations is not only the origin of religion, but the origin of scientific thinking and drawing upon such neurological basis to claim religion is hard-wired just confirms what we see in the world around us but doesn’t explain it. On that level, the difference between religion or superstition and science is simply how carefully you investigate the data and how much you learn about how to construct consistent theories of reality, ie the question is at which level of explanation do you stop searching. Tests for activity in certain brain regions look for activity on the very-short to short timescale. But that’s not all what constitutes human cognition. In contrast, compared to other species humans are particularly good in careful deliberation, reflection and advance planning. That’s the basis of our success. Not so surprisingly then, most, if not all, religious people sooner or later have doubts in the reality of what they believe in. This doubt has to be constantly silenced to be a good believer, and many people manage indeed to lull themselves into a state of constantly belying their own intelligence. But the existence of these doubts tells us that indeed religion is not the natural endstate of the search for explanation. The human mind wants to question and solve the puzzles. It wants to understand, not to be shut up. It wants to know more.

So, compared to science religions don’t make particularly convincing or useful explanations for anything and knowing what we know today, belief is only possible with working against ones’ own intelligence. We are then left to wonder still, why do so many people believe?

In a recent opinion piece on the NYT blog, Tim Crane (who declares himself an atheist) wrote, in essence, that people chose to believe because it’s easier:

“[S]cientific explanation is a very specific and technical kind of knowledge. It requires patience, pedantry, a narrowing of focus and (in the case of the most profound scientific theories) considerable mathematical knowledge and ability...

Religious belief is a very different kind of thing. It is not restricted only to those with a certain education or knowledge, it does not require years of training, it is not specialized and it is not technical. (I’m talking here about the content of what people who regularly attend church, mosque or synagogue take themselves to be thinking; I’m not talking about how theologians interpret this content.)...

I would guess that very few people in the world are actually interested in the details of contemporary scientific theories... [M]ost people aren’t deeply interested in science, even when they have the opportunity and the basic intellectual capacity to learn about it.”

I don’t find this explanation plausible. True, if one wants to understand the details of modern science it requires time and effort. But that’s true for everything, including religion, as Crane points out himself. Understanding the Bible (to the extent possible) also requires patience and a narrowing of focus. It would already make a difference if more people would at least understand contemporary science on the level they understand their weekly sermon. No, the actual reason why people have more knowledge about their religion than, say, modern cosmology, is that they go to church every Sunday instead of going to a physics lecture. Their mindset is a consequence, rather than the origin of what they spend time on. Just think about how amazingly quickly seriously ill patients learn details about their disease, up to the level where they know more about recent research than their doctors. Suddenly they are deeply interested indeed, it’s just a matter of motivation.

With Crane’s explanation not being convincing, let us ask again: why do so many people believe? I think it’s because religious belief has both psychological as well as social advantages, and that serves as a motivation science is often lacking. Let us start with the psychological advantage. Existential psychotherapy is a particularly simple (and overly simple) model of the human mind. It posits that we all have four so-called “existential fears” – the fear of death, of loneliness, of meaninglessness and the fear of freedom. (The latter refers to the fear of responsibility one has for one’s own decisions.) Psychological problems occur if one or several of these fears take overhand and stifle personal development. Religions neatly address all of these fears. The social advantage comes from being a member of a global community with shared traditions that in many cases are very well organized, providing counseling and support in difficult phases of one’s life. The believer belongs, and he knows where he belongs.

Thus, the practitioner of a widely spread religion has indeed benefits from his belief. The benefits are less pronounced for superstition for which there is no such social cohesion and does less to address existential fears, thus explaining why the neurological origin might be the same but religions are more successful.

The question is now what has science to offer?

On the psychological and social level, science has no such offers to make – at least not yet, and not obviously so. But I think these offers will come, and they will become more and more widely accepted.

On the social level, I don’t think it is farfetched that one day people do indeed go to a public lecture on science every Sunday instead of going to church (must be one of my optimistic days). And the sense of community, that some of you might have found already on the Internet, comes automatically with the spread of shared knowledge, and time and places where you know you will meet like-minded people to discuss what's on your mind. Today, if you are actively working in science, you’ll find your community easily at the next university, all over the globe. Departments of physics look the same everywhere. If you’ve been in the field for some while, you’ll feel at home in either one. Same posters on the wall, same books in the shelves, same topics over lunch. I guess it is similar in most other fields: Science is a global enterprise.

On the psychological level, let us first mention again that science has the advantage of allowing –indeed welcoming – skepticism and doubt. The disadvantage is that one has to accept uncertainty as necessary ingredient. Science does not address the four existential fears as directly as religion does, but it does to some extent and that’s becoming more and more noticeable. There are for example numerous research programs trying to understand, explain, and modify human mortality. Of course these are on very different levels of scientific rigor and plausibility (ranking from freezing in one’s brain, over uploading oneself to a computer, to improving the body’s DNA repair mechanism). And of course they are not as complete comfort as believing in an immortal soul that goes to heaven or is reborn, but they offer a ground to grapple with the process of one’s own aging and death. The fears of loneliness, meaninglessness, freedom: There is lots of scientific research which addresses one or the other, on social, neurological, psychological, or philosophical grounds. That again is becoming more and more noticeable. Just have a look at the abundance of self-help books (e.g. on the topic of happiness). Yes, most of them are based on pseudo-science rather than sound science, but at least it’s a start. The point is not the quality of the science, the point is these approaches are non-religious. It’s a begin of a change of which I’m convinced we’ll see more.

And finally, of course a major role is played by the ancient questions: Where do we come from? and What are we made of? Theoretical physics is on the most fundamental level of our search for explanations. This is why the questions asked in this field seem quite detached from life and understanding current research – and its relevance – takes time and effort indeed. But it is this research we need to truly understande our place in the universe.