Thursday, November 24, 2005
SEARCHING FOR MEANING -- FINDING GOD
For many years, good scientific work has been developing increasing evidence that something suspected by the early pioneers of the Enlightenment is in fact true -- that religion and the notion of god or gods that intervene benevolently in the world and human affairs has its basis in the nature of humanity itself and that the program of reason and science has an inevitable uphill battle against this nature. Here is a brilliant essay over at Edge.org that points to a couple of the factors in human nature that are part of this phenomenon. The author, Daniel Gilbert, is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Director of the Social Cognition and Emotion Lab. The two factors he points to are the experimentally verifiable tendencies of the human brain 1) to attribute false causes to random events and to accept things that are offered in the form of explanations as explanations for events (when they are not explanations at all); and 2) to spontaneously generate and accept explanations of events that are most favorable to the person seeking an understanding of an event.
The essay is well worth reading because it involves one of the most difficult processes in human experience: Turning a critical eye on the unconscious operation of the human brain itself. The essay isn't susceptible to the criticism levelled by some who find evolutionary psychology threatening, that explanations of human behavior that point to human evolution involve untestable "just-so stories." Here we see experimental work that unveils the human brain's mechanisms for self-delusion at work.
As for those "just-so stories," I've been developing for some time a theoretical framework explaining human religious instincts on the basis of evolutionary psychology. I call it the "Monkey God" theory. The theory is based on three elements of primate behavior that are hypertrophied in homo sapiens. These are 1) the tendency to see intentionality in every dynamic of nature, 2) the hierarchical nature of primate social relations and 3) the anthropomorphic facial instinct. I offer brief explanation of each of these elements below:
Intentionality. Humans instinctively attribute intention to objects in nature. When humans see an animal doing something, we immediately process the information to find and attribute an intention to the animal's behavior. I see a cat is walking from left to right -- why? This question of "why?" is instinctively phrased in our minds as "What is the cat seeking?" Food? Is it seeking escape from a predator? The mammal -- and especially the primate -- brain that is hard-wired to do this has distinct survival advantages. By seeing animal behavior as a sign of intentional action, the primate brain can get much more useful information about its environment. It leads to the development of increasingly refined and accurate models of animal behavior that leads to increaingly successful hunting and the use of observations of animal behavor as indicators of all kind of useful indicators of other aspects of nature, such as weather, the conditions of a whole biological environment, etc. It is also a key element of the second factor, which is the inherently social and hierarchical nature of primate life.
Primate Society. With only a few exceptions (orangutans, for instance), primates live in highly social groups. And these groups tend to be intensely hierarchical. Reproductive success and survival for social primates depends on the ability of individuals to find their place in these social hierarcies and interact properly with other members of their group. Thus, over time, primate brains have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to their social environment and to instinctively look for and fit into a social hierarchy. Which leads to the third factor, the tendency to perceive faces.
Seeing Faces. Primates have evolved both increasingly sophisticated gestural and facial expression signalling and the neural capacity to perceive and interpret that signalling, all as part of their social nature. As a result, there is the well-documented natural tendency of primates (most especially humans) to see faces in just about everything. Thus the "face of Jesus in an oil slick" or "man in the moon" phenomenon.
These three phenomena interact to powerfully compel humans to the false perception of anthropomorphic supernatural forces. While the perception of intentionality in the case of animal behavior is a good thing for a primate in its natural environment, the brain wiring that makes this possible tends to attribute intentional action to natural phenomena that do not involve any kind of intentionality at all -- for instance in the blowing of wind, the flowing of water, the movements of the earth, etc. It also made it difficult for pre-modern humanity to distinguish between intentional and non-intentional causation in the human sphere as well.
Pressed by his nature to perceive intentionality in nature where there is none, the human mind naturally presses that perception into the mold of a social and hierarchical framework. Thus, not only do we see that nature is moved by intention, but we are compelled by our natures to relate socially with the agent of that action. We perceive a human or human-like actor as the intentional force behind the dynamic operation of nature and we feel compelled to relate to that mystrious, powerful force as if it were a member of our own social group -- a member of that group with superior social status. We see this "alpha monkey god" as having a human face, a set of human gestures and forms in every aspect of nature that can be pressed into that form in our minds. We naturally seek to relate to that high-status person in the ways we relate to individuals with higher status in our real social group: We want to know what it wants and to do that, we seek to avoid its anger, we desire its approval, we intinctively admire it. In short, we worship it.
So, is it any wonder that a short 350 years into the project of the Enlightenment we have made so little progress? Not at all, when you consider that the program of reason is battling tens of millions of years of evolution.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 10:01 AM
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