17 February 2000, 794 words
Genes build bodies, and bodies build brains, and brains build minds. This paradigm is called evolutionary psychology, and it provides convincing explanations for many of our primal attitudes, from male infidelity, to women being attracted to powerful men, to the fear of snakes.
But evolutionary psychology doesn't explain everything. Religion, for example, is a major puzzle. Religious belief exerts a powerful grip upon most people's minds, to an extent that argues that it must have conferred some evolutionary advantage in our distant past. Yet what could such an advantage be? Organisms survive by evolving to deal with harsh reality. But in nearly every culture, people believe in an immortal soul, believe that prayer can affect the physical world, and believe that ill-luck is caused by magic.
Such beliefs are either obviously untrue or have no evidence to support them. Even if it is argued that people find comfort in these beliefs, the question remains as to why our brains evolved to find such comfort.
The explanations of scientists remain, to my mind, unconvincing. They suggest that religion is a technique for success - i.e. a desperate measure people turn to when the stakes are high and all the usual recipes for success - medicines, strategies, courtship - have failed. They point out that supernatural beings often share psychological or physical traits of known creatures or objects. They say that people distinguish between the everyday world and the supernatural one, and find ghosts and spirits fascinating because they do not fit our normal expectations of reality.
All these explanations are inadequate. While they may explain the attraction of religion, they do not explain the power of it. Why should it exert such a strong hold over people's psyches that they defy even their biological urges, practising celibacy and vegetarianism and self-abuse? Why, for most of human history, has religion been a dominant political force? What is the neurological basis of religion's cultural universality?
A possible answer to the last query comes from an experiment by psychologist B.F. Skinner. In 1948, he tried a variation on a standard experiment where pigeons enclosed in a box were able to get food by pecking a switch. Skinner set up the box to reward the pigeon with food no matter what the bird did. The results were fascinating.
Instead of just sitting back and waiting for food, the pigeons developed what Skinner termed "superstitious" behaviour. One bird spun itself round and round; another repeatedly thrust its head towards a particular corner of the box; a third swung its body from side to side like a pendulum. All of them continued these actions until the food appeared; it was as though the pigeons had made some causal connection in their bird-brains between these gestures and getting food.
Human beings are not bird-brains - well, most of us aren't - but neither are our belief systems as simplistic as the pigeons'. Yet the connection is clear: the machinery in our brain designed to link effect with causes may be just as easily derailed, leading to the creation of religion.
This explanation, however, is still insufficient. Humans are not only biological, but also social creatures. Even if our biology malfunctions, religious belief could only have become entrenched if it provided some important, tangible benefit. What might that benefit be?
The answer, I think, may lie in studies which show that people who attend church regularly tend to be healthier and happier than those who do not. The link between stress and illness has also been well-established. And a recent psychological study showed that optimistic people live 19 percent longer than pessimistic ones. In all likelihood, a person who believes in a benevolent God, and who is part of a close-knit social group, will be more optimistic than a person without faith or friends.
So my hypothesis is that, in our far more stress-filled prehistoric days, individuals who believed in the gods' benevolence were more likely to breed by virtue of being braver, more convivial and healthier. And, naturally, the genes that made them predisposed to religious belief would have been passed on to their more numerous offspring, so that those genes became dominant among homo sapiens sapiens.
Given this, it may seem amazing that agnostics and atheists exist at all. But genes do not work in isolation, and since religion is a method of explaining the unknown, its neurology may well also underlie the philosophical and scientific mind. You might ask, however, why, knowing the benefits of religion, I still reject it. Well, in the modern world, no one who is committed to wisdom, ethical action and the pursuit of truth can also be committed to religion. It is simply impossible. Besides, I'm quite healthy, and ludicrously happy.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh