Scientists
discover that atheists might not exist, and that’s not a joke
By Nury Vittachi |
July 6th 2014
About Nury I’m a science writer based in a creativity research lab at a university
in Hong Kong. I love reading Science 2.0 and the popular science journals...
Metaphysical thought processes are more deeply
wired than hitherto suspected
WHILE MILITANT ATHEISTS like Richard Dawkins may be
convinced God doesn’t exist, God, if he is around, may be amused to find that
atheists might not exist.
Cognitive scientists are
becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply
ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged.
While this idea may seem
outlandish—after all, it seems easy to decide not to believe in God—evidence
from several disciplines indicates that what you actually believe is not a
decision you make for yourself. Your fundamental beliefs are decided by much
deeper levels of consciousness, and some may well be more or less set in
stone.
This line of thought has
led to some scientists claiming that “atheism is psychologically impossible
because of the way humans think,” says Graham Lawton, an avowed atheist
himself, writing in the New Scientist. “They point to studies showing, for
example, that even people who claim to be committed atheists tacitly hold
religious beliefs, such as the existence of an immortal soul.”
This shouldn’t come as a
surprise, since we are born believers, not atheists, scientists say. Humans are
pattern-seekers from birth, with a belief in karma, or cosmic justice, as our
default setting. “A slew of cognitive traits predisposes us to faith,” writes
Pascal Boyer in Nature, the science journal, adding that people “are only aware
of some of their religious ideas”.
INTERNAL MONOLOGUES
Scientists have discovered that “invisible friends”
are not something reserved for children. We all have them, and encounter them
often in the form of interior monologues. As we experience events, we mentally
tell a non-present listener about it.
The imagined listener may
be a spouse, it may be Jesus or Buddha or it may be no one in particular. It’s
just how the way the human mind processes facts. The identity, tangibility or
existence of the listener is irrelevant.
“From childhood, people
form enduring, stable and important relationships with fictional characters,
imaginary friends, deceased relatives, unseen heroes and fantasized mates,”
says Boyer of Washington University, himself an atheist. This feeling of having
an awareness of another consciousness might simply be the way our natural
operating system works.
PUZZLING RESPONSES
These findings may go a long way to explaining a
series of puzzles in recent social science studies. In the United States, 38%
of people who identified themselves as atheist or agnostic went on to claim to
believe in a God or a Higher Power (Pew Forum, “Religion and the Unaffiliated”,
2012).
While the UK is often
defined as an irreligious place, a recent survey by Theos, a think tank, found
that very few people—only 13 per cent of adults—agreed with the statement
“humans are purely material beings with no spiritual element”. For the vast
majority of us, unseen realities are very present.
When researchers asked
people whether they had taken part in esoteric spiritual practices such as
having a Reiki session or having their aura read, the results were almost
identical (between 38 and 40%) for people who defined themselves as religious,
non-religious or atheist.
The implication is that we
all believe in a not dissimilar range of tangible and intangible realities.
Whether a particular brand of higher consciousness is included in that list (“I
believe in God”, “I believe in some sort of higher force”, “I believe in no
higher consciousness”) is little more than a detail.
EVOLUTIONARY PURPOSES
If a tendency to believe in the reality of an
intangible network is so deeply wired into humanity, the implication is that it
must have an evolutionary purpose. Social scientists have long believed that
the emotional depth and complexity of the human mind means that mindful,
self-aware people necessarily suffer from deep existential dread. Spiritual
beliefs evolved over thousands of years as nature’s way to help us balance this
out and go on functioning.
If a loved one dies, even
many anti-religious people usually feel a need for a farewell ritual, complete
with readings from old books and intoned declarations that are not unlike
prayers. In war situations, commanders frequently comment that atheist soldiers
pray far more than they think they do.
Statistics show that the
majority of people who stop being part of organized religious groups don’t
become committed atheists, but retain a mental model in which “The Universe”
somehow has a purpose for humanity.
In the US, only 20 per cent
of people have no religious affiliation, but of these, only one in ten say they
are atheists. The majority are “nothing in particular” according to figures
published in New Scientist.
FEELING OF CONNECTEDNESS
There are other, more socially-oriented
evolutionary purposes, too. Religious communities grow faster, since people
behave better (referring to the general majority over the millennia, as opposed
to minority extremists highlighted by the media on any given day).
Why is this so? Religious
folk attend weekly lectures on morality, read portions of respected books about
the subject on a daily basis and regularly discuss the subject in groups, so it
would be inevitable that some of this guidance sinks in.
There is also the notion
that the presence of an invisible moralistic presence makes misdemeanors harder
to commit. “People who think they are being watched tend to behave themselves
and cooperate more,” says the New Scientist’s Lawton. “Societies that chanced
on the idea of supernatural surveillance were likely to have been more
successful than those that didn't, further spreading religious ideas.”
This is not simply a matter
of religious folk having a metaphorical angel on their shoulder, dispensing
advice. It is far deeper than that—a sense of interconnectivity between all
things. If I commit a sin, it is not an isolated event but will have
appropriate repercussions. This idea is common to all large scale faith
groups, whether it is called karma or simply God ensuring that you “reap what
you sow”.
NARRATIVE PRESENCE
These theories find confirmation from a very
different academic discipline—the literature department. The present writer,
based at the Creativity Lab at Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of
Design, has been looking at the manifestation of cosmic justice in fictional
narratives—books, movies and games. It is clear that in almost all
fictional worlds, God exists, whether the stories are written by people of a
religious, atheist or indeterminate beliefs.
It’s not that a deity
appears directly in tales. It is that the fundamental basis of stories appears
to be the link between the moral decisions made by the protagonists and the
same characters’ ultimate destiny. The payback is always appropriate to the
choices made. An unnamed, unidentified mechanism ensures that this is so,
and is a fundamental element of stories—perhaps the fundamental element
of narratives.
In children’s stories, this
can be very simple: the good guys win, the bad guys lose. In narratives for
older readers, the ending is more complex, with some lose ends left dangling,
and others ambiguous. Yet the ultimate appropriateness of the ending is rarely
in doubt. If a tale ended with Harry Potter being tortured to death and the
Dursley family dancing on his grave, the audience would be horrified, of
course, but also puzzled: that’s not what happens in stories. Similarly, in a
tragedy, we would be surprised if King Lear’s cruelty to Cordelia did not lead
to his demise.
Indeed, it appears that
stories exist to establish that there exists a mechanism or a person—cosmic
destiny, karma, God, fate, Mother Nature—to make sure the right thing happens
to the right person. Without this overarching moral mechanism, narratives
become records of unrelated arbitrary events, and lose much of their
entertainment value. In contrast, the stories which become universally popular
appear to be carefully composed records of cosmic justice at work.
WELL-DEFINED PROCESS
In manuals for writers (see “Screenplay” by Syd
Field, for example) this process is often defined in some detail. Would-be
screenwriters are taught that during the build-up of the story, the villain can
sin (take unfair advantages) to his or her heart’s content without punishment,
but the heroic protagonist must be karmically punished for even the slightest
deviation from the path of moral rectitude. The hero does eventually win the
fight, not by being bigger or stronger, but because of the choices he makes.
This process is so
well-established in narrative creation that the literati have even created a
specific category for the minority of tales which fail to follow this pattern.
They are known as “bleak” narratives. An example is A Fine Balance, by Rohinton
Mistry, in which the likable central characters suffer terrible fates while the
horrible faceless villains triumph entirely unmolested.
While some bleak stories
are well-received by critics, they rarely win mass popularity among readers or
moviegoers. Stories without the appropriate outcome mechanism feel incomplete.
The purveyor of cosmic justice is not just a cast member, but appears to be the
hidden heart of the show.
ROOTS OF ATHEISM
But if a belief in cosmic justice is natural and
deeply rooted, the question arises: where does atheism fit in? Albert Einstein,
who had a life-long fascination with metaphysics, believed atheism came from a
mistaken belief that harmful superstition and a general belief in religious or
mystical experience were the same thing, missing the fact that evolution would
discard unhelpful beliefs and foster the growth of helpful ones. He declared
himself “not a ‘Freethinker’ in the usual sense of the word because I find that
this is in the main an attitude nourished exclusively by an opposition against
naive superstition” (“Einstein on Peace”, page 510).
Similarly, Charles Darwin,
in a meeting with a campaigner for atheism in September 1881, distanced himself
from the views of his guest, finding them too “aggressive”. In the latter years
of his life, he offered his premises for the use of the local church minister
and changed his family schedule to enable his children to attend services.
SMALL DIFFERENCES
Of course these findings do not prove that it is
impossible to stop believing in God. What they do indicate, quite powerfully,
is that we may be fooling ourselves if we think that we are making the key
decisions about what we believe, and if we think we know how deeply our views
pervade our consciousnesses. It further suggests that the difference between
the atheist and the non-atheist viewpoint is much smaller than probably either
side perceives. Both groups have consciousnesses which create for themselves
realities which include very similar tangible and intangible elements. It may
simply be that their awareness levels and interpretations of certain surface
details differ.
THE FUTURE
But as higher levels of education spread, will
starry-eyed spirituality die out and cooler, drier atheism sweep the field, as
some atheism campaigners suggest? Some specialists feel this is unlikely. “If
godlessness flourishes where there is stability and prosperity, then climate change
and environmental degradation could seriously slow the spread of atheism,” says
Lawton in New Scientist.
On a more personal level,
we all have loved ones who will die, and we all have a tendency to puzzle about
what consciousness is, whether it is separate from the brain, and whether it
can survive. We will always have existential dread with us—at a personal
or societal level. So the need for periods of contemplative calm in churches or
temples or other places devoted to the ineffable and inexplicable will remain.
They appear to be part of who we are as humans.
Furthermore, every time we
read a book or watch a movie, we are reinforcing our default belief in the
eventual triumph of karma. While there is certainly growth in the number of
bleak narratives being produced, it is difficult to imagine them becoming the
majority form of cultural entertainment. Most of us will skip Cormac McCarthy’s
crushingly depressing “The Road” in favor of the newest Pixar movie.
POPULATION IMPLICATIONS
When looking at trends, there’s also population
growth to consider. Western countries are moving away from the standard family
model, and tend to obsess over topics such as same-sex marriage and abortion on
demand. Whatever the rights and wrongs of these issues, in practice they are
associated with shrinking populations. Europeans (and the Japanese) are
not having enough children to replace the adult generation, and are seeing
their communities shrink on a daily basis.
Africans and South Asians,
on the other hand, are generally religious and retain the traditional model of
multi-child families—which may be old-fashioned from a Western point of view,
but it’s a model powerfully sanctioned by the evolutionary urge to extend the
gene pool.
“It’s clearly the case that
the future will involve an increase in religious populations and a decrease in
scepticism,” says Steve Jones, a professor in genetics at University College
London, speaking at the Hay Festival in the UK recently.
This may appear as bad news
for pro-atheism campaigners. But for the evolutionary life-force which may
actually make the decisions, this may augur well for the continued existence of
humanity. (An image of Richard Dawkins and his selfish gene having a testy
argument over dinner springs to mind.)
In the
meantime, it might be wise for religious folks to refrain from teasing atheist
friends who accidentally say something about their souls. And it might be
equally smart for the more militant of today’s atheists to stop teasing religious
people at all.
We might all be a
little more spiritual than we think.
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