The god-shaped hole in your brain

From New Scientist 13 December 2017

Effortless thinking: The god-shaped hole in your brain

Graham Lawton

Is that rustle in the dark a predator, or just the wind? It pays to think something causes everything – a survival trait that makes us all hard-wired to believe

Cognitive skills that evolved to promote our survival also underpin key religious beliefs

Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos

If God designed the human brain, he (or she) did a lousy job. Dogged by glitches and biases, requiring routine shutdown for maintenance for 8 hours a day, and highly susceptible to serious malfunction, a product recall would seem to be in order. But in one respect at least, God played a blinder: our brains are almost perfectly designed to believe in him/her.

Almost everybody who has ever lived has believed in some kind of deity. Even in today's enlightened and materialistic times, atheism remains a minority pursuit requiring hard intellectual graft. Even committed atheists easily fall prey to supernatural ideas. Religious belief, in contrast, appears to be intuitive.

Cognitive scientists talk about us being born with a "god-shaped hole" in our heads. As a result, when children encounter religious claims, they instinctively find them plausible and attractive, and the hole is rapidly filled by the details of whatever religious culture they happen to be born into. When told that there is an invisible entity that watches over them, intervenes in their lives and passes moral judgement on them, most unthinkingly accept it. Ditto the idea that the same entity is directing events and that everything that happens, happens for a reason.

This is not brainwashing. The "cognitive by-product theory" argues that religious belief is a side effect of cognitive skills that evolved for other reasons. It pays, for example, to assume that all events are caused by agents. The rustle in the dark could be the wind, but it could also be a predator. Running away from the wind has no existential consequences, but not running away from a predator does. Humans who ran lived to pass on their genes; those who did not became carrion.

Then there's "theory of mind", which evolved so that we could infer the mental states and intentions of others, even when they aren't physically present. This is very useful for group living. However, it makes the idea of invisible entities with minds capable of seeing into yours, quite plausible. Religion also piggybacks on feelings of existential insecurity, which must have been common for our ancestors. Randomness, loss of control and knowledge of death are soothed by the idea that somebody is watching over you and that death is not the end of existence.

This helps explain why religious ideas were widely accepted and disseminated once they got started. It has even been argued that religion was the key to civilisation because it was the social glue that held large groups of strangers together as societies expanded. No doubt it still has much of its original appeal. But these days, religion's downsides are more apparent. Conflict, misogyny, prejudice and terrorism all happen in the name of religion. However, as the rise of atheism attests, it is possible to override our deep-seated religious tendencies with rational deliberation – it just takes some mental effort.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Religion"