Give us this day our daily endorphins

Why do people engage in religious rituals? 

In keeping with suggestion of ethologist Niko Tinbergen, this question is actually four separate “why” questions.  Rather than dealing with the first three Why questions (Phylogeny, Ontogeny or Function), I’d like to consider only the fourth Why, Proximate Cause, with regard to the practice of engaging in religious rituals.  In other words, this post will consider the bodily machinery that leads people to attend religious rituals: the immediate payoff to the human animal.

Many believers would answer this question by introspecting.  Believers have often told me that they go to church because they “experience God.”  [How strange that God doesn’t so often hang out in the home, at cocktail parties or in Las Vegas!].  Many believers thus think that you can simply think about thinking to figure out why they do things.  Numerous and repeated experiments have proven introspection to be woefully unreliable, however.

For instance, in 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” [Psychological Review 84, pp. 231-259.]  They allowed female subjects to examine and select stockings.  The subjects offered lots of reasons for why they selected the stockings they selected (they spoke of such things as texture and sheerness).  Unbeknown to them, the stockings were identical.  This and numerous additional experiments robustly demonstrate that people, though they always gave reasons for their choices, are often mistaken. “Inner workings of important aspects of the mind, including our own …

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Who gets to be “on top”? Science versus Religion

For centuries, established religions have asserted that science should be viewed through the lens of religion.  Over the past few years, scientifically-oriented writers have turned that view on its head.  They have asserted that it is more appropriate to view religious practices through the lens of science.

The recent flurry of books includes the following:

  • Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer (2002)
  • The Human Story, by Robin Dunbar (2004)
  • Breaking the Spell, by Daniel Dennett (2006)
  • Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, By David Sloan Wilson (2003)
  • How We Believe, by Michael Shermer (1999)
  • Why God’s Persist, by Robert Hinde (1999)
  • The End of Faith, by Sam Harris (2004)
  • Attachment, Evolution and the Psychology of Religion, by Lee Kirkpatrick (2005)
  • In Gods We Trust, by Scott Atran (2002)

Though I own each of these books, I have completely read only half of them; I’m partly through the others.  They are a priority on my reading list given the high stakes of failing to understand religious practices (religious tensions and wars everywhere one cares to look). 

For anyone just getting started in this area, I recommend Dennett’s 2006 work, Breaking the Spell.  This book is classic Dennett: eloquent, heartfelt and clear.  He works extra hard so that he is not only preaching to the choir. He spends the first one-hundred pages working to convince Believers to give him a chance.  It’s quite an extraordinary opening gambit.

Most of the above books concern …

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The Brain is not a Computer.

How often do you hear someone say that the brain is a computer?  This statement is not literally true. The brain is certainly not like a desktop computer. Brains don’t look like computers; there’s no CPU in the head.  Neurons aren’t all wired together to an executive control center.  Human brains have a massively parallel architecture. Cognitive scientists who have carefully thought through this issue arrive at this same conclusion:  the brain does not really resemble a computer, certainly not any sort of computer in general use today.

The brain as computer is a seductive metaphor. According to Edwin Hutchins, “The last 30 years of cognitive science can be seen as attempts to remake the person in the image of the computer.” See Cognition in the Wild (1996).

Metaphors are models, however, and models are imperfect versions of the reality they portray.  Metaphors accentuate certain parts of reality while downplaying other parts. 

Unfortunately, many people “reify” the brain-as-computer metaphor: they accept this metaphor as literal truth, leading to various misunderstandings about human cognition.

Here’s another big difference between brains and computers: human cognition is fault-tolerant and robust.  In other words, our minds continue to function even when the information is incomplete (e.g., while we’re driving in the rain) or when our purposes or options are unclear (e.g., navigating a cocktail party).  Computers, on the other hand, are always one line of code away from freezing up. 

In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire:  On the Matter of the Mind (1992) Gerald M. …

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How We Really Think About Religion and Politics: The Power of Metaphors

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

The above is an excerpt from “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a poem on which John Godfrey re-told an ancient Indian fable that serves as an allegory. The lesson is this: the lens through which we view reality accentuates some features while downplaying others.  It must be this way, because we are creatures of limited attentional capacities. 

Metaphors are the lenses through which we view our world.  In abstract fields like religion and politics, the use of metaphors isn’t just fanciful (although it can be fanciful); the use of metaphors is absolutely necessary to understand abstract concepts.  Further, research has shown that the use of conceptual metaphors is systematic, not ad hoc. 

Just as physics students understand the flow of electricity by reference to the flow of water, the rest of us use metaphors to understand our own abstract concepts (e.g., in the fields of religion and politics).  More important, without metaphors, we would have no meaningful understanding of most abstract concepts.  Therefore, whenever we discuss any abstract concept, we are compelled to relentlessly engage in the use of metaphors–there is no other way to talk or write about such things. 

Not convinced? What does this matter? Read on and consider the examples.  This was literally and truly a life-changing idea for me.

In Metaphors We …

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