Scientific understanding. Why is it difficult for people to give up religion?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

One American scientist who visited the home of Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize winner in physics who fled the Nazis and became one of the leading participants in the Manhattan Project that created the atomic bomb, was surprised to see a horseshoe hanging over Bohr's desk. “You don’t believe that a horseshoe will bring you good luck, Professor Bohr?” He asked. “After all, being a scientist…”.

Bohr laughed. “Of course I don’t believe in such things, my friend. I don’t believe it at all. I just can't believe all this nonsense. But I was told that a horseshoe brings good luck whether you believe it or not."

Dominic Johnson, who told the story, admits that Bohr was most likely joking. However, the physicist's answer contains a very important and truthful thought. People are constantly looking for a scenario in the events taking place with them, which goes beyond the boundaries of the system of cause and effect. Regardless of how much they think their worldview is determined by science, they continue to think and act as if something superhuman is watching over their lives. Johnson writes: “People around the world believe - knowingly or unknowingly - that we live in a just world or a moral universe where people always get what they deserve. Our brain works in such a way that we cannot but look for some meaning in the chaos of life."

As an Oxford-educated evolutionary biologist with a doctorate in political science, Johnson believes that the pursuit of supernatural explanations for natural processes is universal - "a universal feature of human nature" - and plays an important role in maintaining order in society. Going far beyond the cultures defined by monotheism, it "permeates a wide variety of cultures around the world in all historical periods, from the tribal community … to modern world religions, including atheism."

Reward and punishment can come not only from a single omnipresent deity, as is believed in Western societies. The function of ensuring justice can be divided between a huge invisible army of gods, angels, demons, spirits, or it can be realized by some faceless cosmic process that rewards good deeds and punishes bad ones, as is the case with the Buddhist concept of karma. Human consciousness requires a certain moral order that goes beyond any human institutions, and the feeling that our actions are being evaluated by some entity outside the natural world plays a very specific evolutionary role. Belief in supernatural rewards and punishment fosters social interaction like nothing else. The belief that we live under some kind of supernatural leadership is not at all a relic of superstition that can simply be discarded in the future, but a mechanism of evolutionary adaptation that is inherent in all people.

This is the conclusion that is provoking angry reactions from the current generation of atheists - Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and others - for whom religion is a mixture of lies and delusion. These "new atheists" are naive people. From their point of view, which originates in the philosophy of rationalism, and not in the theory of evolution, human consciousness is the ability that a person seeks to use to create an accurate representation of the world. This view presents a problem. Why are most people - around the planet and at all times - so committed to one version of religion or another? This can be explained by the fact that their minds were deformed by malevolent priests and the devilish power elite. Atheists have always had a weakness for this kind of demonology - otherwise they simply could not explain the extreme vitality of views and beliefs, which they consider poisonous irrational. Thus, the ingrained human inclination towards religion is the problem of the existence of evil for atheists.

But what if belief in the supernatural is natural to humans? From the point of view of those who take the theory of evolution seriously enough, religions are not intellectual mistakes, but adaptations to the experience of living in a world full of uncertainty and danger. We need a concept that understands religion as an inexhaustiblely complex set of beliefs and practices that have evolved to meet human needs.

God Is Watching You is a large-scale and extremely interesting attempt to correct this deficiency. Written in living language and replete with vivid examples, this book explores how belief in supernatural punishment can tame short-term self-interest and strengthen social solidarity. One important piece of evidence of this was a groundbreaking study conducted by two psychologists, Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan, in which participants were asked to play the Dictator game: they were given a certain amount of money, and they were free to share them as they see fit, with an unknown person. Since their choice remained a mystery and the participants were not threatened with any negative consequences of their decision, the most natural response of Homo economicus should have been the decision to keep all the money for himself. Some of the participants did just that. Many studies have shown that some people gave a stranger about half of their money, while those who were of a particular religion or belief tended to give even more.

Further experiments showed that fear of supernatural punishment was more effective in dealing with selfish behavior than hope of supernatural rewards. A deity that watches over our bad deeds creates a rather stifling picture of the world, and the idea that people are easiest to control with fear paints a rather unsightly portrait of a person in front of us. However, belief in a punishing god can be a surprisingly powerful tool for influencing human behavior to maintain social order. Many might argue that the morality imposed on us by supernatural beliefs is often extremely repressive. While this is undoubtedly true, it is nonetheless difficult to understand what arguments new atheists might come up with to refute the idea that illiberal moral systems can have evolutionary value. After all, too few communities have managed to remain liberal for long periods of time. Liberal values can be just a moment in the limitless process of evolution. While the current generation of atheists may prefer to forget this fact, this is precisely the conclusion reached by atheist thinkers of the past - communists, positivists, and many social engineers - who have tried to flirt with evolutionary ethics.

Citing other similar experimental studies that have shown similar results, Johnson provides a powerful argumentation for the evolutionary role of religion in strengthening social interaction. By doing so, he added another chapter to a lengthy debate about how science relates to religion. And his arguments turned out to be pretty well founded. First, not all religions center around a supernatural entity, whose main task is to punish people for their sins. In the pantheon of ancient Greece, gods could be as unreliable and unpredictable as people themselves - if not more: Hermes, the patron saint of thieves, merchants and orators, was famous for his cunning and ability to circle people and other gods. In the Roman and Babylonian civilizations, there were many practices of worship of the supernatural, but their gods were not bearers of morality and did not threaten punishment for those who violate the canons of good behavior. Johnson draws attention to this problem:

If punishment by a supernatural entity is intended to reduce the degree of selfishness and encourage good behavior, then it remains a mystery why some supernatural agents are not only unable to punish, but also punish the innocent. Why, for example, were some of the Greek gods so jealous, vengeful, and vindictive? Why in the Book of Job does an absolutely good God send obviously unjust and undeserved punishments to an innocent person? Why are some supernatural beings opposed to each other? God and Satan are the most obvious example, but this phenomenon can be found everywhere. The Greeks, for example, could turn to one god for help and protection from another.

While Johnson admits that these examples appear to contradict his theory, he sees them as exceptions. “The main thing is a general trend … Capricious gods are no more a problem for the theory of supernatural punishment than the existence of corrupt politicians is for the theory of democratic government. With enough choice - or enough regular elections - the point becomes clear.” In other words, the evolutionary process will make it inevitable that those religions that foster social interaction by maintaining belief in supernatural punishment are inevitable. The problem is that this is more of a blank check than a falsified hypothesis. The conclusion that religion is a mechanism of evolutionary adaptation is inevitable if we consider a person in Darwinian terms. But to argue that evolution favors religions centered on the idea of divine punishment is another matter. No one has ever tried to identify a selection mechanism among religions, and it is unclear if this mechanism will work in the case of individuals, social groups, or combinations thereof. These are the questions that all theories of cultural evolution seek answers to. Ultimately, these theories may turn out to be no more than irrelevant analogies and meaningless metaphors.

Johnson has some pretty good reason to argue that the need to find meaning in random events is deeply ingrained in humans. In this case, the history of atheism can serve as a rather instructive example. Johnson devotes a long chapter to what he calls the "atheist problem," arguing that, like everyone else in the human race, atheists are "prone to thinking about the supernatural," which in their case takes the form of "superstition and superstitious behavior." Perhaps this is true, but this is not the most important thing that can be said about the desire of atheists to satisfy the needs that religion is designed to satisfy. The atheistic movements of the past centuries - almost without exception - testify to their need for finding meaning, which made them copy many of the thought patterns characteristic of monotheism and, in particular, of Christianity.

From the point of view of Christians, human history is not an endless sequence of cycles - this concept was also adhered to by the Greeks and Romans, for example - but history of a very specific nature. Unlike polytheists, who sought and found meaning in other ways, Christians formulated the meaning of life through a mythical story about humanity's striving for salvation. This myth permeates the imaginations of countless people who believe that they have already left religion in the past. The secular style of modern thinking is deceiving. Marxist and liberal ideas of "alienation" and "revolution", "march of humanity" and "progress of civilization" are the same myths about salvation, just slightly disguised.

For some, atheism is nothing more than an absolute lack of interest in the concepts and practices of religion. However, in the form of an organized movement, atheism has always remained a surrogate faith. Evangelical atheism is the belief that a massive shift to godlessness can completely transform the world. This is just a fantasy. Based on the history of the past several centuries, the unbelieving world is just as prone to violent conflict as the believing world. Nevertheless, the belief that human life will improve significantly without religion continues to live and comfort many people - which once again confirms the essentially religious nature of atheism as a movement.

Atheism does not have to become an evangelical cult. Many thinkers can be found who have succeeded in leaving behind the myths of salvation. American journalist and iconoclast Henry Mencken was a militant atheist who took pleasure in criticizing believers. But he did it for the sake of ridicule, for the sake of criticism, and not in order to convert them to atheism. He didn't care what others believed. Instead of complaining about incurable human irrationality, he preferred to laugh at the spectacle that it presents. If monotheism, from Mencken's point of view, was an amusing manifestation of human foolishness, it can be assumed that he would find modern atheism equally amusing.

Undoubtedly, there is an element of comedy in the new atheistic mixture of Darwinism and militant rationalism. There is no way to bring the thinking pattern inherited from Descartes and other rationalist philosophers into line with the findings of evolutionary biology. If you agree with Darwin that humans are animals that evolved under the pressure of natural selection, then you cannot claim that our consciousness is capable of leading us to the truth. Our main imperative will be survival, and any belief that promotes survival will come to the fore. Perhaps that is why we are so eager to look for patterns in the flow of events. If there is no such pattern, then our future will depend on chance, and this is a very depressing prospect. The belief that our lives are flowing under the control of some supernatural entity becomes a consolation, and if this belief helps us to survive all adversity, then statements about its unfoundedness no longer matter. From an evolutionary perspective, irrational belief is not an accidental defect in the human race. It was she who made us who we have become. Why, then, demonize religion?

Johnson concludes that trying to end religion is an extremely reckless move. “Suggestions that this old complex machine, which we assembled in our evolutionary garage, is no longer needed and that it can be sent to the dustbin of history, it seems rather hasty,” he writes. "Perhaps we will need it later." The logic of Johnson's argument points in a completely different direction. If religion is a mechanism of evolutionary adaptation, abandoning it is not so much reckless as simply impossible.

The irony in the case of modern atheism is that it is pre-Darwinian. Finding patterns and meaning in the chaos of events, religions provide people with something that science cannot give, but which the vast majority of people are desperately looking for. Therefore, the new atheists turned science into a religion - into the gospel of enlightenment, which can lead humanity out of darkness into the light. Obsessed with this ersatz faith, which has the same flaws as traditional religion, and yet does not offer any path to salvation, our militant atheists completely forget about their own need for faith. You need to be a truly brilliant scientist like Bohr to see and assert the obvious.