Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Are Humans Hard-Wired for God?

Some scientists suggest that a belief in God is part of human instinct; others argue that God is a human invention. Mark Vernon looks at the evidence.

by Mark Vernon

MOST human beings, even in the modern world, believe in God or gods. The World Religion Database suggests that at least three-quarters of the world’s population identify with a theistic religion.

Conversely, only two per cent are atheists. It is a phenomenon that researchers in the field of cognitive science are investigating, with results that might be thought unsettling for believers. One way to ask why humans believe in God is to study children.

The University of Oxford’s Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology and its Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology has been given a three-year, $3.9-million grant by the John Templeton Foundation to explore exactly this.

The psychologist Dr Justin Barrett has concluded that, when young, we are inclined to believe in a kind of natural religion. Children assume that there are divinities who act as agents in the world —which is to say, there are purposive forces abroad in the cosmos. These "God concepts" are associated in the child’s mind with a number of characteristics.

A common one is that the world is designed — and in particular, that it is designed for the child concerned. Children will also explain features of the world around them in ways that adults do not teach them. "For instance," Dr Barrett says, "children are inclined to say rocks are ‘pointy’ not because of some physical processes but because being pointy keeps them from being sat upon."

Children are also likely to ascribe theological attributes to their view of God. Take a child aged five. He or she knows that, say, there are no corn flakes left in the packet, because of having shaken it. The child will also comprehend that Mummy is wrong when, at breakfast, having put the packet on the table, she insists, "You’ve got the cornflakes."

But the child will also understand that God knows that there are no cornflakes left, even though God has not shaken the packet —because, by that age, the child will also assume that God knows everything.

In short, God is a natural idea for children to acquire. But the fact that there are, conversely, few natural atheists appears to offer little comfort to the religious believer. For the research raises an obvious question: does it not undermine mature belief by showing that belief in God is essentially childish?

THIS s the conclusion articulated by another researcher in the field, Dr Jesse Bering, director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at the Queen’s University, Belfast, and author of the recently published The God Instinct. His work confirms the tendency to see agency in the world, which he interprets as a kind of evolutionary excess.

When our ancestors were living on the savannah, the story goes, their chances of survival were better if they interpreted every swish of grass and every crack of a twig as a stalking predator. Better to be jumpy and survive, than blasé and die. Such interpolations were so adaptively advantageous that human beings evolved to detect agency everywhere, on earth and in the heavens. Hence, the belief in gods. The tendency is reinforced by another powerful intuition, namely, that what is going on inside your head is pretty much like what is going on inside mine.

We make that assumption because we cannot inspect what is going on inside each other’s heads. But by assuming my fear is like your fear, or that my laughter means the same as yours, we are able to have social lives. And, again, sociality is enormously advantageous when it comes to survival — although, once more, we tend to overdo it.

"As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain," Dr Bering writes, "we some times can’t help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven’t even a smidgeon of a neural system there to generate the psychological states we perceive." And it is only a small step from believing that other people have minds, to believing that things have minds, to seeing minds in objects that do not exist.

Like God.

BUT does the logic add up? Cognitive studies of religion are often interpreted as anti-religious, and are deployed with that intent in the writings of individuals such as Professor Richard Dawkins. But Dr Barrett stresses that, strictly speaking, cognitive science only investigates how we think, not why we think the way we do.

It is perfectly possible, for example, to conclude that the tendency to see agency in the world is a reflection of the possibility that there is agency in the world. Clearly, people can have childish beliefs about God. But the believer is called to put away childish beliefs. As St Paul put it, "When I was a child, I thought as a child."

Scientific accounts of religion might help in this process, in the effort to be rid of false gods. The theologian Dr Robert Banks concludes as much in And Man Created God: Is God a human invention? published this month. The best science, he says, serves to expose the believer’s tendency "to infuse their personal preferences into their ideas of God." This is science as a helpful iconoclast.

The call theologically to "group up" suggests a critique of the science, too, because scientific critiques of religion often also deploy childish conceptions of God.

This is rather like restricting a study of music to nursery rhymes. When you ignore the sophistication of Bach or Mozart, it is no surprise that music looks like nothing more than a hangover from primitive times. Scientific debunkers of religion typically reach similar conclusions, having ignored theology’s virtuosi.