"Membership in the family of God is neither inconsequential or something to be casually ignored. The church is God's agenda for the world. Jesus said, "I will build my church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it." The church is indestructable and will exist for eternity. It will outlive this universe, and so will your role in it."
- Rick Warren
Friday, September 3, 2010
Scientists are trying to figure out why evolution put a spark of the divine in every man.
Jesse Bering's mother died of cancer on a Sunday, in her own bed, at 9 o'clock at night. Bering and his siblings closed her door and went downstairs, hoping they might somehow get some sleep. It was a long, hard night, but around 7 a.m., something happened: The wind chimes outside his mother's window started to chime.
Bering remembers waking to the tinkle of these bells, a small but distinct sound in an otherwise silent house. And he remembers thinking that those bells carried a very specific message. "It seemed to me ... that she was somehow telling us that she had made it to the other side. You know, cleared customs in heaven," Bering says.
The thought surprised him. Bering was a confirmed atheist. He did not believe in any kind of supernatural anything. He prided himself on being a scientist, a psychologist who believed only in the measurable material world. But, he says, he simply couldn't help himself.
"My mind went there. It leapt there," Bering says. "And from a psychological perspective, this was really interesting to me. Because I didn't believe it on the one hand, but on the other hand I experienced it." Why is it, Bering wondered, that even a determined skeptic could not stop himself from perceiving the supernatural? It really bothered him.
It was a very good question, he decided, to take up in his lab.
God, Through The Lens Of Evolution
For decades, the intellectual descendants of Darwin have pored over ancient bones and bits of fossils, trying to piece together how fish evolved into man, theorizing about the evolutionary advantage conferred by each physical change. And over the past 10 years, a small group of academics have begun to look at religion in the same way: they've started to look at God and the supernatural through the lens of evolution.
In the history of the world, every culture in every location at every point in time has developed some supernatural belief system. And when a human behavior is so universal, scientists often argue that it must be an evolutionary adaptation along the lines of standing upright. That is, something so helpful that the people who had it thrived, and the people who didn't slowly died out until we were all left with the trait. But what could be the evolutionary advantage of believing in God?
Or possibly, there might be another reason the human behavior is so universal. Obviously Dr. "Presupposing Naturalism" probably never read the appendix to C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man." I can hear Jack yelling now, "It's the Tao, you nicompoops. And God put it there. These things don't just happen by themselves. Being scientists, you probably ought to know that."
Bering is one of the academics who are trying to figure that out. In the years since his mother's death, Bering has done experiments in his lab at Queens University, Belfast, in an attempt to understand how belief in the supernatural might have conferred some advantage and made us into the species we are today.
Bering has a credo, a truth he says he's learned after years of studying this stuff. "I've always said that I don't believe in God, but I don't really believe in atheists either," Bering says. "Everybody experiences the illusion that God — or some type of supernatural agent — is watching them or is concerned about what they do in their sort of private everyday moral lives."
In fact, Bering says that believing that supernatural beings are watching you is so basic to being human that even committed atheists regularly have moments where their minds turn in a supernatural direction, as his did in the wake of his mother's death.
"They experience it but they reject it," Bering says. "Sort of override or stomp on their immediate intuition. But that's not to say that they don't experience it. We all have the same basic brain. And our brains have evolved to work in a particular way."
Or maybe God made your brains, Captain avoid-the-obvious.
Through the lens of evolution, a belief in God serves a very important purpose: Religious belief set us on the path to modern life by stopping cheaters and promoting the social good.
Why would the human brain have evolved to work in that way?
For Bering, and some of his friends, the answer to that question has everything to do with what he discovered in his lab — the way the kids and adults stopped cheating as soon as they thought a supernatural being might be watching them. Through the lens of evolution then, a belief in God serves a very important purpose: Religious belief set us on the path to modern life by stopping cheaters and promoting the social good.
God And Social Cooperation
Dominic Johnson is a professor at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom and another one of the leaders in this field. And to Johnson, before you can understand the role religion and the supernatural might have played in making us the people we are today, you really have to appreciate just how improbable our modern lives are.
Today we live in a world where perfect strangers are incredibly nice to each other on a regular basis. All day long, strangers open doors for each other, repair each other's bodies and cars and washing machines. They swap money for food and food for money. In short: they cooperate.
This cooperation makes all kinds of things possible, of course. Because we can cooperate, we can build sophisticated machines and create whole cities — communities that require huge amounts of coordination. We can do things that no individual or small group could do.
The question is: How did we get to be so cooperative? For academics like Johnson, this is a profound puzzle.
"Explaining cooperation is a huge cottage industry," Johnson says. "It dominates the pages of top journals in science and economics and psychology. You would think that it was very simple, but in fact from a scientific academic point of view, it just often doesn't make sense." It doesn't make sense because there's often tension between the interests of the group and the interests of the individual. Johnson gives an example.
...
On the other hand, Johnson says, if there are Gods or a God who must be obeyed, these strains are reduced. After all, the punisher isn't a vigilante; he's simply enforcing God's law. "You have a very nice situation," Johnson says. "There are no reprisals against punishers. And the other nice thing about supernatural agents is that they are often omniscient and omnipresent."
If God is everywhere and sees everything, people curb their selfish impulses even when there's no one around. Because with God, there is no escape. "God knows what you did," Johnson says, "and God is going to punish you for it and that's an incredibly powerful deterrent. If you do it again, he's going to know and he is going to tally up your good deals and bad deeds and you will suffer the consequences for it either in this life or in an afterlife."
So the argument goes that as our human ancestors spread around the world in bands, keeping together for food and protection, groups with a religious belief system survived better because they worked better together.
We are their descendants. And Johnson says their belief in the supernatural is still very much with us.
Wow! To borrow from Robert Jastrow's famous quote, I think this may be one of those cases when the scientists will finally ascend to the top of the mountain to find C.S. Lewis, Blaise Pascal and Augustine sitting there saying, "It wasn't evolution that gave each of you an inherent, automatic belief in God, you dummies." Of course they won't be recognized by the new arrivals. The scientists will ask, "Is one of you Charles Darwin?"
"He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." - Ecclesiastes 3:11
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Comments on "If C.S. Lewis Were In His Grave, He'd Be Rolling In It":
2. Shrode
- 09/03/2010 11:58 am CDT
James,
I (the author of this post) actually agree with you.
But being as how I'm clearly in one camp as far as my own beliefs go...doing what they are doing just seems so absurd. And so I was more expressing my gut-level response.
But it really does seem like they are avoiding the obvious to me. It's like guys on a sinking ship checking all the sinks and toilets to figure out where all that water is coming from. :-)
But ultimately, I don't think you and I disagree.
Part of what I was trying to do here is to demonstrate how I responded when I read this...and on a larger scale I guess it demonstrates how far apart the natural and the supernatural worldview are from each other.
Hmmmm saying, "Gee, why do all of us atheists experience the divine?" strikes me as really funny. (At least from my biased worldview. :-)
And though as a reformed person, I affirm that unless someone's eyes are opened they don't see, Scripture also teaches that the spiritually blind are accountable because they refuse to see.
19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (Romans 1:19-20)
4. Raindream
- 09/03/2010 3:54 pm CDT
Heh, heh. Give me that old time religion is the closing music to that NPR piece.
Oh, my, there was remarkable dissonance in that interview. What ancestral genius invented the idea of God? Wow. What a legacy he has!
I thought it remarkable that the psychologist gave so much credence to personal experience. To say they experience it but reject it gives it a reality others would write off, I think. Are we humans not capable of imagination?
6. Raindream
- 09/03/2010 5:20 pm CDT
Yes, you can believe both, but Christians argue over whether macro-evolution is consistent with the Bible.
8. Shrode
- 09/04/2010 8:49 am CDT
Bill,
Well, Yes. It was on purpose, I think...unless you are catching something I'm not. :-)
Here's the reason for the title - I started to write "C.S. Lewis is rolling over in his grave" because of the atheistic evolutionary reasons they were coming up with for people from all cultures and times to have a sense of morality and the divine. (In other words, against his argument that it was placed there by the creator.)
Then I thought to myself, "Self, Jack isn't in his grave. He's in heaven." And for the purposes of this post he's also sitting on top of a metaphorical mountain. (Or if you believe Peter Kreeft, he's hanging with J.F.K. and Aldous Huxley.)
So that's the reason for the title. Of course, technically, his body is in the grave awaiting the resurrection while his spirit is cavorting with Jesus, but all that wouldn't fit in the title space.
Does that make sense?
What were you thinking? (I hope you weren't thinking that I think someone stole his body,or that his body was cryogenically frozen or something crazy like that. ) 
9. Bill
- 09/05/2010 10:33 am CDT
Makes perfect sense, Shrode. That's what I thought you were getting at :-)
10. jez
- 09/06/2010 9:46 am CDT
Good to read the comments, I thought like James that Phil was a bit rough on this fellow. Anyone who has found the face in the moon or experienced any optical illusion knows the value of checking your immediate impressions; and anyone who acknowledges that human psychology is equally susceptible to other, conflicting religions knows better than to trust it implicitly.
But this interested me more than all of that:
"And though as a reformed person, I affirm that unless someone's eyes are opened they don't see, Scripture also teaches that the spiritually blind are accountable because they refuse to see."
I can't understand how this isn't a contradiction, could you explain it please? It looks like I'm refusing to do something that I couldn't do on my own, even if I weren't refusing to do it -- which feels like nonsense. Is it?
11. nhe
- 09/06/2010 10:14 am CDT
Is anyone else troubled by the notion that "religion" (in terms of how it causes us to "cooperate" in our inter-personal relationships) is expressed here as simply being afraid of punishment because God is watching?
It seems to me that while trying to explain away this "God sense" in us, they are assuming that the primary motivation to "cooperate" is to avoid punishment from this would be God.
Religion certainly works this way, but the true God of the universe doesn't. As long as they work from the fallible assumption that Religion=God, they'll never get there.
I think James has a point, without the Holy Spirit to point out the image bearer in all of us (not to mention concepts like grace and love) science is pretty limited.
12. James
- 09/06/2010 10:35 am CDT
Yeah Shrode I thought we would agree.
Though I personally do not like calvinism, I find myself talking as if it were true. I blaim my random inconsistency as being "post-modern".
I have just finished a degree in Physics and Philosophy, as you can imagine there are plenty of people around me who talk about the whole God and Science thing. The more I read about it and talk to people it just seems that science cannot get to the conclusions people want it to go (either yay or nay). I'm not talking about some a priori divide between "faith vs fact" but just practically whenever anyone tries to draw any conclusions about God from science it just ends up muddled. I'm intrigued by Stephen Hawkins new book claiming there is no God, but from what I understand (haven't read any of it yet), he is basing some views on M-theory, which is like a dodgey offshoot of String-theory which may be the best we have but its incredibly epistemically shakey grounds.
Science and God stuff tends to have people either putting MASSIVE conclusions based on very little, have people going round in circles or having people being able to see whatever conclusion they want in a way that is in my opinion both rational and justified objectively but "obvious" to anyone who thinks anything (Such as this example).
Anyway. From a more philosophical angle I think that if it were possible to figure out the existence of God purely through Logic, or Science it would suggest an unfair God who favours clever people too much. (note: I do NOT like kierkegard's "leap of faith" even if I sound like that, even though I don't really understand it).
From a biblical point of view we don't see a God who favours clever people as well. The pharisees consistently failed though they probably knew the scripts better then any of us (at least better then me!) and when the disciples understood things Jesus tended to tell them that that information has been revealed, not cleverly worked out.
And besides, even if you were to work out the existence God from nature/logic because "all creation cries out to him" or something, it will still be worthless cause you definitely can't get to the cross without even preaching, let alone the Holy Spirit.
So yeah, I agree with you. I also don't think you're that harsh. I think I agree with you and might go further. It is OBVIOUS that the "feeling of wanting God" is caused by the God we want and that anyone who thinks otherwise is just plain STUPID. However, I also think that there are people who are rationally justified to think it obvious it was caused by evolution (for a whole host of reasons that I actually think good, like how unified science is) and are justified in thinking we are stupid...
That is... they are justified if you ignore the massive advantage we have with the creator of all things directly telling us the right answer!
13. jez
- 09/07/2010 6:16 am CDT
I think there are non-stupid people with each opinion, and I've experienced OBVIOUS but WRONG impressions too many times to trust gut feeling without anything rational to back it up with.
Science is testing hypotheses through repeatable experiment, which relies on the universe being consistent. The supernatural as far as I know concerns itself at least partly with miracles, the exceptional events, the moments where the universe is inconsistent, and therefore testing through repeatable experiment is not an option. The popular religions describe Gods which science, by definition, could not. Science is irrelevant, the wrong tool for the job.
Leave a Comment:
I know you weren't saying this at all but it usually pops up so this isn't really a comment so much as a "rant inspired by this post".
However, I think that whilst:
"Or maybe God made your brains, Captain avoid-the-obvious. "
is a valid question. And an important valid question that some people incorrectly think invalid. The jump from that question to "God made your brains" is simply a massive one.
I kind of think that the dataset that says "All people search after God" won't ever get you to either "God did it" or "Evolution did it". All you can really do is "If God did it, how does this data make sense?" (Which CS Lewis has the easy answer) or you can say "If Evolution makes sense, how does this data make sense" which these scientists are trying to answer.
As soon as you try and suggest "it is just obvious". Then simply if someone doesn't find it obvious there is nothing more that can be said.
The reason why this is a rant. Is so many people try and use the "God Shaped Whole" as proof that God exists. But its usually a pointless road to go down (Even the demons believe that God exists!). But there are a number of things that can count as "obvious"... I think the reality is you need a Holy Spirit to actually demonstrate to you the obviousness of it...
Seeing as I think I remember you thinklings guys are well into Calvinism you're probably not part of the set of people I'm ranting at:P