Is Religious Belief Part of Human Nature?

This seems closely related http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9360000/9360157.stm It’s all about imaginary friends which are much more common then one might think, or as common as one might think if you count deities.

I know you didn’t really mean it, but I have to nitpick.

We need to let go of our insatiable need for answers.

On the contrary, our insatiable need for answers is what drives us. It forces us to explore, investigate, and learn. What we actually need to let go of is the acceptance of simple answers that do not progress our understanding of the universe around us. Religion gives us the simple answers in the form of “Goddidit”, while science provides the mean to dig deeper.

I know you pretty much concluded with that. I just felt it was a really poor sentence to lead into it.

(Hemant says: I could’ve phrased it better, but I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’m all for curiosity, and you’re right that our need for answers drives us. I’m saying, however, that we need to accept that we will never have the answers to everything. Let’s focus on what we *can* know and accept what we can never know.)

Next project: Is it human nature to mock people for believing absurd fairytales?

I think that childhood dependency creates a strong need for gods. We are born helpless and only survive because big, powerful, all-knowing adults meet all our needs. Then we grow up and are cast adrift in a harsh, cold world without caregivers, protectors and someone with all the answers. Gods fill that empty slot.
It’s no accident that gods are often described as powerful father figures; and that xtians refer to god as “Our Father”.

@Militant Maggie

Frankly, I think science has answered FAR more questions that religion.

This is a pretty naive statement. First of all, which “religion” are you referring to? If you are referring to all religions, you have “answers” for every question you could ever think of. It’s not about who answers the most questions. Most religions have some kind of belief on any given subject, so it’s not about who answered the question, its about who’s right. Maybe that’s what you meant when you said that science has “answered” more questions.

I think spirituality or deism might be human nature in some cases, but not religion. If you didn’t have any scientific evidence, you could come up with a creator for the universe and such, but I don’t think anyone can look at a rainbow and suddenly feel the need to believe a complex religious dogma like that of Catholicism as part of human nature. I’m not sure if I’m making any sense here–I can see where someone uninformed or not intellectually mature could jump from unexplained incident to there is a higher power, but I don’t think anyone jumps from unexplained incident to a higher power who impregnated a virgin and sent his son to die for everyone’s sins and then raised him from the dead.

I mean, I don’t know how I would have reacted to our environment without the scientific evidence we have available now–I might have ended up a deist. But I just don’t think the incredibly complex religions that exist today can possibly be human nature. It doesn’t make much sense to try to find a reason for something unexplainable with a complex dogma that is equally unexplainable. Looking at some of the earliest religious beliefs that focus mainly on the earth and universe, I think those are the kind of things you could believe from human nature. It’s human influence, not nature, that persists the religions we have today.

I was at a lecture about religion and one of the things mentioned by the speaker was how ancient and universal religion (in its various forms) is. Afterwards, I pointed out that as religion arises in even primitive cultures, but the first recorded areligion/atheism required a far more advanced culture, it appears atheism is far more advanced than religion. IIRC, the speaker (being religious) didn’t quite agree with my conclusion.

@Anna:

Once again, I find myself wishing we could do a social experiment and raise children in isolation to see what (if any) religious beliefs would arise naturally. Modern children in the modern world (with access to scientific answers) are very different from primitive cave-dwellers. Would they invent gods? It would certainly be interesting to find out.

This sounds like the sort of experiment Frederick II would have tried in the 13th Century CE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor#Science

We need to let go of our insatiable need for answers.

I’m going to have to disagree with the need to let go of our need for answers. I agree that we need to accept that some things we won’t be able to answer, but that doesn’t mean we should stop looking. The purpose of Science is to find answers, and not finding or finding that we cannot know the answer is not the same as proving that god exists.

As it works now, every bit of knowledge we gain opens doors to even more questions that we want to answer. I don’t know if the cumulative knowledge in the universe is finite or not, but I have a feeling that we aren’t going to reach the end of it any time soon.

Hemant, I know you’ve already responded to this:

We need to let go of our insatiable need for answers. We’ve learned quite a bit during our time on this planet and we’re learning more daily. We have to also accept that there are some questions we will never know the answers to — like if anything happens to us after we die or why we exist at all.

I don’t ever want to give up my insatiable need for answers. I want to know why things are as they are and how it all works. I want to know the answers to questions that I haven’t even thought of yet. I want to know why people accept the answers that they are given without ever bothering to question them.

I do not accept that there are some questions that we will never have answers to. I may never have answers to them and I accept that but we, the human species, have the potential to discover the answers to all kinds of questions. What we need to do is ask intelligent questions rather than nonsensical ones.

“Why do we exist?” is a pointless question. The answer is obvious to anyone who knows a thing about reproduction but give that answer and the silly sods will say that they meant “why does the universe exist?” or somesuch. That at least shows a bit of curiosity and there are some theories as to why there is something rather than nothing. The questions have to be meaningful to be of any value. Part of the fun of seeking answers is finding out exactly what it is that you’re trying to find out.

Also we already know what happens when we die. The process of decay is well understood.

Children have such a great curiosity about the world and ask the questions that many of us, as adults, would find embarrassing to ask. That curiosity should be nurtured and stock answers like “goddidit” should be avoided. They don’t answer the question but misdirect the curious mind into a cul-de-sac of self conceit. It has been said that there are no stupid questions and I agree. It remains incumbent to continue to ask them when an answer raises more questions. A lot of people don’t.

Is religion part of human nature? Of course it is. Humans do it, so it’s part of human nature. “Human nature” is one of those silly terms that don’t really mean anything. Yes, religion is part of human nature. So are computers and genocide and cheerios.

It makes sense that a belief in an afterlife could take root, given the fact that our brain is, at its core, a sensory-motor system. We can only think in ways that the structure of our brain allows, and so our imagination has predictable limitations. Most importantly for a belief in the afterlife is that our perceptual systems can’t really be used to imagine a total lack of experience. It’s easy to imagine experiencing a whole lot of nothing, but extremely difficult to imagine a context where experience itself loses all meaning. If you want to test this (and you’re sighted), imagine what it would be like to have a complete lack of vision – not a lack of stimulus, where you’d experience total blackness, but an actual lack of visual experience.

And there’s no need to get all doom and gloom about what this means for atheism. Another great thing about human nature is our ability to build societies that shape people in ways that they wouldn’t be if left alone. Just as we put braces on a kid’s teeth to make them straighter than they’d be “naturally,” or hell, even teach them irregular verbs, we can intervene in ways that teach children to identify and discount the patterns of thinking that contribute to religiosity.

“Children in particular found it very easy to think in religious ways,” such as believing in God’s omniscience, said Trigg.

My child likes to eat boogers. I’m just sayin’.

Not me though. I am, of course, special.

A new study co-directed by Oxford University professor Roger Trigg says that “Religion comes naturally, even instinctively, to human beings.”

Smallpox also comes naturally to human beings, but thanks to science we now have effective vaccines.
“Natural” != “Good.”

I’m saying, however, that we need to accept that we will never have the answers to everything. Let’s focus on what we *can* know and accept what we can never know.)

Hemant often does a wonderful job at articulating some of my personal reasons for belief in God.

It’s exactly that kind of thinking that humanity needs to grow out of. The primitive need to fill all the gaps with superstition and the supernatural.

As said here plenty of times, we must never give up our thirst for knowledge. If anything is part of human nature it’s that. But faith isn’t knowledge. It’s pretending to know in the absence of knowledge. We just need to accept that we don’t know some things (yet) and leave it at that.

Hemant says, “None of this is surprising.”

On the contrary, Hemant! Please allow me to submit that there are at least two quite surprising things about the early reports of the Cognition, Religion, and Theology Project’s findings.

First, there is no mention in those reports of any intention to submit the findings to a peer reviewed scientific journal. Instead, the project’s director seems intent on bypassing peer review and intends to bring out the results in two books to be published in the future.

Second, it does not appear that these early reports of the Project’s findings are based on an official press release — but are instead based on information leaked to a very few journalists — none of whom are science writers.

I think there are additional reasons to be suspicious of the Project’s findings as represented in the early reports, but those first two reasons should by themselves give us pause.

I’m all for curiosity, and you’re right that our need for answers drives us. I’m saying, however, that we need to accept that we will never have the answers to everything. Let’s focus on what we *can* know and accept what we can never know.

I see what you’re saying here, but I’m going to have to respectfully disagree that this isn’t quite explicit enough, Hemant. “Accepting what we can never know” still skirts too close to giving “I don’t know” as a final answer, which also easily leads to shutting down discussion.

I think the caveat there is to accept that there are something things we may never know in our lifetime but to continue questioning and analyzing and evaluating never the less. Because even if WE don’t come up with the answers, someone else can pick up where we left off, rather than having to start from scratch again. I think the problem is more due to the impatience in human nature and the desire to have all of the answers we want NOW instead of accepting that we may never know some things and yet not give into the desire to attribute what we’re not able to understand to a supernatural, untestable explanation.

Accepting that we may never discover all the intricacies and mysteries of the Universe in our lives is fine, just so long as it doesn’t become an excuse for defaulting to simplistic answers like “We don’t know, therefore God!” in the meantime.

Can’t you people see you’re conflating knowledge of how the chemical process photosynthesis happens with the knowledge that plants take in Water and Carbon Dioxide to make Sugar and release Oxygen? That you’re conflating the theory of relativity with the observation that things fall? If god or the supernatural is real, we first need an observable “that.” Then you can figure out “how.”

Fair question. To many Christians, our “observable that” is the evidence in our own lives and the lives of millions of others over the past 2000 years that have been changed, uplifted, or infused with peace of mind and a less selfish attitude.

Another “that” that we observe is that religion, and Christianity specifically, offers the only explaination for human pain and suffering that makes sense to “we people”.
We believe that anxiety and depression, for example, would only cause the very real pain that they do if they were intrinsically and universally “broken” states of mind. A chemical imbalance explains the cause, but not the associated despair. Christianity acknowledges the idea of a world out of sunc with the way it should be.

We see the “How” as our Christian faith.

I’m expecting the usual onslought of comments about bad things that have been done “in the name of” Christianity, but I see that very bad things have been done by humans in the name of almost anything, or nothing at all.

We believe that anxiety and depression, for example, would only cause the very real pain that they do if they were intrinsically and universally “broken” states of mind. A chemical imbalance explains the cause, but not the associated despair. Christianity acknowledges the idea of a world out of sunc with the way it should be.

I’m not going to parade around “bad christians” or anything of the like. I am simply going to gape in astonishment that you have obviously never heard of or seen anything to do with psychology, neuropsychology and the biology of the mind.

This, as an argument, isn’t just not right; it’s not even wrong. I understand that you think mind and body are two separate things, but you’re still just asserting that they are. There is still no evidence (anywhere, at all, seriously none, zip, zero, zilch) that emotions like despair are separate somehow from the mind.

In fact, your “evidence” is evidence against you! The fact that a chemical imbalance can cause depression supports the view that the physical chemistry of the brain is responsible for consciousness.

Excuse me while I facepalm…..

I’m expecting the usual onslought of comments about bad things that have been done “in the name of” Christianity, but I see that very bad things have been done by humans in the name of almost anything, or nothing at all.

If both good and bad things have been done ‘in the name of’ Christianity, how does that support the idea that it is true?

Belief is not part of human nature.
Credulity, fear of the unknown, the inability to accept mortality, lack of reason for existence, and penchant for chocking unexplainable events up to a higher power, are.

Anyone who can overcome all those things and emerge a rational nonbeliever has made a great accomplishment.

@Reginald Selkirk:

Thank you for the information.

However, if the Wikipedia article is correct then: 1) this areligion postdates religion by many thousands of years, and 2) it arose from philosophy. This doesn’t contradict the characterization that areligion requiring a more advanced culture than religion.