The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (26 page)

30
.
Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? 30 Years Later,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
12 (2008): 187–92.

31
.
Derek C. Penn and Daniel J. Povinelli, “On the Lack of Evidence That Non-human Animals Possess Anything Remotely Resembling a ‘Theory of Mind,’”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences
362 (2007): 731–44.

32
.
“Child Star, Now Grown Up, Re-releases ‘Red Balloon’” (interview with Pascal Lamorisse),
National Public Radio
(December 14, 2007), www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=17253102.

33
.
György Gergely and Gergely Csibra, “Teleological Reasoning in Infancy: The Naïve Theory of Rational Action,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
7 (2003), 287–92.

34
.
Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,”
American Journal of Psychology
57 (1944), 243–59. To see if you can avoid attributing these humanlike characteristics to the images on the screen, check out Heider and Simmel’s original animation online. At the time of this writing, the clip is readily available on YouTube.

C
HAPTER
2

1
.
Charles Darwin,
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882,
ed. Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), 92–93.

2
.
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Words,
trans. Irene Clephane (London: Penguin, 1964), 65.

3
.
Unfortunately, we know very little at this stage about what makes one individual liable to become an atheist and another a believer—even when the two are raised together, share the same general upbringing, and are exposed to the same parental beliefs. It’s certainly not just a matter of genes, of course, because even heritable traits are influenced profoundly by the environment. But learned values, ideologies, and belief systems can take on considerable strength when they nuzzle into the head of an especially receptive genetic host. Evidence suggests, for example, that the personality variable of
religiosity
(basically, how much passion someone tends to feel about religious topics, wherever she falls on the belief scale) is largely determined by genes. Your identical twin brother may be an evangelical preacher while you’re a screaming atheist, but these genetics data help explain why you’re both so hot and bothered by God.

4
.
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Existentialism and Human Emotions
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), 14.

5
.
In other work, such as
The Flies
(1946), Sartre targets the quandary of morality in the absence of a human nature designed by God. In doing so, he fore-shadows the many earnest attempts of recent evolutionary theorists who argue that good and evil, the soul, the afterlife, and God are phantoms of the evolved human mind rather than ontological realities. Unlike Sartre, however, many of these recent writers struggle to articulate a nondeterministic morality that allows any room for free will. This is because, when followed to its full, logical conclusion, evolutionary psychology can lead only to a deterministic moral philosophy. This is not to say that evolutionary processes themselves are deterministic; rather, they are “epigenetic” (bidirectionally driven by genetic and environmental factors). But when it comes to the discrete social behaviors of individual human beings, and the psychological forces that are responsible for such behaviors, the subjective self is impotent to affect the person’s biological destiny. If, for example, a middle-aged man hires a prostitute, it is because the decision is in accordance with his present physiology, which has arisen as a consequence of his unique developmental experiences, which occurred within a particular cultural environment in interaction with a particular inherited genotype, which he inherited from his particular parents, who inherited genetic variants of similar traits from their own particular parents, ad infinitum. What’s more, this man’s brain acted without first consulting his self-consciousness; rather, his neurocognitive system enacted evolved behavioral algorithms that responded, either normally or in error, in ways that had favored genetic success in the ancestral past. This man’s self merely plays the role of spectator in his body’s sexual affairs; so there is no one here to hold personally accountable for his behavior, even though he may be exposing his wife to a sexually transmitted disease or exploiting a young drug addict for his own pleasure. There is only the embodiment of a man who is helpless to act in any way that is contrary to his particular nature, which is a derivative of a more general nature.
     In this sense, evolutionary psychology is antithetical to Sartre’s humanistic thesis; here, the self is only a deluded creature that thinks it is participating in a moral game when in fact it is just an emotionally invested audience member. So just as he did with any religious portrayal of a human nature purposefully crafted by God, Sartre similarly derided any biological portrayal of a universal human nature. In his view—which was rightly held, if one appreciates the full philosophical implications of the complex interplay of biology, genetics, and psychology—a biological explanation would excuse the individual from accountability in the moral domain. If there is, in reality, no such thing as free will, then how can the individual have responded any other way to the stimuli he or she was confronted with? Attributing responsibility to others becomes merely a social convention that reflects only a naive psychology of the causes of their behaviors.

6
.
Rick Warren,
The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 18.

7
.
Steve Paulson, “The Flying Spaghetti Monster” (interview with Richard Dawkins),
Salon
(October 13, 2006), www.salon.com/books/int/ 2006/10/13/dawkins.

8
.
There are certainly many scholars today who, while being well informed of very complex matters concerning evolutionary biology, remain subtle (or not-so-subtle) advocates of some type of “natural theology”—a quasi-scientific branch of religious study that, in modern manifestations, seeks to understand God’s creative intentions in “guiding” evolution. The fallacies of natural theology are discussed in detail elsewhere in the book (Chapter 3). But in general, there are of course many people for whom evolutionary logic and religious belief are not obviously incommensurable and who suffer no apparent conflict or tension by simultaneously endorsing the former without abandoning the latter.

9
.
Simon de Beauvoir,
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre,
trans. Patrick O’Brien (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 438 (italics added).

10
.
Albert Camus,
The Fall,
trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), 27. Originally published in 1956.

11
.
David Albert Jones,
The Soul of the Embryo: An Enquiry into the Status of the Human Embryo in the Christian Tradition
(London: Continuum, 2004), 11.

12
.
Job 10:10–11 (New International Version).

13
.
William James, “Thought before Language: A Deaf-Mute’s Recollections,”
Philosophical Review
1 (1892): 613–24.

14
.
Ibid.

15
.
Ibid.

16
.
In fact, D’Estrella strongly influenced the impressionist painter Granville Redmond when the latter’s parents admitted their hearing-impaired son to the school. As an adult, Redmond in turn befriended the silent film star Charlie Chaplin, who admired his paintings, and eventually the two became so close that Chaplin incorporated some of his deaf companion’s exaggerated gestures—copied from D’Estrella, no less—into his famous cinematic pantomime acts.

17
.
James, “Thought before Language.”

18
.
Jean Piaget,
The Moral Judgment of the Child,
trans. Marjorie Gabain (New York: Free Press, 1997), 257. Originally published in 1932.

19
.
Deborah Kelemen, “Are Children ‘Intuitive Theists’?: Reasoning about Purpose and Design in Nature,”
Psychological Science
15 (2004): 295–301.

20
.
Krista Casler and Deborah Kelemen, “Developmental Continuity in the Teleo-Functional Explanation: Reasoning about Nature among Romanian Romani Adults,”
Journal of Cognition and Development
9 (2008): 340–62.

21
.
Tania Lombrozo, Deborah Kelemen, and Deborah Zaitchik, “Inferring Design: Evidence of a Preference for Teleological Explanations in Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease,”
Psychological Science
18 (2007): 999–1006.

22
.
Deborah Kelemen, Maureen A. Callanan, Krista Casler, and Deanne R. Pérez-Granados, “Why Things Happen: Teleological Explanation in Parent-Child Conversations,”
Developmental Psychology
41 (2005): 251–64.

23
.
E. Margaret Evans, “Beyond Scopes: Why Creationism Is Here to Stay,” in
Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific and Religious Thinking in Children,
ed. Karl S. Rosengren, Carl N. Johnson, and Paul L. Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 305.

24
.
Kayoko Inagaki and Giyoo Hatano, “Young Children’s Conception of the Biological World,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
15, no. 4 (August 2006): 177–81.

25
.
Albert Camus,
The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays,
trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), 94. Originally published in 1943.

26
.
Jeanette Walls, “Gossip,” MSNBC (November 27, 2006), www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15516583.

27
.
Bill O’Reilly,
A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity
(New York: Broadway Books, 2008), 242.

28
.
Ibid., 254.

29
.
Letter to Asa Gray, February 8 or 9, 1860. In Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith, eds.,
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin,
vol. 8,
1860
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 275.

30
.
“CNN March 1997 Interview with Osama bin Laden,” FindLaw, http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/ binladen/binladenintvw-cnn.pdf (accessed November 7, 2004).

31
.
Paula Hancocks, “Kids TV Praises Gaza Mom’s Suicide Bombing,” CNN (July 16, 2009), http://edition.cnn.com/2009/ WORLD/meast/07/15/tv.show/ index.html?iref=allsearch.

32
.
“Obama’s Religious Beliefs: An Interview with Barack Obama on His Religious Views,” WantToKnow.info (March 27, 2004), www.wanttoknow.info/008/ obama_religious_beliefs_views.

33
.
Tim P. German and H. Clark Barrett, “Functional Fixedness in a Technologically Sparse Culture,”
Psychological Science
16 (2005): 1–5.

34
.
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr,
trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Braziller, 1963).

35
.
“Miss California Sparks Furor with Gay Marriage Comments on Miss USA Telecast,” FOXNews.com (April 20, 2009), www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2009/04/20/ miss-california-sparks-furor-gay- marriage-comments-missusa-telecast.