The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (7 page)

In fact, there’s reason to believe that, even for the committed atheist, the voice of God is still annoyingly there, though perhaps reduced to no more than a whisper. I suspect Dawkins would be reluctant to tell us if ever he felt strangely “called” to be the proselytizing atheist he has become—that this is ironically what he feels meant for, much as I sometimes feel that my purpose in life is to explain to others why such feelings of purpose are cognitive illusions. But we do know that Sartre, at least, had precisely these types of fleeting theistic inclinations.

We are privy to these secret ruminations only because Sartre’s partner, Simone de Beauvoir, had the good sense to keep a meticulous diary of her conversations with Sartre in the few years leading up to his death, a collection of personal, sometimes startlingly frank exchanges that she published as an anthology shortly before her own death. And what Beauvoir discovered between coffee and cigarettes at the famed café Les Deux Magots and in Sartre’s cluttered apartment was an especially lucid mind, a man who was unusually aware of his own contradictions in thought and willing to acknowledge the niggling sense that, at least in the theater of his own consciousness, there was a lingering, strange tension between his explicit beliefs and a very subtle, very particular type of creationist cognition.

Below is Sartre’s inward glimpse of how, despite his atheistic convictions, there was all along a certain conceptual impotence in his “existence precedes essence” formula when applied to his own subjective consciousness. “I don’t see myself as so much dust that has appeared in the world,” he confessed to Beauvoir,

This is a rather amazing admission from someone who claimed to have rid himself of God back as a naughty schoolboy secretly playing with matches in the bathroom. But there’s no hypocrisy here. Unlike most people, Sartre didn’t allow this glandular feeling to persuade him that God actually existed. Rather, he considered it to be a trick of the mind. And what we can say now about this trick was that it was rendered by Sartre’s own very human theory of mind. Like so many others, Sartre couldn’t help but attribute some inherent purpose to his life—to see a grand mind at work behind the scenes.

Sartre wasn’t alone in experiencing this puzzling juxtaposition of his atheistic beliefs and his private illusions. Other astute thinkers and writers have noticed a similar disconnect; and often we find it in the voice of their fictional characters. In Albert Camus’
The Fall
(1956), for example, the protagonist is Jean-Baptiste Clamence, an eccentric, ex-Parisian lawyer who embarks on a brooding journey to dissect the artifice of meaning. For Clamence, meaning is an illusion that embeds individuals in preposterous self-narratives leading to “absurd” human conventions. Ultimately, he concludes that human existence itself is an affliction of epic proportions, so cosmically irrelevant is our hidden suffering.

But Clamence wasn’t always like this. It was only after a series of calamitous events in his personal life (namely, a lingering guilt about deciding not to try to rescue a woman who leapt to her death from a bridge as he happened to stroll past her) that he became such a cynical misanthrope. Before this, the atheistic Clamence saw himself, oddly, as a metaphysically privileged entity—a secular angel who, upon reflecting on his own seemingly blessed station in life, felt the shadowy hand of a benevolent Creator who had designed him:

Clamence realizes that he once was ensnared by the very illusion he had since come to discover and expose as a seductive artifice of human thought. Such self-surprising insights about the atheist’s rather embarrassing vulnerability to feel as though he were the product of intelligent design would seem to suggest that logical thought in this domain runs against the grain of our natural psychology.

An objection to this “nativist” view of an intentional, creative God, however, is that even atheists have been polluted by cultural residue, including the idea that God creates man and infuses him with a special essence or spirit—what many Christians call “ensoulment.” The concept of God as creator of souls certainly wasn’t confined to Sartre’s twentieth-century French bourgeoisie. In his book
The Soul of the Embryo
(2005), University of Surrey bioethicist David Albert Jones reveals how this line of thought stretches back to the very earliest days of Christian theology, with liberal evidence of such creationist reasoning even in the Hebrew scriptures. “The molding of the body in the womb, the gift of life and the call from God are coterminous,” summarizes Jones of these precanonical writings.
¹¹
And although you may not like Sartre’s particular image of God as a brusque tinker hammering out soul after soul like a sweaty smithy knocking off cheap metal goods, in the book of Job we can see how this analogy isn’t much of a leap from traditional Christian thought. “Remember that you fashioned me like clay,” says Job to the Lord. “Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese? You clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews.”
¹²

When growing up hearing tales such as these, is it any wonder that so many people believe that there is some intelligent, “higher” purpose to human life? Many contemporary atheists, for example, believe that such religious ideas amount to a sort of cultural virus, the human brain being parasitized by virulent concepts that children catch like a bug from infected adults, and that are especially potent in a climate of fear and ignorance. And atheists and believers alike see children generally as acquiring religion from outside sources. But are children’s minds really the religious tabula rasae we make them out to be? Or rather, are human beings, in some sense, born believers?

Scientists would be hard-pressed to find and interview feral children who’ve been reared in a cultural vacuum to probe for aspects of quasi-religious thinking. In reality, the closest we may ever get to conducting this type of thought experiment is to study the few accounts of deaf-mutes who, allegedly at least, spontaneously invented their own cosmologies during their prelinguistic childhoods. In his book
The Child’s Religion
(1928), the Swiss educator Pierre Bovet recounted that even Helen Keller, who went deaf and blind at nineteen months of age from an undiagnosed illness, was said to have instinctively asked herself, “Who made the sky, the sea, everything?”

Such rare accounts of deaf-mute children pontificating about Creation through some sort of internal monologue of nonverbal thought—thought far removed from any known cultural iterations or socially communicated tales of Genesis—are useful to us because they represent the unadulterated mind at work on the problem of origins. If we take these accounts at face value, the basic existential problem of reasoning about our purpose and origins would appear not to be the mental poison of religion, society, or education, but rather an insuppressible eruption of our innate human minds. We’re preoccupied with why things are. Unlike most people, these deaf-mute children—most of whom grew up before the invention of a standardized symbolic communication system of gestures, such as American Sign Language (ASL)—had no access to the typical explanatory balms of science and religion in calming these bothersome riddles. Without language, one can’t easily share the idea of a purposeful, monotheistic God with a naive child. And the theory of natural selection is difficult enough to convey to a normal speaking and hearing child, let alone one who can do neither. These special children were therefore left to their own devices in making sense of how the world came to be and, more intriguingly, in weaving their own existence into the narrative fabric of this grand cosmology.

In an 1892 issue of
The Philosophical Review,
William James, brother to the novelist Henry James and himself arguably the world’s most famous psychologist of his era (some years later, he would write the classic
Varieties of Religious Experience
), penned an introduction to the autobiographical account of one such deaf-mute, Theophilus Hope d’Estrella. “I have Mr. d’Estrella’s permission,” James tells us, “to lay before the readers of
The Philosophical Review
a new document which is most interesting by its intrinsic content.”
¹³
For uncertain reasons (perhaps literary), D’Estrella writes of his early childhood in the third person, but it’s indeed a remarkably eloquent and beautifully composed piece of work. Born in 1851 in San Francisco to a French-Swiss father he never met and a Mexican mother who died when he was five years old, D’Estrella grew up as an orphan raised by his mother’s short-tempered best friend—another Mexican woman who, judging by her fondness for whipping him over the slightest misdeeds, apparently felt burdened by his frustratingly incommunicative presence.

With no one to talk to otherwise, and only wordless observations and inborn powers of discernment to guide his naive theories of the world, D’Estrella retreated into his own imagination to make sense of what must have been a very confusing existential situation. For example, he developed an animistic theory of the moon that hints at the egocentric nature of children’s minds, particularly with respect to morality:

D’Estrella writes also about his notions of the origins of natural objects and events in the world—namely, the sun, the stars, the wind, and the ocean. In these observations we see something like a natural creationist bent, one that reflexively imbues objects in the world with pragmatic functions and clear purposes:

It’s worth cautioning that D’Estrella would have been about forty years old when he wrote about these early childhood experiences—experiences that were retrospectively given voice by a mind that had since learned language. In fact, by the time he authored these personal accounts, D’Estrella had become an accomplished artist and was employed as the drawing instructor at the unfortunately named California Institution for the Deaf and Dumb.
¹⁶
But regardless of the inevitable failings of memory, D’Estrella’s recollections were still convincing enough for William James to argue that the human mind, even without language, is predisposed to engage in abstract, metaphysical reflection. “It will be observed,” James summed up authoritatively at the end of the essay in
The Philosophical Review,
“that [D’Estrella’s] cosmological and ethical reflections were the outbirth of his solitary thought.”
¹⁷

A few decades later, another psychologist—this time the influential cognitive developmentalist from Geneva, Jean Piaget—elaborated on this innate cosmological penchant by postulating that all school-age children tend to think in “artificialist” terms. To Piaget, young children weren’t simply less knowledgeable than older children and adults, but they were qualitatively different types of thinkers operating under cognitive constraints—constraints that were systematically shed with age and over discrete stages of development. In Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development, “artificialism” referred to young children’s seeing aspects and features of the natural world as existing solely to solve human problems, or at least meant for human use. Like Sartre, however, Piaget was skeptical of atheists’ claims of entirely escaping this psychological bias of seeing the workings of the natural world in intentional, human-focused terms. Rather, he suspected that artificialist beliefs never really went away; instead, they would continue cropping up in the nonbeliever’s mental representations in very subtle ways. “A semi-educated man,” wrote Piaget, “may very well dismiss as ‘contrary to science’ a theological explanation of the universe, and yet find no difficulty in accepting the notion that the sun is there to give us light.”
¹⁸