The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (8 page)

Piaget’s central argument has continued to hold up under controlled experimental conditions. This is the finding that children, and to some extent even science-literate adults, are compelled to reason in terms of an inherent purpose when deliberating about origins—that objects, artifacts, events and even whole animals exist “for” a certain reason. That is to say, our minds are heavily biased toward reasoning as though a designer held a conception in mind. In fact, contrary to what many atheists tend to believe, recent findings from the cognitive sciences suggest that, just like a crude language sprouting up, at least some form of religious belief and behavior would also probably appear spontaneously on a desert island untouched by cultural transmission, particularly beliefs involving purpose and origins.

Underpinning purpose-based thinking is what’s called “teleo-functional reasoning,” which sounds more complicated than it really is. Actually, you do it all the time—at least, every time you walk into your local Brookstone store or stand before a museum display case scratching your head over some baroque contraption for, say, cleaning cow hooves or extracting molars. In fact, “teleo-functional reasoning” is just a fancy philosophical expression that refers to people’s thinking that something
exists for a preconceived purpose
rather than simply came to be as a functionless outgrowth of physical or otherwise natural processes.

It’s entirely logical to say that a showerhead sprays clean, plumbed-in water over dirty bodies because it’s designed for such a purpose. But it would sound absolutely bizarre to say that a natural waterfall is “for” anything in particular, even though, if one were standing beneath a waterfall, it might well do the very same thing the showerhead does. As an artifact, the showerhead is the product of human intentional design, and thus it has an essential purpose that can be traced back to the mind of its creator (in this case, some long-forgotten and vastly underappreciated Athenian inventor working on the athletic stadiums in ancient Greece). Without a theory of mind, we couldn’t easily reflect on the purpose of this object, because “purpose,” in this sense, implies a purposeful
mental agent
as creator. By contrast, the waterfall is just there as the result of a naturally occurring configuration of the geographic landscape.

Yet, as Boston University psychologist Deborah Kelemen has found in study after study, young children erroneously endow such natural, inanimate entities—waterfalls, clouds, rocks, and so on—with their own teleo-functional purposes. Because of this tendency to over-attribute reason and purpose to aspects of the natural world, Kelemen refers to young children as “promiscuous teleologists.” For example, Kelemen and her colleagues find that seven-and eight-year-olds who are asked why mountains exist overwhelmingly prefer,
regardless of their parents’ religiosity or irreligiosity,
teleo-functional explanations (“to give animals a place to climb”) over mechanistic, or physical, causal explanations (“because volcanoes cooled into lumps”).
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It’s only around fourth or fifth grade that children begin abandoning these incorrect teleo-functional answers in favor of scientifically accurate accounts. And without a basic science education, promiscuous teleology remains a fixture of adult thought. In studies with uneducated Romany adults, Kelemen and psychologist Krista Casler revealed the same preference for teleo-functional reasoning that is seen in young children;
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it also appears in Alzheimer’s patients, presumably because their scientific knowledge has been eaten away by disease, thus allowing the unaffected teleo-functional bias to recrudesce.
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There is, of course, a type of purpose in the natural world—just not teleo-functional purpose. Many biological traits are “for” specific purposes, even though they owe their existence entirely to the mindless machine of natural selection. These are evolutionary adaptations. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that a turkey vulture’s small, diamond-shaped, featherless head is “for” rooting around inside the meaty looms of carcasses.

It’s a different story with artificial selection, where human beings domesticate and selectively breed plants and animals to accentuate particular traits for either pragmatic or aesthetic ends. Here, teleo-functional reasoning is logical because selective breeding is done with an end product in mind. My dog, Gulliver, has the typically shaped head of a border terrier, a hunting breed whose streamlined cranium resembles that of an otter. This skull design is the product of generations of Scottish breeders whittling away at the basic cranial morphology using selective breeding, to better allow “for” furrowing deep into holes and flushing out foxes.

So with artifacts and some biological features (those modified by human beings), we’re on solid ground using teleo-functional reasoning. Again, however, young children and adults lacking a basic scientific education overdo it; they’re promiscuously teleological when reasoning about happenstance properties of nonbiological, inanimate objects. For example, when asked why rocks are pointy, the seven- and eight-year-olds in Kelemen’s studies endorse teleo-functional accounts, treating rocks as something like artifacts (“so that animals could scratch on them when they get itchy”) or as though the rocks were organisms themselves with evolved adaptations (“so that animals wouldn’t sit on them and smash them”).

If you think this type of response is just the result of what kids hear on television or from their parents, Kelemen is one step ahead of you, at least with respect to parental input. In looking at spontaneous dialogues occurring between preschoolers and their parents—particularly with respect to “why” and “what’s that for” questions—Kelemen and her colleagues showed that parents generally reply with naturalistic causal answers (that is, scientific) rather than teleo-functional explanations. And even when they’re given a choice and told that all-important adults prefer nonfunctional explanations over teleo-functional ones, children still opt strongly for the latter. “So current evidence suggests the answer does not lie there,” says Kelemen. “At least, not in any straightforward sense.”
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Furthermore, not only do children err teleologically about inanimate natural entities like mountains, or about the physical features of inorganic objects like the shapes of rocks; they even display teleo-functional reasoning when it comes to the existence of
whole organisms.
One wouldn’t (at least, one shouldn’t) say that turkey vultures as a whole exist “for” cleaning up roadkill-splattered interstates. Dogs, as a domesticated species, may have been designed for human purposes, but, like buzzards, canines as a group aren’t “for” anything either. Rather, they simply are; they’ve come to exist; they’ve evolved. And yet, again, Kelemen has found that when children are asked why, say, lions exist, they prefer teleo-functional explanations (“to go in the zoo”).

All of this may sound silly to you, but such findings, and the distorting lens of our species’ theory of mind more generally, have obvious implications for our ability to ever truly grasp the completely mindless principles of evolution by random mutation and natural selection. In fact, for the past decade University of Michigan psychologist Margaret Evans has been investigating why creationist thinking comes more easily to the human mind than does evolutionary thinking. “Persistence [of creationist beliefs] is not simply the result of fundamentalist politics and socialization,” writes Evans. “Rather, these forces themselves depend on certain propensities of the human mind.”
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According to Evans, the stubborn preponderance of creationist beliefs is due in large part to the way our cognitive systems have, interestingly enough, evolved. Like Kelemen, Evans has discovered that irrespective of their parents’ beliefs or whether they attend religious or secular school, when asked where the first member of a particular animal species came from, five- to seven-year-old children give either spontaneous generationist (“it got born there”) or creationist (“God made it”) responses. By eight years of age, however, children from both secular and religious backgrounds give more or less exclusively creationist answers. Usually these answers predictably manifest as “God made it,” but otherwise Nature is personified, seen as a deliberate agent that intentionally made the animal for its own ends. It’s at eight years or so, then, that teleo-functional reasoning seems to turn into a full-blown “design stance,” in which children envisage an actual being as intentionally creating the entity in question for its own personal reasons.

Only among the oldest children she has studied, the ten- to twelve-year-olds, has Evans uncovered an effect of developmental experience, with children of evolutionary-minded parents finally giving evolutionary responses and those of evangelical parents giving creationist answers to the question of species origins. And even the “evolutionary” responses are often corrupted by culturally based misunderstandings. For example, Japanese fifth-graders tend to believe that human beings evolved directly from monkeys, probably because macaque monkeys are prodigious in Japan.
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In other words, all of this suggests that thinking like an evolutionist is hard work because, ironically, our psychological development—and, in particular, our theory of mind—strongly favors the purposeful-design framework. Evolutionists will probably never outnumber creationists, because the latter have a paradoxical ally in the way natural selection has lent itself to our species’ untutored penchant for reasoning about its own origins.

Even if one acknowledges that the teleo-functional bias distorts our perception of origins by creating the illusion of a creative mind that isn’t there, a sticking point for many agnostics and lukewarm believers—including, as we saw at the opening of this chapter, Darwin himself—is the problem of ultimate origins. Natural selection may explain the great variability of life on earth today, many argue, but it doesn’t explain why there is life to begin with. In other words, something mindful must have wound up the cosmos at its inception, sparked the Big Bang, devised the algorithms of evolution, materialized ether, and so on.

But our overzealous theory of mind can have us easily falling prey to flawed reasoning on this subject as well. Think a bit deeper and you’ll notice a few unwarranted inferences in this line of thought. To begin with, let’s assume for the moment that “being” (versus “non-being”) does imply an intelligent Creator. Intelligent beings don’t always do intelligent things. There may well be a God, even one who caused Creation. But for all we know, He did so accidentally rather than intentionally. In fact, in many ways, this still-godly account of our ultimate origins—the theistic equivalent of slapstick or a clumsy God or perhaps one sneezing or kicking up a pebble—can account considerably better for our present situation than can an intentional act of Creation. The humanlike God we’re prone to worshipping could be a long-dead intergalactic sea horse that, rooting through an ancient seabed for plankton in some unknown dimension, incidentally dislodged the one grain of sand that held all of our own infinite cosmos intact. Philosophers and theologians are quick to point out the untenable assumptions of atheism, noting that the nonexistence of an intentional God is not a scientific hypothesis, because it cannot be proved or disproved. But, in spite of its philosophical soundness and explanatory relevance, and the fact that it also cannot be proved or disproved, few would equally strenuously defend this type of accidental-origin hypothesis.

Our species’ overabundant theory of mind has clear repercussions for our ability to reason logically about the origins of species, because creationist appeals, however they may vary from one another on the surface, invariably involve an intelligent first “agent” as cause (the “Prime Mover” in cosmological terms). “Someone” or “something” is seen as having engaged deliberately—
mindfully
—in the act of Creation.

Yet how exactly does theory of mind spill over into our thinking about our own individual creation, as unique members of our species? When it comes to religion, most believers reason that human beings are here “for” some divine purpose. And if they’re not particularly religious, then you’ll often hear people referencing a vaguely spiritualized purpose to human existence, such as “to be happy” or “to love one another.” As Camus wrote, “Revolt against man is also directed against God.”
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But many of us go even one step further than this in teleo-functional absurdity, saying that individual members of our species also exist “for” a special reason. This is what the concept of destiny implies and what Sartre was trying to get at all those years ago: that each of us feels as if we’re here to satisfy our own unique purpose, one crafted specially for us by intentional design. In our heads, not only are “we” (as in “we humans”) here for a reason, but also “we” (me, you, the lady next door, the clerk behind the counter, and every single one of the billions of individuals on this planet) are each here for an even subtler shade of this overall purpose. At least, that’s what people like Rick Warren would have you believe. “God broke the mold when he made you,” the expression goes.

To see how fantastically odd this highly focused degree of teleo-functional reasoning actually is, imagine yourself on a nice sunny farm. Now have a glance around at the landscape. See that horsefly over there, the one hovering about the rump of that Arabian mare? Good. Now compare its unique purpose in life to, say, that other horsefly over there, the one behind the barn, waltzing around the pond algae. And don’t forget about the hundreds of larvae pupating under that damp log—each of which also needs you to assign it a special, unique purpose in life. It’s hard enough to come up with a teleo-functional purpose for horseflies as a whole, such as saying that horseflies exist to annoy equestrians or to make the rear ends of equines shiver in anticipation of being stung. Just as American poet Ogden Nash famously penned, “God in His wisdom made the fly / And then forgot to tell us why.” But to suggest that each
individual
horsefly is here for a special, unique reason—one different from that of every other horsefly that has ever lived or will live—by using our theory of mind to reflect on God’s intentions in crafting each its own destiny, may get us institutionalized. (If horseflies don’t do it for you, simply replace the nominal species with another nonhuman species of your choice; perhaps goats, elm trees, or wild boars may suit your imagination better.) Yet this is precisely what we do when it comes to reasoning about individual members of our own species; and, curiously, the concept of destiny doesn’t strike most of us as being ridiculous, insane, or conceptually flawed at all.