The GOD Delusion (28 page)

In
its lower orders at least, the intentional stance, like the design
stance, saves time that might be vital to survival. Consequently,
natural selection shaped brains to deploy the intentional stance as a
short cut. We are biologically programmed to impute intentions to
entities whose behaviour matters to us. Once again, Paul Bloom quotes
experimental evidence that children are especially likely to adopt the
intentional stance. When small babies see an object apparently
following another object (for example, on a computer screen), they
assume that they are witnessing an active chase by an intentional
agent, and they demonstrate the fact by registering surprise when the
putative agent fails to pursue the chase.

The
design stance and the intentional stance are useful brain mechanisms,
important for speeding up the second-guessing of entities that really
matter for survival, such as predators or potential mates. But, like
other brain mechanisms, these stances can misfire.
Children, and primitive peoples, impute intentions to the weather, to
waves and currents, to falling rocks. All of us are prone to do the
same thing with machines, especially when they let us down. Many will
remember with affection the day Basil Fawlty's car broke down during
his vital mission to save Gourmet Night from disaster. He gave it fair
warning, counted to three, then got out of the car, seized a tree
branch and thrashed it to within an inch of its life. Most of us have
been there, at least momentarily, with a computer if not with a car.
Justin Barrett coined the acronym HADD, for hyperactive agent detection
device. We hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this
makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only
indifferent. I catch myself momentarily harbouring savage resentment
against some blameless inanimate such as my bicycle chain. There was a
poignant recent report of a man who tripped over his untied shoelace in
the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, fell down the stairs, and smashed
three priceless Qing Dynasty vases: 'He landed in the middle of the
vases and they splintered into a million pieces. He was still sitting
there stunned when staff appeared. Everyone stood around in silence, as
if in shock. The man kept pointing to his shoelace, saying, "There it
is; that's the culprit." '
⁸³

Other
by-product explanations of religion have been proposed by Hinde,
Shermer, Boyer, Atran, Bloom, Dennett, Keleman and others. One
especially intriguing possibility mentioned by Dennett is that the
irrationality of religion is a by-product of a particular built-in
irrationality mechanism in the brain: our tendency, which presumably
has genetic advantages, to fall in love.

The
anthropologist Helen Fisher, in
Why We Love,
has
beautifully expressed the insanity of romantic love, and how
over-the-top it is compared with what might seem strictly necessary.
Look at it this way. From the point of view of a man, say, it is
unlikely that any one woman of his acquaintance is a hundred times more
lovable than her nearest competitor, yet that is how he is likely to
describe her when 'in love'. Rather than the fanatically monogamous
devotion to which we are susceptible, some sort of 'polyamory' is on
the face of it more rational. (Polyamory is the belief that one can
simultaneously love several members of the opposite sex, just as one
can love more than one wine, composer, book
or sport.) We happily accept that we can love more than one child,
parent, sibling, teacher, friend or pet. When you think of it like
that, isn't the total exclusiveness that we expect of spousal love
positively weird? Yet it
is
what we expect, and it
is what we set out to achieve. There must be a reason.

Helen
Fisher and others have shown that being in love is accompanied by
unique brain states, including the presence of neurally active
chemicals (in effect, natural drugs) that are highly specific and
characteristic of the state. Evolutionary psychologists agree with her
that the irrational
coup de foudre
could be a
mechanism to ensure loyalty to one co-parent, lasting for long enough
to rear a child together. From a Darwinian point of view it is, no
doubt, important to choose a good partner, for all sorts of reasons.
But, once having made a choice - even a poor one - and conceived a
child, it is more important to stick with that one choice through thick
and thin, at least until the child is weaned.

Could
irrational religion be a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms
that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in
love? Certainly, religious faith has something of the same character as
falling in love (and both have many of the attributes of being high on
an addictive drug*). The neuropsychiatrist John Smythies cautions that
there are significant differences between the brain areas activated by
the two kinds of mania. Nevertheless, he notes some similarities too:

*
See my expose of the dangerous narcotic Gerin Oil: R. Dawkins, 'Gerin
Oil',
Free Inquiry
24: 1, 2003, 9-11.

One
facet of the many faces of religion is intense love focused on one
supernatural person, i.e. God, plus reverence for icons of that person.
Human life is driven largely by our selfish genes and by the processes
of reinforcement. Much positive reinforcement derives from religion:
warm and comforting feelings of being loved and protected in a
dangerous world, loss of fear of death, help from the hills in response
to prayer in difficult times, etc. Likewise, romantic love for another
real person (usually of the other sex) exhibits the same intense
concentration on the other and related positive reinforcements. These
feelings can be triggered by icons of the other, such as letters,
photographs, and even, as in Victorian times, locks of
hair. The state of being in love has many physiological accompaniments,
such as sighing like a furnace.
⁸⁴

I
made the comparison between falling in love and religion in 1993, when
I noted that the symptoms of an individual infected by religion 'may be
startlingly reminiscent of those more ordinarily associated with sexual
love. This is an extremely potent force in the brain, and it is not
surprising that some viruses have evolved to exploit it' ('viruses'
here is a metaphor for religions: my article was called 'Viruses of the
mind'). St Teresa of Avila's famously orgasmic vision is too notorious
to need quoting again. More seriously, and on a less crudely sensual
plane, the philosopher Anthony Kenny provides moving testimony to the
pure delight that awaits those who manage to believe in the mystery of
the transubstantiation. After describing his ordination as a Roman
Catholic priest, empowered by laying on of hands to celebrate mass, he
goes on that he vividly recalls 

the
exaltation of the first months during which I had the power to say
Mass. Normally a slow and sluggish riser, I would leap early out of
bed, fully awake and full of excitement at the thought of the momentous
act I was privileged to perform . . .

It
was touching the body of Christ, the closeness of the priest to Jesus,
which most enthralled me. I would gaze on the Host after the words of
consecration, soft-eyed like a lover looking into the eyes of his
beloved . . . Those early days as a priest remain in my memory as days
of fulfilment and tremulous happiness; something precious, and yet too
fragile to last, like a romantic love-affair brought up short by the
reality of an ill-assorted marriage.

The
equivalent of the moth's light-compass reaction is the apparently
irrational but useful habit of falling in love with one, and only one,
member of the opposite sex. The misfiring byproduct - equivalent to
flying into the candle flame - is falling in love with Yahweh (or with
the Virgin Mary, or with a wafer, or with Allah) and performing
irrational acts motivated by such love.

The
biologist Lewis Wolpert, in
Six Impossible Things Before
Breakfast,
makes a suggestion that can be seen as a generalization of
the idea of constructive irrationality. His point is that irrationally
strong conviction is a guard against fickleness of mind: 'if beliefs
that saved lives were not held strongly, it would have been
disadvantageous in early human evolution. It would be a severe
disadvantage, for example, when hunting or making tools, to keep
changing one's mind.' The implication of Wolpert's argument is that, at
least under some circumstances, it is better to persist in an
irrational belief than to vacillate, even if new evidence or
ratiocination favours a change. It is easy to see the 'falling in love'
argument as a special case, and it is correspondingly easy to see
Wolpert's 'irrational persistence' as yet another useful psychological
predisposition that could explain important aspects of irrational
religious behaviour: yet another by-product.

In
his book
Social Evolution,
Robert Trivers enlarged
on his 1976 evolutionary theory of self-deception. Self-deception
is 

hiding
the truth from the conscious mind the better to hide it from others. In
our own species we recognize that shifty eyes, sweaty palms and croaky
voices may indicate the stress that accompanies conscious knowledge of
attempted deception. By becoming unconscious of its deception, the
deceiver hides these signs from the observer. He or she can lie without
the nervousness that accompanies deception.

The
anthropologist Lionel Tiger says something similar in
Optimism:
The Biology of Hope.
The connection to the sort of
constructive irrationality we have just been discussing is seen in
Trivers's paragraph about 'perceptual defense':

There
is a tendency for humans consciously to see what they wish to see. They
literally have difficulty seeing things with negative connotations
while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive. For example,
words that evoke anxiety, either because of an individual's personal
history or because of experimental manipulation, require greater
illumination before first being perceived.

The
relevance of this to the wishful thinking of religion should need no
spelling out.

The
general theory of religion as an accidental by-product - a misfiring of
something useful - is the one I wish to advocate. The details are
various, complicated and disputable. For the sake of illustration, I
shall continue to use my 'gullible child' theory as representative of
'by-product' theories in general. This theory - that the child brain
is, for good reasons, vulnerable to infection by mental 'viruses' -
will strike some readers as incomplete. Vulnerable the mind may be, but
why should it be infected by
this
virus rather
than that? Are some viruses especially proficient at infecting
vulnerable minds? Why does 'infection' manifest itself as religion
rather than as ... well, what? Part of what I want to say is that it
doesn't matter what particular style of nonsense infects the child
brain. Once infected, the child will grow up and infect the next
generation with the same nonsense, whatever it happens to be.

An
anthropological survey such as Frazer's
Golden Bough
impresses
us with the diversity of irrational human beliefs. Once entrenched in a
culture they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of
biological evolution. Yet Frazer discerns certain general principles,
for example 'homoeopathic magic', whereby spells and incantations
borrow some symbolic aspect of the real-world object they are intended
to influence. An instance with tragic consequences is the belief that
powdered rhinoceros horn has aphrodisiac properties. Fatuous as it is,
the legend stems from the horn's supposed resemblance to a virile
penis. The fact that 'homoeopathic magic' is so widespread suggests
that the nonsense that infects vulnerable brains is not entirely
random, arbitrary nonsense.

It
is tempting to pursue the biological analogy to the point of wondering
whether something corresponding to natural selection is at work. Are
some ideas more spreadable than others, because of intrinsic appeal or
merit, or compatibility with existing psychological dispositions, and
could this account for the nature and properties of actual religions as
we see them, in something like the way we use natural selection to
account for living organisms? It is important to understand that
'merit' here means only the ability to survive
and spread. It doesn't mean deserving of a positive value judgement -
something of which we might be humanly proud.

Even
on an evolutionary model, there doesn't have to be any natural
selection. Biologists acknowledge that a gene may spread through a
population not because it is a good gene but simply because it is a
lucky one. We call this genetic drift. How important it is
vis-a-vis
natural selection has been controversial. But it is now
widely accepted in the form of the so-called neutral theory of
molecular genetics. If a gene mutates to a different version of itself
which has an identical effect, the difference is neutral, and selection
cannot favour one or the other. Nevertheless, by what statisticians
call sampling error over generations, the new mutant form can
eventually replace the original form in the gene pool. This is a true
evolutionary change at the molecular level (even if no change is
observed in the world of whole organisms). It is a neutral evolutionary
change that owes nothing to selective advantage.

The
cultural equivalent of genetic drift is a persuasive option, one that
we cannot neglect when thinking about the evolution of religion.
Language evolves in a quasi-biological way and the direction its
evolution takes looks undirected, pretty much like random drift. It is
handed down by a cultural analogue of genetics, changing slowly over
the centuries, until eventually various strands have diverged to the
point of mutual unintelligibility. It is possible that some of the
evolution of language is guided by a kind of natural selection, but
that argument doesn't seem very persuasive. I'll explain below that
some such idea has been proposed for major trends in language, such as
the Great Vowel Shift which took place in English from the fifteenth to
the eighteenth century. But such a functional hypothesis is not
necessary to explain most of what we observe. It seems probable that
language normally evolves by the cultural equivalent of random genetic
drift. In different parts of Europe, Latin drifted to become Spanish,
Portuguese, Italian, French, Romansche and the various dialects of
these languages. It is, to say the least, not obvious that these
evolutionary shifts reflect local advantages or 'selection pressures'.