The Belief Instinct is pleasurable in that it's wholly unlike books by the sort of atheists who doggedly pursue the conversion of their readers to their way of thinking. Bering is methodical and scientific in building his argument. He's also very personable and quite funny. [full review] ( )

Jesse Bering begins his fascinating exploration of the psychological underpinnings of the human tendency to believe in God with a couple of anecdotes. As a little kid, he accidentally broke a neighbour’s ersatz Fabergé egg. He did not confess; rather, he placed the shattered ornament back on the shelf, hoping its condition would go unnoticed. It did not. When the neighbour deduced that Bering was the culprit, he—the child of a secular Jew and a shoulder-shrugging Lutheran, a boy who had received no religious education whatsoever and whose home didn’t even contain a Bible—“swore to God” that he didn’t do it. A little later, a nasty sliver in Bering’s finger would be interpreted by him as evidence of God’s wrath over the lie. Years later, when Bering was a teenage nonbeliever, he framed his mother’s cancer diagnosis in like terms: it was a judgement from above, a punishment from God. In my own life, I’ve seen similar responses, especially to terminal illness. People I’ve known who showed essentially no religious inclination throughout their lives have feared that their disease was some sort of divine judgement on their moral lapses or bad behaviour. “Sin” suddenly became relevant. The human tendency to attribute power to a divine being appears to be our psychological default. Bering calls it “the belief instinct” and goes on to theorize about why we have it. He examines it through the lenses of evolutionary, developmental, and social psychology, and many of his conclusions are based on recent findings from cognitive science.

First off, my “review” is not so much an evaluation of the book as a summary of points I found compelling. I really don’t know enough about the subject to assess how comprehensive or accurate Bering’s discussion is, as it’s the first work of its kind that I’ve read. What you read below is only a smattering of the book’s contents. Having been filtered through my mind, they may not be strictly accurate. Really, this is a text that a person should read more than once—something I did not do. What I can say is that the work is a psychological inquiry, written with the assumption that “God” is a human construct, not an actual being. Believers probably won’t like that. Having said that, I will add that this is not a strident book. The tone is one of curiosity not disrespectful dismissal.

Bering, like other scholars on the subject, sees religion as an “accidental by-product of our mental evolution”. Although it may have “no particular adaptive biological function in itself,” it appears to have served an important social function. Our ancestors’ belief that they were known by an omniscient, omnipotent being who could punish or reward them brought order to social groups, “stomp[ing] out the frequency and intensity of . . . immorality” that could fracture communities.

Evolution has endowed humans with theory of mind, a system of inferences by which we make predictions about the behaviour of others. This system allows us to understand, interact with, and protect ourselves from other people. The system goes into overdrive when others behave in ways that we perceive to be abnormal or unexpected. It’s a kind of accident of evolution that humans also apply theory of mind to things that lack brains. We see intentions, desires, and psychological states in (“willfully”) malfunctioning computers and cars that (“stubbornly”) won’t start or even in forlorn-looking teddy bears. Our belief in God is a similarly grounded psychological illusion, says Bering. “It may feel as if there is something out there . . . watching, knowing, caring. Perhaps even judging, “ he writes. “But, in fact, that’s just your overactive theory of mind.”

Bering proposes that belief in God and the sense that everything exists for a purpose isn’t due to a cultural virus that children catch from their parents—as atheistic existential philosophers might have us believe—but something we are born with, a default setting if you will. He explains that our minds are heavily biased towards reasoning that things exist (because a designer intended them to) for pre-conceived purposes. This is known as “teleo-functional reasoning,” and psychologist Deborah Kelemen has seen it in action in study after study of young children. When she’s asked seven and eight-year-olds why mountains or trees exist, kids will say: “to give animals places to climb,” thereby endowing plants and landforms with purpose, rather than providing a mechanistic explanation for their existence. Only when children reach fourth or fifth grade do they abandon their teleo-functional answers for accurate scientific explanations. Interestingly, teleo-functional reasoning has also been found in uneducated Romany adults, as well as in Alzheimer’s patients (whose brains have been damaged by disease).

Given our predisposition to teleo-functional reasoning (our tendency to view things as existing for a purpose) and “the distorting lens of our species’ theory of mind,” it is hard for us humans to get our heads around “the mindless principles of evolution,” including natural selection and random mutations. In fact, University of Michigan psychologist Margaret Evans says that creationist thinking comes much more easily to the human mind than evolutionary theory. In her research with young children, Evans has discovered that, regardless of parents’ beliefs and kids’ attending secular or religious schools, five to seven-year-olds who are asked about where a species comes from will provide either a generalist response—“it got born there”—or a creationist one: “God made it.” By age eight, children from both secular and religious backgrounds reply that “God” or “Nature” (personified) made it. Only in the oldest children of evolutionary-minded parents does the full-blown design stance (in which a being intentionally creates an entity) give way to their developmental experience. Our psychological development—particularly, our theory of mind—favours a “purposeful design”/creationist framework over an evolutionary one.

Because our brains are equipped to look for underlying psychological causes, we see messages in more than each other’s behaviour. Unexpected natural events—such as earthquakes or violent storms—hold messages for us. Once again, our theory of mind goes into overdrive when things unfold in ways that are inconsistent with our expectations. We believe God or Nature is trying to communicate with us. Indeed, notes Bering, without our general cognitive bias towards finding messages in natural events, most religions would never have got off the ground.

As for the human belief in life after death: Bering asks why we should wonder at all where our minds go when our bodies are dead; shouldn’t it be obvious that our minds are dead, too? Well, it’s not. Since none of us have had the experience of being dead, we are incapable of imagining what it’s like not to exist. Some scholars have postulated that beliefs about the afterlife are due to our profound anxiety about not existing, but these theorists have failed to find a correlation between fear of death and belief in an afterlife. In other words: just because you’re terrified of dying, it doesn’t mean you are any more likely to believe in life after death. The research of Bering and others suggests that because humans are incapable of projecting themselves into an afterlife in which they neither think nor experience sensation, they consequently believe that our minds must be immortal.

Bering’s is a fascinating book, which I really do hope to reread one day. I know there’s lots I’ve missed, but hopefully not too much that I’ve misinterpreted. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3015978.html

It's a short and breezy exploration of the psychology of belief - not as wearyingly hostile as Richard Dawkins, but equally taking it for granted that there is no "there" there. I was particularly drawn into the first few chapters' exploration of theory of mind - our ability to attribute mental states to others and to adapt our behaviour to take others' mental states into account. This is one of the things that makes us human - not just that we have a greater cognitive ability than other animals, but that we treat each other as fellow individuals. Bering makes a strong argument that belief in God, or in the supernatural, is a natural development from the fact that we have theory of mind, and therefore is to an extent an evolutionary adaptation to cope with our intelligence and social natures. He then ranges around the areas of philosophy, psychology and organised religion with a bit less impact, but he has set up the argument well enough (and the book is short enough) that I enjoyed following it though to the end. I must read more of his books, which include Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? and Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us. ( )

Shouldn't the single most important scientific question there is be approached with an open mind?

This book takes on a provocative topic: Why, if we do not assume interference from a God or Gods, might we believe in those beings?

This is a question which scientists seem to shy away from, perhaps because they don't want to be seen as "explaining away" God -- after all, they have funding to preserve! And yet, there are very good reasons to think that religion conveys evolutionary advantage. For at least two reasons. (Author Bering never really makes this point explicitly -- I'm not dead sure he even realizes it explicitly -- but I'll say this my way.)

First, human society is based on interactions, which have to be based on trust. You can't have too much cheating, or the system breaks down. So you need an enforcement mechanism. A god who will punish you for doing wrong is an enforcement mechanism.

Second, it is well-known (although Bering does not bring out the research on this) that people who have a purpose in life are more successful. Believing in an afterlife is obviously motivational: We aren't going to die and just vanish; all that work we do serves to build on something. Religious feelings increase reproductive fitness. This has been clearly demonstrated.

Bering does make another point, which I have not seen elsewhere: That our "theory of mind" (that is, our ability to realize that other people and things have a different viewpoint from our own) is tremendously adaptive (and it is -- one of the reason people with autism have so many difficulties is that they have defects in theory of mind). Since it's so useful a trait, it has expanded to be a little too strong: We try to impose theory of mind on things like natural disasters that don't in fact have theory of mind. (Bering is a little fast and loose here; theory of mind is a concept with many parts, and he acts as if only humans have it. But elephants and dolphins and chimps also have some theory of mind, raising the possibility that they might even have some aspects of it that we don't. Bering ignores this completely.) If human beings are guilty of applying theory of mind to all sorts of things that don't have mind, why not apply it to the entire universe, which is certainly too complex for us to be able to test whether it has a mind? God is, in effect, what you get if you look for theory of mind in the universe. (I'm being sloppy in my terminology. Forgive me. It was faster that way.)

So: Bering has found three ways in which religion is evolutionarily adaptive: it (sometimes) makes us more social and moral; it (sometimes) makes us more reproductively fit, and it (sometime) helps us see the universe in a more efficient way. In other words, religion makes evolutionary sense even if it isn't true.

So far, so correct: religion could well exist whether it contains a shred of truth or not. But it's here that Bering falls down. He never takes the next step: Having shown that religion could be false, he does not examine the question of whether it is. He simply assumes religion is false and tries to explain it. He does not attempt to consider the other side (if religion were true, what tests might we be able to apply?). This isn't really science; it's philosophical arguing based on some scientific data.

The result is a good, useful (if slightly ponderous) book, but I found it rather irritating because it operates on an unnecessary assumption (that God does not exist). Any good scientist knows that we should never assume what we don't have to. Instead, we should try to test anything we can test. Right up to the existence of God. ( )

I found this book very interesting, though it was a little repetitive. I didn't disagree with much, and I did enjoy learning about the theory of mind. It was well-written, with a nice balance of the personal- not too much, not too little. ( )