Supersense

CHAPTER THREE

WHO CREATED CREATIONISM?

The essence of being human is an uncomfortable duality of ‘rational’ technology and ‘irrational’ belief. We are still a species in transition.

– DAVID LEWIS-WILLIAMS,

The Mind in the Cave (2004), p. 18

WHO TEACHES US about the ‘something there’? When do we start thinking that there is a hidden but real dimension to reality? Is it religion, or does religion simply recognize and fulfill that urge in the human psyche that is so great that we seek out those who explain why we feel the way we do and then take comfort in their stories, which make sense of the strange notion that there is something more to existence? To answer this we have to begin at the beginning.

Two summers ago, my wife Kim arranged for the family to visit the Niaux cave in the French Pyrenees. It is one of the last Neolithic caves still open to the public where you can see original prehistoric cave paintings. Most sites are now closed to protect them from the destructive moisture and other corrosive properties of human breath. We booked months in advance, as visits are strictly limited. It may not be on your list of things to do before you die, but if you want to get a true measure of the scale of your own life against where humankind has come from, there can hardly be a more moving experience than marvelling at prehistoric art deep inside the belly of a mountain.

The Niaux system of caves runs over half a mile from the entrance perched high on a Pyrenean cliff face. Outside the temperature was a humid 28 degrees centigrade, but inside it rapidly dropped to a constant 12 degrees. The path was uneven, wet, and slippery, but it was the absolute pitch-blackness that was the most unsettling feature of the caves. The journey varied from claustrophobic passages to wide expanses, created by ancient underground rivers that over the course of millions of years had carved out the inside of the range. Each member of the expedition (I felt like a Jules Verne explorer journeying to the centre of the earth) was given a hand-held flashlight that acted like a light sabre to cut through the ebony shroud. My five-year-old daughter wore those running shoes with lights built into the heels that flashed each time she took a step. She is the fearless type, and she set off with our French guide at the front of the group, picking her way through the tunnel with uncanny ease. The rest of us, unsure of our step, struggled to keep up with the blinking pink flashes that disappeared into the bowels of the earth.

I now understand why people risk their lives exploring underground caverns. The ancient watercourses had sculpted an alien landscape of smooth and bulbous protrusions rising from the floor and dripping from the roof. On the outside, the craggy cliff entrance had been blasted away by modern dynamite, but the inside of the mountain seemed organic and alive. The mica and mineral deposits twinkling in the flashlight triggered childhood memories of Disney grottoes and the seven dwarfs mining for sparkling jewels. Halfway into our descent, we found the hand of man. Mixed in with the graffiti left there by intrepid French youths over the past 350 years was an occasional repeated pattern made up of parallel lines and dots that we were told was much older. Our guide invited us to speculate, but like the experts who carbon-dated the work, we were unable to explain the wood-ash markings put there deliberately for a long-forgotten purpose.¹

After about an hour, we reached a cathedral-like chamber, the salon noir, or black exhibition hall. With our light sabres, we were able to pick out the remarkably well-preserved images of animals and patterns left more than thirteen thousand years ago on the walls of the cavern. This was clearly the focal centre of activity, though no trace of human habitation had ever been found. No bones, no flints, no remnants of someone’s lunch. Only the art remained. I tried to imagine the scene illuminated by the flicker of simple lamps made out of animal fat. The place was magical. So often we take for granted our modern lives and all the technologies available to us and easily forget how fast and how far we have travelled. This revelatory experience in the loins of a mountain was a jaw-dropping moment for a twenty-first-century scientist. The people who painted the cave must have thought so too. David Lewis-Williams studies prehistoric paintings and artefacts. In his book The Mind in the Cave, he argues that subterranean art was not for general public viewing.² Otherwise, there would be more examples in less remote and more accessible sites. He proposes that the activity in these caves instead reflects early religious attempts to connect symbolically with the earth in its deepest crevices. These places were sacred. The art was deliberately created around the physical properties of each cave. Natural rock patterns and shapes were outlined to form animals in the same way that we see faces in the clouds on a summer’s day. This human capacity to see structure and significance in the natural world is not only a talent of the artistic mind but an essential quality for the spiritual one as well. The images came alive through the combination of flickering shadows from tallow lamps and the power of human imagination. Some decorated spaces were only large enough for a solitary individual to squeeze into. The geometric patterns found here may have been the first evidence of the altered states of consciousness that the early shamans are thought to have achieved. Lewis-Williams speculates that the shamans, cocooned in these narrow cervices, sought to document their crossover to the underground world through images and symbols. This may be wild speculation, but what is undisputed is that prehistoric art depicts a mixture of natural and supernatural images. Animals such as horses and bulls, as well as extinct species such as the aurochs and mammoth, are represented, but so are half-human, half-animal creatures.

FIG. 3: ‘Lion-Man’, a statuette carved of mammoth tusk, dating from around 32,000 years ago, discovered in a cave at Hohlenstein-Stadel, Germany. PHOTO BY THOMAS STEPHAN, © ULMER MUSEUM.

The most stunning example is not a drawing but a statuette from Germany, the Hohlenstein-Stadel ‘Lion-Man’. Originally nobody knew what it was. It was shattered into two hundred pieces and mixed among ten thousand bone fragments retrieved from a prehistoric cave in southern Germany just before the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1997 it was carefully reassembled. Who could have predicted how spectacular this find would be? The figure has a human body but a lion’s head, stands about 12 inches tall, and is carved from a mammoth tusk. It is not clear whether it is a lion that has taken on human properties or the other way around. Either way, it proves that prehistoric man had imagination and a sense of the unreal. Not only is it one of the most beautiful examples of human art, but it is also one of the earliest. It dates from around thirty-two thousand years ago! Try to get your head around that date for a moment. When it comes to thinking about how long culture and art have been around, we are exceedingly myopic in our outlook.

We may have no written record from this period of humankind, but evidence for supernatural practices can be found in human activity as far back as we can record it. Some of the earliest burials from at least forty-five thousand years ago show signs of ritual. We do not know exactly what motivated prehistoric humans to paint their caves, bury their dead with symbolic objects, or make female (‘Venus’) figurines with enlarged breasts and stomachs, but these behaviours reflect some of the earliest ceremonial practices in the history of our civilization. Ceremony and ritual have been present from the beginning. There was culture in the caves. Everyday experience must have raised questions in minds sophisticated enough to organize hunts, manufacture jewellery, paint, and communicate. Where do we go when we dream? What happens when we die? They must have thought that there was something more to daily existence. Why else spend so much effort celebrating a culture deep in the recesses of a cave if not in the belief that there was something more to reality? From the beginning, humans already had minds prepared for the supernatural.

MODERN MINDS IN THE CAVE

In modern society, we should no longer have a need for shaman to commune with subterranean spirits. Armed with modern science and technology, we can predict and control our lives without the help of trance-induced priests. We can even blast away an entire mountain at the press of a button. We do not have to pray or make sacrifices to control our future. We can measure, test, and document the world. Prehistoric man may have believed in the supernatural, but, then, he did not have the benefit of modern science to explain what he could not understand. Humankind has emerged out of the darkness into a bright, technological, scientific age. By now, we should have abandoned the mind in the cave.

Clearly this has not happened. Over the last four hundred years, we have witnessed an astonishing explosion in our understanding of the universe, something almost like a ‘big bang’ of scientific understanding. In no other period in human history has humankind made such breathtaking advances in explaining so many facets of the natural world. Wander the corridors of the science departments in any modern large university, and you will find experts in the minuscule details of nature. We have reached out to the farthest galaxies and delved into the subatomic through our science. Science should be the bedrock of our knowledge and wisdom. And yet beliefs in the supernatural – beliefs that are unnatural and unscientific – are still very common.

If science is so successful, why do most people ignore what it has to say about the supernatural? Why doesn’t the general public listen to the scientists who say that such belief is unfounded? At this point, I want to draw your attention to the fact that supernatural beliefs generally come in two forms. There are religious supernatural beliefs (God, angels, demons, reincarnation, heaven, hell, and so on) and secular supernatural beliefs (such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and ESP). All religions are based on supernatural beliefs, but not all supernatural beliefs are based on religion. This is an important distinction, since there are some very powerful lobbies and arguments when it comes to the differences between religion, science, and supernaturalism.

As we saw in the last chapter, many Westerners have some form of supernatural belief. The Gallup poll in 2005 revealed that three out of four American adults have at least one secular supernatural belief. Even this figure is an underestimate, for the simple reason that supernatural belief is at the core of every known religion. In the United States, around 90 per cent of the general public is religious, compared to 10 per cent who are atheists.³ The difference between religious and secular supernatural belief becomes crucial when we consider how we should treat each type. Religious supernatural beliefs are deemed sacrosanct and beyond the realm of scientific analysis. They are miraculous. They transcend the profane and mundane. That’s the whole point. Religions must offer unworldly views of reality, not views based in natural laws. Otherwise, they would not be attractive to those people seeking something more from the natural and the ordinary. Religion has to appeal to the supernatural and the extraordinary. Believers need that spiritual ‘X factor’ from their religion. In contrast, secular supernatural beliefs are thought to be real phenomena that science has arrogantly failed to acknowledge. All manner of secular supernaturalism has been studied experimentally and, as we shall see, generally rejected by conventional science. Yet in both cases believers have dismissed what science has to say. Why is this?

As we noted earlier, the number one reason people believe in the supernatural is because of their own personal experience. No amount of scientific explanation seems to shake the foundations of such belief. Science seems to make no impact on our supersense. One reason for this is the widening gap between scientists and the general public when it comes to understanding. We are happy to accept the technologies that emerge from science, like the Internet, cell phones, medicines, and so on, but we remain generally ignorant about how science goes about its business. Second, science has a poor public relations image. Ever since scientists were deemed to be tinkering with Mother Nature, they have been held responsible for all sorts of humankind’s problems. Today’s newspaper headlines about ‘Frankenfoods’ in reference to genetically modified crops reflect the same deep-seated notion of abomination that was captured so well by Mary Shelley’s monster. And what’s more, scientists never seem to give a straight answer. They can’t agree on the important issues, with experts wheeled in by the media to give opposing opinions that don’t seem to provide answers. One day we are told that something is bad and the next, it’s good. The public simply don’t know what to believe anymore, nor who to trust.⁴

As our planet appears to lurch from one self-inflicted Armageddon catastrophe to the next, from the threat of nuclear holocaust to global warming, many hold the relentless progress of science responsible rather than the technology we have used so conspicuously and greedily. We blame the scientists, not our own human nature. In typically beautiful prose, the psychologist Nick Humphrey summarizes our fear of science:

Science with its chain-saws and bulldozers of reason, has felled the tropical rainforests of spirituality. It has wreaked ecological destruction on fairyland. It has extinguished the leprechauns, the elves and goblins. It has caused a global change in the weather of imagination. It has made a dustbowl of our Eden, and created an inner drought. And all of this, not to bring greater peace or happiness, but to satisfy people’s hunger for the Big Macs of technology.⁵

The nostalgic amongst us look back with rose-tinted glasses and reminisce about a simpler age that seems more wholesome and less threatening than today’s uncertain future. We look to ancient cultures for prescientific knowledge, simple living, and spiritual enrichment. We want to get back to nature. We conveniently forget or ignore Thomas Hobbes’s callous observation that life in such times was ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short.’⁶

Many of us consider modern science a necessary evil. We are happy to reap the benefits of the technology it produces, but deeply suspicious about how it operates. It can be opaque and detached, speaking in a language that make no sense to the rest of society. Any scientist who has briefly stepped into the spotlight has to learn how to explain his or her work in a way that the rest of society can understand. Even scientists from one discipline can be completely unintelligible to those from another. I once took part in the popular BBC Radio 4 science programme, ‘Material World’ with two astrophysicists.⁷ I was talking about the origins of supernatural beliefs while they were arguing about the structure of the universe. I must confess that I felt an acute degree of intellectual inferiority. My contribution seemed trivially simplistic as I struggled to understand their disagreement about whether there are eleven or twelve dimensions to the universe. Phrases such as ‘dark matter’, ‘string theory’, and ‘multiverses’ momentarily triggered faint glimpses of recognition, but since I lacked the necessary skill and experience in mathematics, they might as well have been talking Venusian for all I knew. I expect that’s how the public must feel about scientists in general. As he summed up his theory, one of the astrophysicists said that he ‘believed’ that his theory would be proven right. At last, some common ground for me to enter the discussion. Scientists have beliefs too. They don’t always have all the facts. They also have to make leaps of logic in order to put forward a better model to explain the world. The difference between supernatural beliefs and scientific beliefs is that the latter produce testable hypotheses. A good scientist puts forward an idea and, if it fails to stand up to rigorous testing, he or she is obliged to abandon the hypothesis and move on. That’s how science progresses – it is always moving forward. In contrast, supernatural believers either do not question their beliefs or ignore the lack of evidence. They do not move forward. In short, the major difference between scientific and supernatural belief is that scientists and believers approach the problem from two completely opposite directions when it comes to weighing up the evidence. Scientists reject beliefs until they are proven beyond reasonable doubt. In contrast, supernaturalists accept beliefs until they are disproven beyond reasonable doubt. The problem is that it is impossible to disprove anything. Logically, you cannot categorically say that something does not exist and will never exist in the future. So you cannot disprove the supernatural. That’s why most conventional scientists reject supernatural beliefs as unscientific. The other important lesson I learned from that day at the radio station is that science may be specialized, but most of us have some opinion on the supernatural. After the broadcast, we all went for a drink at the pub with the production crew. It was not astrophysics that was discussed, but rather supernatural belief. Maybe my fellow scientists were graciously saving me from the embarrassment of not knowing how to discuss the structure of the universe, but they seemed genuinely interested in the public’s appetite for the supernatural. During our discussion, it occurred to me that most of us are happy to defer to scientists when it comes to areas of knowledge beyond our own ability. My mathematics is hopelessly mediocre, but I am willing to accept that the astrophysicists know what they are talking about when it concerns the dimensions of the universe. The same must be true for all the other specialized disciplines. However, when it comes to the supernatural, we all have something to say and something we believe. Whether it is our religion or personal conviction that there are supernatural events, science does not have a monopoly on explanations. Also, if the public can see that scientists disagree within their own areas of expertise, then it stands to reason that scientists can’t possibly know everything about the supernatural.

And what about belief in general? Belief plays a role in science, religion, and the supernatural. If scientists, priests, and mediums all have beliefs, then who is right? All of them deal with the unobservable, but they rely on different sources of evidence. Science has the scientific method of experiment and observation. The supernatural operates on the basis of personal experience and intuition. Religion is based on culture, testimony, and individual experiences. These descriptions are not perfect, but they capture some of the main differences. Science, religion, and the supernatural are usually treated separately, but we have to consider how they coexist and sometimes overlap in the same mind. I know religious scientists who believe in the supernatural. They bring to mind a Venn diagram showing three circles of beliefs. Some individuals see themselves firmly encamped in one of the circles, but the rest of us are spread out across all three fields. As belief systems, science, religion, and the supernatural are not neatly fenced off from each other but rather blend and blur at the edges, and we cherry-pick from different belief systems when the need suits us. This is important to appreciate as we try to understand the turf wars and tension about belief that have arisen in recent years.

RELIGION AS A VIRUS

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins denounces all supernaturalism but strategically focuses his attack on the main organized religions.

I decry supernaturalism in all its forms, and the most effective way to proceed will be to concentrate on the form most likely familiar to my readers – the form that impinges most threateningly on all our societies . . . I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.⁸

Every religion has a supernatural component, but not all supernaturalism is religious. I could be an atheist and still think that I have abilities that go beyond nature but without the need to believe in God. This is important because while all religions come from culture, this is not true for all supernatural beliefs. In making this distinction, we may better understand where supernatural beliefs come from, why they transmit so well, and why they are so difficult to get rid of.

Supernatural beliefs may emerge spontaneously in children as they develop as a natural by-product of their mind design. These beliefs do not need to come from culture. This may also account for why religious beliefs are so successful. Justin Barrett, a religious psychologist, similarly argues that mind design explains belief in God, but I think that such a natural explanation can be extended to all forms of supernaturalism.⁹ Religion does not have a monopoly on the miraculous. And if there is a natural origin for all supernatural thinking, then this presents a considerable problem for any attempt to remove supernaturalism, religious or otherwise.

Let’s examine the idea that belief is spread by culture alone. We have already seen that we tend to assume that experts know what they are talking about. So it is no surprise that naive children tend to believe what they are told. Maybe our human inclination to believe is something we cannot avoid. It could be immensely adaptive. Such a strategy would increase the learning potential of children by making it unnecessary for them to discover everything by themselves. That’s why communicating ideas has been so successful for human civilization. We can learn immense amounts of things about the world without ever having to experience or discover them ourselves. We can learn about people we have never met, places we have never been, and things we have never done and are not likely to do. In fact, we love to learn about things we cannot experience ourselves. However, as Dawkins points out, the same mechanism could be used by the naive child to spread nonsense and lies.

Are children gullible? As every parent knows, the answer is yes, but there are some interesting issues here. Their belief in cultural magical beings such as Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny shows that children are open to the possibility of believing the impossible. At the same time, they do appreciate that not all things are possible. Even infants can tell the difference between the possible and the impossible. For example, they recognize a magic trick when they see it. If you hide a toy behind one of two screens and then retrieve the toy from the second screen, as if it somehow moved invisibly from one to the other, six-month-old infants will look longer.¹⁰ Psychologists use such magic tricks to investigate what young children know about the world. If they seem surprised or look longer, then we can say that they noticed something was amiss. Somewhere in their brain, they know something isn’t quite right. How then do children come to know what is impossible?

Some knowledge appears to be built into babies by evolution, while other knowledge has to be learned. For example, from the start, babies seem to know the difference between humans and objects and to treat them as very different.¹¹ Babies interact with people in a totally different way from their interactions with objects. By their first birthday, they have solid objects pretty much figured out, though they are still unsure about nonsolid objects like liquids, sand, and jelly.¹² They can even predict how objects should behave. For example, they know that solid objects cannot float on thin air, and they stare in amazement if shown a conjurer’s illusion to create this effect.¹³ Are they reasoning about this in a logical way? Are they thinking in terms of why an object cannot float on thin air? When it comes to this type of reasoning, studies have shown that young children reason from experience rather than logic.¹⁴ Children make judgements based on their past experiences. If they have seen something happen, then they know it is possible. However, if they have not seen it happen, they regard it equally as impossible. For example, if told something unlikely – there are people who like to drink onion juice, for instance, or you can find a live alligator under your bed – pre-school children regard these things as being just as impossible as turning apple sauce back into an apple or walking through a brick wall. Only after some years at school can children start to understand that while some things are improbable, they are not necessarily impossible. Children are filtering information through their minds and looking for past experiences to compare it with. This explains why they also deny the possibility that social laws can be broken, for instance, by going barefoot to school or changing the colours of the traffic lights. Since they have never seen any of these events, they regard them as impossible. Also, pre-school children rarely explain why something is impossible. They can’t give you a logical argument. Rather, they seem to reason from example. So if you tell them there are things that happen in the world that they can’t check out for themselves, they are going to be vulnerable. If they trust you, they will believe you until they have had a chance to check out the truth of what you say.

One analogy often invoked for the spread of beliefs is to compare them to mental viruses or parasites that infect minds. Dan Dennett opens his book Breaking the Spell by comparing supernatural beliefs to the tiny parasitic lancet fluke, which colonizes the brains of ants and makes them repeatedly crawl up blades of grass.¹⁵ In doing so, the ant is likely to be eaten by a cow or sheep, thereby fulfilling the next stage of the parasite’s reproductive cycle. Dennett is comparing religious ideas to a parasite that makes us spread supernatural beliefs by infecting the child’s mind. Strong stuff, and deeply emotive, but Dennett misses an important part of the analogy: both viruses and parasites can infect only hosts that can accommodate them. That is why viruses and parasites cannot infect all species. Viruses can mutate and cross over to different species only after they have changed to fit into the host environment, not the other way around. This minidiversion into virology highlights an important point about indoctrination accounts of belief. Maybe ideas spread not only because children are programmed to believe any idea, but also because they believe ideas that best fit a receptive mind.

Psychologists have long known that we actively have to process ideas in order for them to lodge in our minds. In processing ideas, we compare them to what we know already in order to make sense of them. This can lead to some interesting distortions. Here is a famous example.¹⁶ Consider this description of a young woman:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Think about who Linda might be for a moment. Imagine a large population of people that includes Linda. Which of these two statements is more likely: ‘Linda works in a bank’ or ‘Linda works in a bank and is a feminist’? Around eight out of ten people consider the second statement to be more likely, but that would be the wrong answer. Consider the problem like a Venn diagram of overlapping groups.

If the number of female bank workers in the world is group A and the number of feminists in the world is group B, you can see that it is impossible to have more female bank workers who are also feminists (A + B) than female bank workers alone. This is because the number of female bank workers who are also feminists will always be a subset of all female bank workers. Nevertheless, the description of Linda seems more typical of a feminist bank worker, and so we say that it is more likely. The Linda problem demonstrates how our minds apply the principle that the more an idea fits with our expectations, the more likely we are to deem it to be true. Our stereotypes of feminists are much stronger than our stereotypes of bank workers, who, let’s face it, can seem a nondescript bunch. Because the description of Linda fits our stereotype of feminists, we estimate her to be more likely to be a feminist bank worker, even though there will always be fewer such people in the world compared to all female bank workers.

FIG. 4: If the number of female bank workers is A and the number of feminists is B, then there cannot be more feminist, female bank workers (A + B) than female bank workers. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.

Why are some ideas more likely? Bankers and feminists are complicated modern concepts that we have learned through culture. Our familiarity with them depends on how often we have encountered these concepts. They do not have any built-in special status. However, other aspects of thinking may be more ingrained in the human mind; traceable to our evolutionary past, they still exert a legacy today. Consider an example that seems more related to irrational thinking and beliefs. Do you have a strong fear of spiders? Does the sight or thought of them make you shiver or feel sick? Do you experience or believe you are faced with great harm when you see one of these creatures? If so, you probably have a phobia.

Phobias are irrational fears and beliefs that are completely out of proportion to the actual source of potential threat. For example, there are no poisonous spiders in the United Kingdom, yet this is one of the most common sources of phobia in that country. Like many wives, Kim makes me remove spiders from the house. I should not complain. We have a friend who also lives in the country but has to pay an exterminator to travel miles to do this job for her when her husband is not around. In 2005 the Zoological Society of London surveyed one thousand adults and found that eight out of ten reported having arachnophobia, the irrational fear of spiders.¹⁷

It’s not just creepy-crawlies. Most of us know someone who suffers from one of the common phobias such as fear of heights, open spaces, snakes, or small dark places. Sufferers can’t help themselves. No amount of reassurance or rational explanation can help a truly phobic sufferer. Sometimes phobias become so strong that sufferers cannot stop themselves from taking self-harming actions. For example, obsessive hand-washing is a common symptom of an abnormal fear of contamination. The urge to wash is compelling even though the individual knows that too much washing can be harmful. Such individuals sometimes rub their hands raw until they are bleeding. The 1920s’ film mogul and aviator Howard Hughes became famously obsessive about dirt, contamination, and touching other people. He would certainly not wear someone else’s cardigan, killer or otherwise.

Where do these beliefs and behaviours come from? Let’s consider an explanation based on learning. In the same way that we can acquire superstitious rituals in times of stress, one theory suggests that phobias are caused by a bad experience as a child. In what must be one of the most notorious psychological studies ever conducted, John Watson and Rosalie Raynor presented a nine-month-old baby, ‘Little Albert’, with a white lab rat.¹⁸ At first the baby showed no fear, but then Watson sneaked up behind the infant and startled him with a loud bang by striking a hammer on a metal bar. Naturally, this startled Little Albert, and he cried. Every time Watson and Raynor presented the rat, they clanged the hammer to frighten the poor child. Very soon, the sight of the rat alone was enough to reduce Little Albert to a shaking bundle of nerves. He had learned to fear the sight of a rat. Little Albert soon became fearful of a number of similar objects that Watson and Raynor presented to him. Not too surprising considering that, whenever these two adults appeared, they seemed hell-bent on making his life a misery. Rabbits, dogs, a sealskin coat, and even a Santa Claus mask soon became sources of sheer terror for the poor child. Only by crawling away could Little Albert get some comfort and relief. He had become phobic to objects that had not previously upset him. These findings supported the theory that adult phobias are due to some bad learning episode as a child.

I know from personal experience that there is some truth to this theory. I used to fish when I was a young boy and didn’t particularly like the maggots we used for bait. I remember feeling a bit queasy when I had to pick up their wriggling little bodies to impale them on the hook. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was something that I could do. Some years later I would have a terrible encounter with maggots. Like many ten-year-olds, I had taken to searching old derelict houses looking for anything to scavenge. In one house, I remember creeping from one darkened room to another. It had been entirely trashed, as if it had been in an earthquake, and so I had to pick my way through the rubble and household debris. On entering a darkened back room, I heard a faint gurgling, almost buzzing, sound but was unable to see where it came from. I stepped forward onto what I thought was a small furry cushion. In fact, it was the bloated carcass of a dead cat that gave way under the weight of my foot, causing it to pop like a balloon full of rice pudding. Before I realized what had happened, the smell of decay hit my nostrils like a physical punch forcing me to gag and retch. The stench of rotting flesh is universally recognized as one of the most unpleasant on the planet – a response programmed into humans but not carrion beasts or flies. When I lifted my foot into a shaft of light that streamed through a broken window, I stared at the horror of my canvas gym shoe writhing with a mass of maggots. I ran screaming into the daylight and eventually walked home barefoot. From that day on, I have been phobic to maggots. I experience extreme uncontrollable nausea whenever I see them. I particularly hate filmmakers who seem to delight in inserting shots of wriggling maggots into films and documentaries without warning the viewer. As for flies, the creatures that maggots aspire to become, I take great delight in killing them. To hell with karma and Buddhism. If I come back as a fly, I would prefer to be squashed. And do not even think of offering me rice pudding for dessert.

Nobody knows what happened to Little Albert. It is not clear who his parents were and why they would ever have agreed to such an experiment. Watson’s study was conducted in 1920; any scientist repeating that experiment today would be fired for unethical conduct. It turns out that Watson was indeed fired, but not for traumatizing Little Albert. In between sessions of terrorizing the baby, he had been conducting an affair with his collaborator. As a married man, his liaison with his graduate student Rosalie was considered too scandalous for the day and so he left academia and went on to earn a fortune in advertising.

The trouble with any learning explanation of phobias is that many patients have never had the sorts of early traumatizing experiences that both Little Albert and I had. For example, it cannot explain people with snake phobias in Ireland or New Zealand, where there are no snakes. Also, if early learning were the only explanation, you would have more cases of car phobias, electric socket phobias, and so on. We are much more likely to have a potentially life-threatening experience with today’s technology than with snakes and spiders. It is as if something in our evolutionary past has prepared us to learn these fears. The psychologist Martin Seligman first proposed this preparedness theory of phobias.¹⁹ He argues that humans are genetically wired to fear certain classes of things without the need for a lot of learning. Our species learned to be extra-sensitive to potential threats by natural selection. Maybe our prehistoric ancestors who were especially fearful of snakes and spiders passed that aspect of their personality on to their children through their genes. That would explain why the majority of phobias fit into a few categories that could have been sources or signals of potential danger, such as environments (open spaces, heights, dark places), animals (snakes, spiders), and animals that elicit disgust (rats, mice, maggots). There are few phobias of modern appliances because we simply have not had enough time to evolve wariness to threats like electric sockets.

So some fears seem to take root much more easily than others. Could this be true of other thoughts? Religious beliefs may be indoctrinated by associative learning in the same way phobias are, but like irrational fears, they may also build on our natural inclinations. This is because they fit well with our natural ways of thinking about the world – the mind design we have inherited through our genes. This may partly explain why supernatural beliefs are so easily accepted. They seem to fit with what we think is possible.

This idea of being prepared for the supernatural is one that the anthropologists Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran, who study the similarity of religious beliefs from around the world, have proposed.²⁰ At first sight, individual religious beliefs seem to be extremely varied, but they all share properties that predict whether they will catch on as ideas. To begin, all religions have a supernatural component – beliefs that violate the natural laws of the world. When Boyer and Atran examined individual supernatural beliefs passed on from one individual to the next through storytelling, they found that these beliefs have a similar structure. First, they were transmitted best when the supernatural aspects were set within a normal mundane context. It was because Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding reception that the miracle was attention-grabbing and is remembered well. His ability to feed a crowd is not particularly surprising until you find out that there were five thousand people and he had only a few fish and loaves. If these supernatural acts had occurred in a much more fantastical context, they would not have had so great an impact. This is called a contrast effect: events are more striking when they suddenly depart from what you expect. That’s why horror movies lull you into a false sense of security before the monster jumps out at you. The contrast effect of storytelling has been demonstrated experimentally by showing that the bizarre is best remembered in the context of a normal story line.²¹ Completely fanciful stories do not provide such a strong contrast effect, and so they have less impact. Also, the events that violate just one fundamental principle, rather than commit multiple violations, are the most memorable. In other words, the story cannot be too outrageous and fantastical. A statue that speaks is judged to be more likely an example of a ‘real’ case of the supernatural than one that speaks, bleeds, hovers above the ground, and then vanishes into thin air. The fact that context and credibility are important in the transmission of ideas suggests that people filter stories for plausibility. If this is the case, our intuitive understanding of the world is going to be an important factor in what we believe.

INTUITIVE CREATIONISM

The recent atheist attack on religion has been welcomed by many who are alarmed by the apparent rise and influence of religious fundamentalism in the world. There are a number of reasons for this anti-religion attitude. It is partly a reaction to the perceived rise in the terrorist threat from Islamic fundamentalism around the world that was triggered by 9/11. The reaction is also a response to a corresponding strengthening of Christian fundamentalism and its increasing influence in policy decisions that affect the progress of science and how it is taught in our schools. The battle between science and religion is at its fiercest over the issue of the origins of life on earth, and currently that fight is most bitter in the United States.

The problem is that the majority of US adults believe that a supreme being, namely God, guided the origin and diversity of life on earth. They believe that in the beginning God created earth and all its life forms and that there has been no significant change since that day. This creationist view contrasts with the scientific theory of evolution, which states that life on earth is constantly changing to produce new life forms and that this process continues without purpose, guidance, or design. According to evolution, the diversity of life on the planet we see today is due to gradual changes accumulated over time. The reason this is a problem is that it highlights a paradox of modern America. The United States is one of the most scientifically and technologically advanced nations on the planet. It has produced more Nobel Prize winners than any other country. With the most successful space programme, it has ambitions to colonize neighbouring planets. The United States also has some of the most advanced medical knowledge and practice in the world. Yet less than half of the American population accept a comprehensive scientific theory that explains the origins and diversity of life on earth. When it comes to the general public’s acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the United States is second from the bottom of the list of the top thirty-four industrialized nations. Why is creationism so dominant and natural selection so weak in the United States?

There are two main reasons. First, Christian fundamentalism is politically strong in the United States. In some states, bills have been introduced to allow creationism to be taught as a valid alternative to evolution in the science curriculum. Ever since the famous Scopes monkey trials in 1925, in which a biology teacher was prosecuted for teaching Darwinism, there have been concerted efforts to curb the influence of the teaching of evolution by presenting creationism as a valid alternative. Even though two-thirds of US state science standards recommend the teaching of evolution, fewer than 40 per cent include humans as part of the curriculum. But strong Christian fundamentalism is only one part of the explanation. The other reason creationism is so successful is that there is something about Darwin’s theory of natural selection itself that makes it difficult for people to accept. When we see the diversity of life today, it is hard to believe that such complexity could arise spontaneously. Remember: our minds are designed to see order and structure in the world, and everything about life seems to be specially designed, as if by purpose. Darwin’s theory explains why this is an illusion. It is beautifully simple, but so alien to the way humans think. To most of us, Darwin’s theory of the origin of the species through natural selection is, well, unnatural.

Consider what it has to say. First, we must accept that the world is continually changing. Life on earth has to adapt to those changes in order to survive. Adaptation occurs because each generation of life inherits slight random variations in its genetic makeup from the previous generation, and these variations produce slight differences between individuals. This means that some individuals and not others are better equipped to deal with the pressures of the environment where there is competition to breed. The selection occurs because these individuals are more likely to survive and pass on to their offspring the genes that gave them the advantage. Over time – a lot of time – this gradual process of selection by nature accumulates to produce significant change and diversity.

That’s Darwin’s theory of evolution in a nutshell. It is a simple, elegant, powerful theory that explains so much about diversity on our planet. But, as Richard Dawkins himself once lamented, it’s almost as if the human brain is designed to misunderstand evolution.²² I think he is right. Evolution is so damned counterintuitive. For example, we can easily see patterns in the diversity of life at any moment in time. However, the same processes that lead us to group animals together also lead us to treat them as separate. As individuals with relatively short life spans, we don’t have experience of immense passages of time, and so we cannot observe evolution at work. As laypeople, we don’t have the luxury of the historical record to show us how life has changed. All we have as nonscientists are our intuitions about life. And evolution runs counter to those intuitions. How can all living things, from the complexity of humans to the simplicity of bacteria, come from the same original source? How can the complexity of design emerge without a designer? It’s precisely because it doesn’t fit with our mind design that we find evolution a really hard process to understand.

Also, when people say they are not creationists, are they fully aware of how natural selection works, or are they just rejecting the religious account? Does the rest of the world really understand natural selection any better than the Americans? I am not so sure. In Europe we may readily supply the answer ‘evolution’ to the question, ‘Where did the diversity of life on earth come from?’ but, as with many other phenomena, we often say we understand explanations when in fact we don’t. This weakness in our ability to be accurate in judging how much we know is called the illusion of explanatory depth.²³ We all typically overestimate how much we understand, and this is especially true of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. For example, most people think evolution works by ‘survival of the fittest’, a term coined not by Darwin but by his contemporary Herbert Spencer.²⁴ This concept has been misinterpreted to mean that nature selects for those with the most physical strength. This misconception was at the core of Nazi eugenics to kill off individuals who they deemed would weaken the genetic pool. However, this is a gross misunderstanding of the original theory, in which ‘fittest’ meant how well the individual was matched to his or her environment. It’s not always the largest or the strongest individuals who are best matched, because environments are constantly changing, a point Dawkins elegantly explains in his first book, The Selfish Gene. If we all evolved into seven-foot-tall, muscular athletes, we would not be very successful in an environment with a limited food supply to feed our massive bodies. This is one consoling fact for those of us lower down the food chain. Eventually those at the top are going to evolve themselves out of existence.

Probably the most difficult aspect of the theory, and the one that smashes headlong into the face of common sense, is the shared ancestry of all life forms. Ever since the Scopes monkey trial, most people have been familiar with the furor over the Darwinists’ claim that humans are related to monkeys. But that’s nothing compared to the truth about ourselves as revealed by modern genetics. All living things – humans, animals, insects, trees, plants, flowers, fruit, amoebas, and even simple moulds – are genetically related. We know this because science has been able to unravel the building blocks of life and show that all living things share varying degrees of similarity in their DNA structures, the stuff of life. And Darwin’s theory of evolution is the only meaningful explanation for this fact. All living things must have evolved from a common ancestor way back in the infancy of life on earth. But, like the argument about whether there are eleven or twelve dimensions to our universe, the science of genetics does not make intuitive sense. From an early age, children treat all manner of living things as fundamentally different in kind. As we shall see, they understand that people are different from pets. Dogs are different from cats. Animals are different from plants. Children are not taught these distinctions. It’s a natural way to carve up the living world into all its different forms. Not only that, but children think that all living forms have always existed the way they are today.²⁵ They are naturally inclined to the creationist’s viewpoint.

Like many adults, children cannot conceive of an animal, let alone humans, as a product of constant change. They simply don’t have any experience of this, and so they consider it impossible. Of course, we can learn these facts through science education, but they still do not make intuitive sense. That’s why we are so fascinated by natural metamorphosis, such as is demonstrated by tadpoles and butterflies. They seem magical because an individual can dramatically change in a lifetime. Actually, metamorphosis in the animal kingdom is not that uncommon. Many species can even change sex, with fish topping the gender-bender list.²⁶ That might be acceptable for animals, but a transgender human who decides to have a sex change operation is abhorrent to most people – because transgender individuals violate our natural view of humans as being either male or female, a property fixed from birth. In truth, many of our intuitive biological boundaries, such as gender, are more apparent than real. There is much more shared similarity and common origins than we appreciate. And if you don’t believe me, ask yourself this: why do men have nipples?²⁷

As humans, we do not naturally see ourselves as a product of continual change. Most of us think we are direct descendants in a lineage of ancestors who were also human. That’s why we feel a connection with the prehistoric artists of the Niaux caves. However, thirteen thousand years is just a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms. If we go back far enough, we find that life was literally much simpler. I can know this on an intellectual level, but I cannot easily accept that all living organisms have evolved from the same origin. I simply cannot see how I am related to the furry green mould growing on the cheese in my fridge. The full implications of evolution are rarely considered because we cannot conceive what it really means. Our physical resemblance to chimpanzees may make it easier for us to understand that we share around 98 per cent of our genetic makeup. Much harder to accept is that we also share 50 per cent of our genetic makeup with a banana.²⁸ I may feel that some of my fellow humans have the intelligence of a banana, but to fully accept that all life is related by the same basic genetic building blocks is beyond belief. No matter how simple or complicated an organism can be, all life forms share about one thousand genes. As I write this, I am contemplating the bananas in the fruit bowl in front of me, which for some strange reason suddenly seem less appetizing.

Why do we misunderstand natural selection, and why does creationism do so well in a Christian fundamentalist environment? The answer is that our minds are naturally inclined to a creationist view. After all, creationism was created by the human mind, whereas evolution by natural selection is a fact that was discovered. Without the Book of Genesis, there would have been some other creation story. The Incas, the Egyptians, and the Aztecs all had exotic creation myths, and that probably goes for all extinct civilizations.²⁹ Every culture has a creation story because humans are naturally inclined to understand the world in terms of patterns, purpose, and causality. Everything about evolution runs counter to how our natural mind design makes sense of life on an earth made up of different animals and plants. We are not naturally inclined to a theory that is nonpurposeful, nondirected, and yet capable of all the extreme diversity of life forms. To top it all, we are then expected to believe that we are all related to bananas.

Rather, our intuitions from an early age provide a fertile soil for creationism, whether we stumble on it ourselves or are led to it through religious doctrines. These intuitions include:

1.

There are no random events or patterns in the world.

2.

Things are caused by intention.

3.

Complexity cannot happen spontaneously but must be a product of someone’s plan to design things for a purpose.

4.

All living things are essentially different because of some invisible property inside them.

The developmental psychologist Margaret Evans has studied creationist beliefs in children raised in both fundamentalist and nonfundamentalist homes in the US Midwest.³⁰ She asked children a series of open-ended questions about the origins of different animals, then coded their responses in terms of whether they were creationist (‘God made it’), spontaneous (‘It just came out of the ground like that’), or evolutionist (‘It came from an earlier different kind of animal’). The youngest children in her group, the five- to seven-year-olds, gave a mix of creationist and spontaneous explanations, depending on their community. As expected, they provided no evolutionary explanations. Also not surprising, those raised in Christian fundamentalist homes were more likely to say that God was responsible, whereas children from nonfundamentalist homes gave an equal mixture of ‘God made it’ and ‘they just appeared’ answers.

However, something very strange happens around eight to ten years of age. Irrespective of their home environment, all children of this age gave mostly creationist accounts for life on earth. Something is happening around middle childhood that makes creationism a very appealing explanation to most children. Only at age ten to twelve did children start to show an awareness of evolution and, not surprisingly, this awareness was predominantly shown in the nonfundamentalist households, where families had taken children to natural history museums.

We can know that natural selection is the correct account for the diversity of life on earth, but like the dormant naive reasoning we saw with college students guessing the speed of falling cannonballs, intuitive beliefs can still linger in the educated mind.

RELIGIOUS SCIENTISTS

If God is a delusion and creationism wrong, what can be done to change this state of affairs? It has been suggested that a good grounding in science education can combat the spread of the religion virus. Our best scientists are elected as Fellows of the Royal Society, an august institution that dates back three hundred years to the time of Newton. Around 3 per cent of Royal Society Fellows who responded to a recent survey said they were religious, though I suspect that this figure may be an underestimate, since three-quarters of the Fellows did not respond at all. It may be that religious scientists are aware that their faith beliefs put them in direct contradiction with their science and that they do not want to be ‘outed’. There is caution for good reason. When the openly religious member, the Revd Prof. Michael Weiss called, in 2008, for Creationism to be debated as part of the schools’ curriculum, he was duly forced to resign as its director of education for bringing the Society into disrepute. It’s a similar story in the US. Only 7 per cent of the members of the prestigious US National Academy of Sciences are religious. At first pass, these tiny minorities of 3 to 7 per cent seem to support the idea that scientists are not religious.³¹

The problem with this is that these figures are based on a highly selected group of individuals – the ‘A-list’ celebrities of the scientific community. The most comprehensive study, conducted in 1969 by the Carnegie Commission, surveyed more than sixty thousand US professors and revealed that around 40 per cent regularly attended church.³² Of course, society changes over time, and someone who attends church is not necessarily a believer. I had dinner once with Dan Dennett, who surprised me by revealing that he liked going to church. Dennett is famously atheistic and was in the United Kingdom promoting his latest book, which argues that religion is a natural product of mind design. When I heard that he regularly attends church, my jaw dropped into my soup. (I was ‘gob-smacked’, a quaint British phrase I love, as it captures so well the visual image of one’s mouth [gob] when it has been unexpectedly slapped open.) I was aghast. Hold the press. Dennett going to church did not compute until he explained that he enjoyed the choir and the singing. Not all atheists are church-burning militants, and Dennett is still a committed nonbeliever.³³ We were reminded of this recently on his recovery from heart surgery. With typical wit, Dennett thanked those who had prayed for him but wondered whether they had also sacrificed a goat for good measure!

The most recent study, a 2007 survey of 1,646 academics from twenty-one top American universities, reports that only four out of every ten of the physicists, chemists, and biologists interviewed said they did not believe in God.³⁴ In other words, most of the scientists had some degree of indecision or belief. I find this remarkable, since these academics were from the very ‘hard’ sciences that demand argument based on objective and reliable evidence. What does this all mean? Basically, that a good science education does not stop you believing in God. Can we really expect the general public to reach the intellectual standards of members of the NAS and Royal Society for them to cease being religious? Science education is essential, and every child can benefit from scientific training, but we must not make the mistake of thinking that science education inoculates the child from religion.

Rather, it appears that culture, not education, is the main factor in the spread of religion. Currently Europe is more secular than the United States, but that does not mean that Europeans engage in less supernatural thinking than Americans. Atheists can still have supernatural beliefs. A popular poll of one thousand typical UK adults in 2002 revealed that 36 per cent did not believe in God, but nearly twice as many believed that psychics have real powers.³⁵ As the writer G. K. Chesterton pointed out, when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Even prominent atheists can maintain the possibility of the supernatural. The neuroscientist Sam Harris is a voracious critic of religion.³⁶ He evokes rational argument to support his attack on faith, and yet, at the end of his book The End of Faith, he endorses supernatural aspects of Eastern mysticism and the possibility of the sorts of mental telepathy I address and criticize later. Just because someone rejects conventional religion does not mean that he or she denies all supernaturalism. Some critics quickly denounced Harris’s apparent double standards, but I think such criticism is unfair.³⁷ It is unfair because most of us, including atheist neuroscientists, are naturally inclined to supernatural beliefs.

SUPERS VERSUS BRIGHTS

Dennett argues that we are not all doomed to supernaturalism, since the world can be divided into those with supernatural beliefs (‘Supers’) and those who reject supernatural explanations of the world (‘Brights’).³⁸ I would argue that human nature rarely fits neatly into separate boxes. Such is the case with religion and secular supernatural beliefs. The world does not neatly divide into Brights and Supers on the basis of belief. There is a whole range of beliefs out there. Some beliefs (in heaven, hell, demons, angels, God, and the Devil) are immediately recognizable as the stuff of religious gospel. Other beliefs, such as those surveyed in the Gallup poll cited in the last chapter (precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance) are supernatural notions that contradict our scientific understanding but are not religious. People who say they are atheists can still have some bizarre supernatural beliefs. Most atheists I have met are generally not anti-supernatural so much as anti-religion. This is a vitally important point that is often overlooked. When I talked in Norwich about humans being wired for a supersense, some thought I only meant religion. Critics pointed out that if we are wired for supernatural beliefs, how can we explain there being so many atheists in countries like Sweden and Finland, where eight out of every ten say that they are not religious? It may be cold up there, but not all Swedes and Finns could have evolved different brains. Or consider a comparison of Ireland and the United Kingdom. Only one out of every twenty is an atheist in Ireland, but skip across the water to the United Kingdom and the number is eight times higher. How could biology explain atheism being prevalent in one country but not in its neighbour?³⁹

The answer is that the brain is wired for many things that depend on environment. Just because human behaviour and thinking vary between those raised in different environments does not mean that there is no biology involved. For example, every human infant is wired for language, but the language they end up speaking depends on where they are raised.⁴⁰ Infants from anywhere in the world will end up speaking the language to which they are exposed – and with no effort, because their brains are designed to do this.

Or consider an example from vision. Why do all Chinese look alike? Before you start writing to me to complain about my racism, I will add that, of course they don’t all look alike, and in fact we also all look alike to them.⁴¹ In an area located just behind your ears is the brain region known as the fusiform gyrus, which is specialized for processing faces.⁴² Right from the very start, newborns appear to be wired to seek out faces. With experience, they become expert at recognizing their own mother’s face and other members of their group, but they remain less expert at recognizing members of other groups.⁴³ This research on language and face recognition development tells us there is a biological bias for babies becoming increasingly tuned in to their environment. To borrow an analogy from computing, the infant brain is formatted for certain inputs, and faces and language are just two of them.

TWEEDLEDUM AND TWEEDLEDEE

Could it be that a supersense also results from a biological bias? Maybe culture spreads belief by feeding our bias with ideas, but that does not mean that we inevitably grow up believing. Unlike language and face expertise, which are present in almost every human, belief has much more variation. It depends on the individual as well. For example, I heard a BBC Radio 4 interview with Peter Hitchens and his brother Christopher, who recently published his provocatively entitled criticism of religion, God Is Not Great.⁴⁴ Both men are intelligent, well-educated journalists. They were raised in the same family, one that taught them to be independent. However, Christopher is an atheist and Peter is a Christian. At the end of a rather surprisingly barbed argument – typical of squabbling brothers, each accused the other of changing the subject – the interviewer interjected and asked how two brothers raised in the same household could be so passionately different in their beliefs. There was a pregnant pause. This simple question had them both lost for words. Eventually, Christopher answered. ‘This doesn’t help to sell my book!’

The answer to the interviewer’s question may be found in a natural experiment that allows investigators to look at the role of biology and environment. When a human egg splits into two after fertilization, the result is identical twins who mostly share the same genes. If these identical twin children are fostered out to different homes, we can estimate the influence of environment and the contribution of genes to their development. It’s not a perfect experiment, since most environments are very similar, but it does reveal something fascinating about the power of genes. The research findings are vast, but to sum up the conclusions drawn from identical twin studies, on many psychological measures a comparison of results indicates that it’s often like testing the same person twice. Aspects of our personality that we think we have cultivated ourselves are often biologically predictable. This also appears to be true for each twin’s inclination toward religion.

Identical twins raised in separate environments share more religious beliefs and behaviour compared to non-identical twins who also live apart. A study by a Minnesota team led by Thomas Bouchard found that the environment is less predictive of religiosity than genetic similarity.⁴⁵ Another study from the same group found that once twins leave home, only the identical twins continue to share the same religious beliefs.⁴⁶ The geneticist Dean Hamer has even identified a gene, vesicular monoamine transporter 2, or VMAT2, that is linked to the personality traits of spirituality.⁴⁷ He found that in a survey of over two hundred people including twins, those who share religiosity also share VMAT2. This gene controls a number of the brain chemicals responsible for controlling moods. Neuroscientists such as Andrew Newberg have even made progress towards identifying the relevant neural circuitry that is activated during religious experiences, again suggesting a brain-based account for the spiritual.⁴⁸ So maybe our brains and our own unique mind design determine whether we believe or not. Even if Peter and Christopher Hitchens have shared very similar environments and experiences, they will be pleased to know that they have different brains, which probably explains why their beliefs are so different.

It’s early days yet, and it is not clear that reducing the search for belief to the gene level is going to make much sense of a rich and complex human behaviour. However, this research does suggest that the explanation of how belief operates should look at the role of biology working within environments. If the findings from genetic studies hold up, this means that there is something in our genes that contributes to building a brain that is predisposed to belief. If that turns out to be the case, those on both sides of the debate about the true origins of belief are going to be really annoyed, because the suggestion would be that maybe we don’t have a choice about whether we believe. In other words, there is no free will in making the decision to believe or not.

Your own individual mind design determines how predisposed to belief you are, a possibility we return to at the end of this book when I discuss mechanisms that control thought processes. However, if there is one thing that both believers and nonbelievers are uncomfortable about it is the prospect that there is a mind design when it comes to choices in life. That’s because we like to think that when we make our decisions we are doing so on the basis of objective reason. We like to think that we are weighing up the evidence and making a balanced judgement. In truth, when we make decisions there are all sorts of biases operating that are independent of reason. We don’t necessarily have the free will to choose. That’s an idea that no one feels happy about. This is because, as the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer observed, ‘You must believe in free will; there is no choice.’⁴⁹

EVERYDAY SUPERNATURALISM

Religion is just one form of supernaturalism. You may be a self-avowed, cross-burning, shrine-desecrating, grave-trampling atheist, but I bet that I could quickly uncover some supernatural skeletons in your mental closet. You may also not believe in any of the paranormal phenomena from the ten listed in the Gallup poll from the last chapter, but that list refers only to the ones that are recognized as supernatural. There are many more. For a start, there are the obvious customs like not walking under ladders, throwing salt over your shoulder, crossing your fingers, and so on. These clearly come from superstitious practices passed down through culture. Less obvious are the aspects of normal daily human interaction that arguably reflect beliefs in unseen properties operating in the world. For example, every culture has some form of ritual for greeting that demonstrates the extent to which people are prepared to touch each other physically.

Some cultures are explicit about the supernatural origins of their greeting rituals. The Maori of New Zealand press noses (Hongi) to exchange spiritual breath (ha), but all contact gestures can be interpreted according to the extent to which there is a perceived exchange of essence. For example, people do strange things in the presence of their idols. Fans go crazy when they get to physically touch their sports heroes or rock stars. Normal, rational people mob the famous simply to make contact. Every presidential candidate has to get used to sore wrists in an effort to satisfy the crowd’s desire to shake hands. The need to touch another person is a powerful human urge.

In the same way we are repulsed by psychological contamination from a murderer’s cardigan, we are also compelled to engage in acts that address intimate physical contact. Of course, we can always justify them in terms of following traditional customs, but the point is that they originate from supernatural thinking. As a child, did you ever make an oath with a friend in which you both spat on your hands and then slapped them together? You would only do that with someone to make a solemn oath, because touching someone else’s spit is so gross. This is because our willingness to make physical contact with others is a reflection of our essentialist beliefs.

Then there are the various beliefs about sacred objects and places. In 2007 John Lennon’s piano, the one on which he composed the anthem to humanity ‘Imagine’, left the United Kingdom to begin a tour of sites around the world. It’s not the beautiful white grand piano that we all remember, but a rather plain, brown upright one that you would find in many a school music room. The plan was to take the piano to places of violence and atrocity. It went to the grassy knoll in Dallas where John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It was taken to Memphis where Martin Luther King Jr was shot. It turned up in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. It appeared at Waco, Okalahoma City, and the Virginia Tech campus – the scenes of so many pointless deaths.

Lennon’s piano had become a sacred object to heal the wounds left in communities still coming to terms with grief. Anyone was allowed to touch it. Lori Blanc, a Virginia Tech avian biologist, told me that, even though she is a scientist and not sentimental, she found herself surprisingly drawn to the piano and comforted after playing a tune for a murdered friend. Libra LaGrone, whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, said, ‘It was like sleeping in your grandpa’s sweatshirt at night. Familiar, beautiful, and personal.’⁵⁰

All societies have sacred possessions, places, and practices. They become sacred when we attribute special value and powers to them. We believe that they have properties that make them unique and irreplaceable and that no scientific instrument can measure, but most of us believe we can sense them. They are secular supernatural beliefs.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that you do not have any of the thoughts I have suggested. However, even the most rational among us can have emotional urges and feelings that run counter to reason. Like Lori Blanc, the scientist who played John Lennon’s piano, sometimes we can even surprise ourselves by our own feelings. Cynics too easily dismiss these thoughts and behaviours as simply emotional, as if somehow emotions are less important than reason. However, as my old colleague Dan Gilbert recently pointed out, feelings are the reason humans do anything.⁵¹ Feelings motivate us to go to work, to fall in love, to wonder at the universe, to enjoy life or not. Without feelings, there really would be no point in going on.

Scientists have feelings too. Despite its poor public perception, science can be intensely passionate and emotional. This often comes as a surprise to most nonscientists, but I can tell you that when ideas and reputations are challenged, it can really hurt to be wrong. So I challenge anyone out there to claim they have no emotions. Without emotion, none of us would consider ourselves human. And if you have emotion, I would argue, that emotion cannot be entirely ruled by reason, leaving the door open for the supernatural. We all vary in how much we are influenced by supernatural belief; while many of us can suppress this way of thinking, in the end it is a normal part of the human makeup to reason and behave this way.

Clearly some of us are more prone to this way of thinking than others, but maybe others cannot suppress what is a natural inclination in most of us. We all know what it is to be irrational. Humans are destined to make mistakes of rationality. This irrationality reflects supernatural assumptions that appeal to patterns, forces, and energies categorically denied by science. We don’t have our rational radar on all the time. Sometimes our behaviour and decisions are based on inferring the presence of things that science tells us do not exist. That’s because the idea of there being something more to reality is such a common ingredient in so much of our human behaviour, irrespective of whether we are religious or not. But I don’t want to keep bludgeoning you over the head with the supersense. I hope you will come to the same conclusion. By the end of this book, I want you to reject the idea that you are either a Super or a Bright. Rather, I think it is better to be SuperBright.

WHAT NEXT?

In this chapter, I have dealt with belief in science, religion, and the supernatural. They all depend on thinking about the unobservable, and that requires a mind designed to fill in the missing information. However, by now you should appreciate that this process is not infallible. The same intuitive processes that lead us to reason are the same ones that lead us to be unreasonable. Sometimes we infer the presence of things that do not really exist, and if they did, they would require a complete overhaul of our natural laws. That’s what makes them supernatural.

Religion and culture do play a role in the spread of supernaturalism, but I would argue that they simply provide a framework for what comes naturally to us all. We are primed for religious belief because our mind design is biased to supernatural reasoning as a by-product of rational thinking. This subtle distinction between how ideas spread may seem like pedantic hair-splitting but, depending on which is true, there are different implications for what culture can do, if anything, to change supernatural thinking.

Richard Dawkins is right. Religions are spread by culture telling our children stories that have to be believed by faith alone. If we remove the church, religion may be stopped dead in its tracks, but we will still have supernatural thinking. If I am right, it will re-emerge in every newborn child as part of the natural processes of reasoning. It’s like the mythical Hydra beast. If you chop off one head it simply grows another. So let’s take a look at this monster of a child.