Religion
About 6 in 10 Americans, according to a 2005 Harris Poll, believe in the devil and hell, and about 7 in 10 believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and of life after death. A 2006 survey at Baylor University found that 92% of respondents believe in a personal God.
Assuming the presence of an “agent” (any creature with volitional, independent behavior) is more adaptive than assuming its absence. If you are a caveman on the savannah, you are better off presuming that the motion you detect out of the corner of your eye is an agent and something to run from, even if you are wrong.
An experiment from the ’40s by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel suggested that imputing agency is so automatic that people may do it even for geometric shapes. Subjects watched a film of triangles and circles moving around. When asked what they had been watching, the subjects used words like “chase” and “capture.”
People mistake a rock for a bear, but almost no one mistakes a bear for a rock.
In the “false-belief test” children watch a puppet show with a simple plot: John comes onstage holding a marble, puts it in Box A and walks off. Mary comes onstage, opens Box A, takes out the marble, puts it in Box B and walks off. John comes back onstage. The children are asked, Where will John look for the marble?
Very young children, or autistic children of any age, say John will look in Box B, since they know that’s where the marble is. But older children respond that John will look for it in Box A.
Justin Barrett recently conducted a version of the false-belief test with a religious twist. Barrett showed young children a box with a picture of crackers on the outside. What do you think is inside this box? he asked, and the children said, “Crackers.” Next he opened it and showed them that the box was filled with rocks. Then he asked two follow-up questions: What would your mother say is inside this box? And what would God say?
As earlier theory-of-mind experiments already showed, 3- and 4-year-olds tended to think Mother was infallible, and since the children knew the right answer, they assumed she would know it, too. They usually responded that Mother would say the box contained rocks. But 5- and 6-year-olds had learned that Mother, like any other person, could hold a false belief in her mind, and they tended to respond that she would be fooled by the packaging and would say, “Crackers.”
No matter what their age, the children, who were all Protestants, told Barrett that God would answer, “Rocks.”
Children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience.
David Sloan Wilson links group selection and the evolution of religion. Imagine flock of birds. Some birds serve as sentries, scanning the horizon for predators and calling out warnings. Having a sentry is good for the group but bad for the sentry, which is doubly harmed: by keeping watch, the sentry has less time to gather food, and by issuing a warning call, it is more likely to be spotted by the predator. So in the Darwinian struggle, the birds most likely to pass on their genes are the nonsentries.
On the other hand, if there are 10 sentries in one group and none in the other, 3 or 4 of the sentries might be sacrificed. The flock with sentries will probably outlast the flock that has no early-warning system, so the other 6 or 7 sentries will survive to pass on the genes. If the whole-group advantage outweighs the cost to any individual bird of being a sentry, then the sentry gene will prevail.
There are costs to any individual of being religious. But in terms of intergroup struggle the costs can be outweighed by the benefits of being in a cohesive group.
In 2003, Richard Sosis and Bradley Ruffle sought an explanation for why Israel’s religious communes did better on average than secular communes in the wake of the economic crash of most of the country’s kibbutzim. They based their study on a standard economic game that measures cooperation. Individuals from religious communes played the game more cooperatively, while those from secular communes tended to be more selfish. It was the men who attended synagogue daily, not the religious women or the less observant men, who showed the biggest differences.