Science doesn’t smile on atheists

Nobody likes an evangelical atheist. Nothing ruins a dinner party like some less-holy-than-thou zealot giving a vodka-fueled sermon, pounding the table and decrying religion and spirituality as quaint superstitions left over from less enlightened times. I should know: after a few vodka-tonics, there’s no quelling my attempts to proselytize believers.

But things are looking up for my future dinner companions: New information and new ideas are forcing me to change my tune. Not about atheism, mind you, and certainly not about vodka, but about trying to convince others to believe what I believe (or more accurately, to not believe what I don’t believe). I once was happy to preach the good word of skepticism and empiricism, to enlighten the gullible and deliver the credulous, but now I hold my tongue. Not because of a precipitous drop-off in dinner party invitations (that’s a separate issue), nor as a result of condemnation, censure, or pity from believers. My humbling comes at the hands of people I’d intuitively expect to have on my side: scientists. Let the word go out from the prophets of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology: Atheists’ brains are broken.

Many non-believers would like to think otherwise. Atheism comes with an intuitive sense of rightness (bordering on righteousness). For centuries, atheists have anticipated the any-day-now when religion becomes historical artifact, and science takes its rightful place as the means by which we understand our world. This has never been more true than in the post-modern era. Surely, if you were born in the last fifty years, you weren’t born yesterday, and you can see why we used to need religion, and why we no longer do.

Smug non-believers tend to think of spiritual belief as a blip, a fluke, or at best a phase that people and cultures will eventually get over. They quote Cyril Bailey, a historian of philosophy, who wrote, “If we think that this search for God is a vain search, and that there is no reality to be discovered, … then the history of religion becomes a study of the aberrations of the human mind.” That’s right, we don’t have a problem, it’s that other 99 percent of population who are the freaks. (It echoes a young Indiana Jones, who wandering alone in the desert, separated from his party, declared, “Everyone’s lost but me.”)

By now, of course, atheists know they’re not going to win the minds of the majority any time soon, but many remain vexed as to why this should be so. “A volume like this should not be necessary,” Sunand Tryambak Joshi, writes in his introduction to the essay collection, Atheism: A Reader (Prometheus, 2000). “After at least twenty-five hundred years in which some of the keenest human minds have established the extreme unlikelihood of the major religious tenets – that God exists; that human beings are made in the image of God; that the ‘soul’ is immaterial and immortal; that God is guiding the human race in some particular direction – the great majority of the human populace continues to embrace these views with blind and unthinking tenacity, and even those who claim a more reasoned ‘faith’ are unwilling to abandon them in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

It’s not just that atheism is right that’s so frustrating, it’s that it’s so obviously right. Arguing for atheism feels like trying to convince someone that men really went to the moon, or that cigarettes really cause cancer. To believe the opposite seems to require willful ignorance.

The reasons for religion’s tenacity have become much clearer over the past five years, thanks to advances in several modern fields of study, including a new branch of science known as neurotheology. It seems that our brain structure predisposes us to spiritual belief. We are hardwired for God.

Of course, when I say “we” I really mean “you.” My brain is broken. The religion on-switch isn’t working. It never has. A lifetime of soul-searching, has turned up zilch. I’m completely devoid of the religious predisposition that scientists say I should have.

To lay my cards on the table, here’s what I really, truly believe: I believe atheism is factually correct, and that all religious and spiritual beliefs are based on untrue premises. In other words, I disbelieve in God, gods, ghosts, spirits, souls (immortal or otherwise), heaven, hell, reincarnation, angels, monsters, witches, shamans, karma, charms, wishes, pyramid power, prayer, cosmic justice, and intelligent design. I think the universe unfolds according to the blind laws of physics and chemistry, and that people are merely big bags of biochemical reactions. Love, joy, humour, conscience, consciousness – great stuff, but easily explainable in terms of body chemistry. (You can just imagine how much fun I am as a dinner guest. I’m also a great movie date, adept at pointing out scientific inaccuracies in a loud whisper.)

Before you dismiss me as an ignoramus or a bigot, let it be known that I have made sincere efforts to feel what believers feel. My closest childhood friends ran the gamut from fairly serious Christians to seriously serious Christians and our main activity was staying out late talking about God. In university, I sang in a church gospel choir, and happily sat through many a fiery sermon before breaking into joyous song. I’ve willingly attended Sunday services in many Christian denominations, and have had multi-session chats with Mormons who knocked on my door. When I started to travel, I gravitated toward Balinese temples and Malaysian mosques. I studied Buddhist meditation in Nepal, and floated prayer candles on the holy Ganges River in India at dawn. And to be clear, I love it all – the silence, the splendour, the rituals, the awe, the serenity.

But if my experiences sound suspiciously spiritual, rest assured they are not. It’s just that certain stimuli lead to hormonal surges and changes in respiratory, cardiovascular, and synaptic activity. Results: sensations of serenity and awe. No divinity required. And yet, almost everyone else experiences these same circumstances on a religious level. Even in Canada, a relatively secular country, only 16 percent of the population says they have no religion. And most of these “nones,” are not atheists. They merely reject organized religion in favour of some sort of personal god or spirituality.

Of course, numbers themselves don’t mean that much – Tim Hortons consistently trounces its café competition but that’s certainly no indication they have Canada’s best coffee – but the very pervasiveness of religious belief means it’s almost certainly a result of Darwinian evolution. When a trait is endemic in every population group on the planet, as is religion, it’s a sure sign that at some point in the past, that trait proved environmentally advantageous. Everyone without the trait was killed off before they could reproduce.

Two main theories have emerged concerning Darwinian evolution of religiosity. One says certain religious beliefs were of direct environmental advantage, because they fostered community, morality, security, and higher purpose that allowed those with God-compatible brains to kick the evolutionary biological patooties of those without.

The other school says religious beliefs themselves weren’t necessarily advantageous, but that other positive traits and abilities had as their byproduct an openness to belief in otherworldly phenomena.

“All human minds carry the systems that produce the small selective advantage,” writes Pascal Boyer, a Washington University professor of collective memory, in his book Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (Perseus, 2001). “Among these systems are a set of intuitive ontological expectations, a propensity to direct attention to what is counterintuitive, a tendency to recall it if it is inferentially rich, a system for detecting and overdetecting agency, … a set of moral intuitions that seem to have no clear justification in our own concepts, a set of social categories that pose the same problem.”

In less fancy words, he’s saying people have a natural desire to explain and understand things, an inborn tendency to look for an intelligent hand behind events and feelings, and an inherent ability to infer things they can’t directly experience. Back in the hunter-gatherer day, these skills were indispensable for sussing out how the world worked, and finding ways to exploit it. But those same skills and tendencies also caused people to see the hand of spirits guiding events. Belief in God was, and is, a sign of a healthily functioning brain.

And there’s more. In Why God Won’t Go Away (Ballantine Books, 2001) neurotheologists Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili, and Vince Rause, chronicle their experiments scanning the brains of meditating Buddhists. Meditation offers a different kind of spiritual experience: Rather than seeing the face of God, you attain a oneness with the universe. This pinnacle of meditative enlightenment, known as nirvana, makes you feels as if you’re everything and nothing at the same time. It’s almost as if the region of the brain that allows a person to distinguish between the self and the not-self – the posterior superior parietal lobe – shuts down. It turns out that’s exactly what happens. Brain scans reveal that during a nirvanic state, bloodflow to that part of the brain slows to a trickle, an indicator that there’s no activity in that part of the brain.

Such a neurological explanation for a religious experience should be music to my atheistic ears, but Newberg et al come to a different conclusion.

“The neurobiological roots of spiritual transcendence show that Absolute Unitary Being [their term for nirvana] is a plausible, even probable possibility,” they write. “The realness of Absolute Unitary Being is not conclusive proof that a higher God exists, but it makes a strong case that there is more to human existence than sheer material existence … As long as our brains are arranged the way they are, as long as our minds are capable of sensing this deeper reality, spirituality will continue to shape the human experience, and God, however we define that majestic, mysterious concept, will not go away.” They argue that our brain architecture might give us the illusion of the divine, but it could just as easily be that God designed our brains this way so that we can experience the reality of the divine.

Regardless of whether one buys their argument, one theme is clear throughout all this scientific literature: It’s normal to believe in God. Most scientists and philosophers agree that almost all aspects of cognitive ability, from temperament and disposition, to mental acuity and mathematical ability, involve some combination of nature and nurture. An individual comes into the world with certain latent predispositions, and environmental factors shape how those predispositions are manifested. A person might, for instance, have a great head for calculus, but they’ll never know it if they spend their days hunting wild boars. Certain brain qualities, though, are common across the board. The instinct to learn language, for instance, can be found in every human being on the planet, from board member to boar hunter. Predisposition to religion is almost as pervasive. If someone were born without the ability to learn language, they would be instantaneously pathologized. Clearly, a lack of ability to be religious is less of an impediment than being alinguist, but it still suggests that something about an atheist’s brain just ain’t right.

“Lack of ability” is the correct term. There are certain biological impulses that we can choose to ignore, but this isn’t one of them. We are predisposed to omnivorousness, but can choose vegetarianism. When tempers flare, we can will ourselves to remain calm. Religion is different. I have never had the chance to make a decision about what I believe. I would be a different kind of atheist if that choice were available to me, but I can’t find that damned salvation switch. Atheism is simply the only possible thing I can believe. Let’s not overstate the broken-brain case. Genetics provides humans with many variations and rarities that aren’t necessarily problems: AB negative blood, blue eyes, the ability to understand Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Without variety and rarity, we’d have gone extinct a long time ago.

And the fact is, the disadvantages of lacking God aren’t entirely crippling. I sometimes must hold my tongue at the dinner table. I occasionally have grave doubts about what purpose I should assign to my life. Sometimes, usually thanks to a stark reminder that the death rate remains steady at 100 percent, the

pointlessness of existence crushes in on me, and I wonder why I bother trying. Most of the time, though, I enjoy the luxury of good body chemistry, and so live a happy life filled with joy and wonder.

But still, I often think about what it must be like to believe in God. I would enjoy the security of knowing that even the worst catastrophe has a valid purpose, and that whatever justice isn’t served in this life will be rectified in the next. More than this, though, I’d enjoy being able to share that bond with the rest of humanity. Bruce Feiler, in his book Walking the Bible describes the experience of traveling through the lands that provide the setting for the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, the story of Moses and the Israelites.

“The Bible becomes like a lingua franca when I travel,” he writes. “Everyone I talk to instantly bonds with me when I bring out the Bible, because it means we have something vital in common.”
That bond goes beyond the Judeo-Christian-Islamic biblical tradition. Imagine a meeting between a Hindu, a Christian, an Inuit shaman, and an atheist. Three out of four don’t believe in heaven. Two out of four don’t believe people can turn into animals. Two don’t believe in reincarnation. They all have radically different ideas about how the universe formed. But despite the fact that all their beliefs are mutually contradictory, the atheist is still the odd one out.

Truth be told, if I had the chance to fix my broken brain, I would choose not to. Religion might be a tempting seductress, but given a choice between believing what I’d like to be true, and what I think is true, and I’ll stick with the latter. But at least I know enough now to keep quiet about it during the main course.