The Science of Beliefs

Wade: I took the following excerpts from my personal blog post "Reflections on The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer". I thought these points would especially interest you, as they all pertain to religion and the belief in God.

A Demon-Haunted World

"I worry that...pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir."

I get chills whenever I read this passage from Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. Though he makes a legitimate point about the dangers of pseudoscience and superstition, I am hopeful that the internet will continue to be a source of knowledge to free society from the described peril.

A common issue when encountering mysteries in the world is our human tendency to ascribe supernatural causes when no natural explanations seem plausible. However, "the fact that we cannot fully explain a mystery with natural means does not mean it requires a supernatural explanation." Throughout history this trend has prevailed:

1. Discover mystery -> attribute mystery to "the gods".
2. Science/technology improves -> attribute mystery to natural causes.

For example:

1. The sky appears blue -> there must be a layer of water held aloft in the heavens.
2. Science improves our understanding of visible light -> the blue is actually a result of scattered photons!

This is why I love science so much. We can appreciate natural beauty at deeper levels through a deeper understanding of what is actually occurring. The blue light that you're observing on a sunny day is actually about 4 minutes old, having just been created on the surface of the sun via fusion of two hydrogen atoms to make helium, in the process ejecting a massive amount of energy in the form of a photon (that acts both as a particle and a wave!), accelerating faster than any other known substance toward the earth, reaching our atmosphere in about 4 minutes and scattering as it collides with gas molecules in the air, and being that blue light travels as shorter, smaller waves, it is scattered more than other colors and gives us the beautiful skyblue color above. Amazing.

But the gods have served their purpose in history, and we may not have become the civilized society we are today without "their" help.

The Evolution of God

God has taken many forms throughout history - Yahweh, Amon Ra, Aphrodite, Apollo, Baal, Brahma, Ganesha, Isis, Mithra, Osiris, Shiva, Thor, Vishnu, Wotan, Zeus and ~1000 others. But where did this need for an all-knowing creator come from?

Evolutionary biology may have the answer: "around five thousand to seven thousand years ago, as bands and tribes began to coalesce into chiefdoms and states, government and religion co-evolved as social institutions to codify moral behaviors into ethical principles and legal rules, and God became the ultimate enforcer of the rules. In the small populations of hunter-gatherer bands and tribes with a few dozen to a couple of hundred members, informal means of behavior control and social cohesion could be employed by capitalizing on the moral emotions, such as shaming someone through guilt for violating a social norm, or even excommunicating violators from the group. But when populations grew into the tens and hundreds of thousands, and eventually into millions of people, such informal means of enforcing the rules of society broke down because free riders and norm violators could more readily get away with cheating in large groups; something more formal was needed. This is one vital role that religion plays, such that even if violators think that they got away with a violation, believing that there is an invisible intentional agent who sees all and knows all and judges all can be a powerful deterrent of sin." 

In other words, religion evolved as "a social institution to create and promote myths, to encourage conformity and altruism, and to signal the level of commitment to cooperate and reciprocate among members of a community." Religion helped us civilize. 

As religion evolved, so too did the myths and stories associated. There is speculation that the ancient Greek god of wine may have evolved into Jesus of Nazareth. 

Was Jesus the God of Wine?

It is very interesting to observe the evolution of myths throughout history. The flood myth of my own namesake, Noah, was predated by centuries by another eerily similar flood story, the Epic of Gilgamesh. But that is just one example of many.

"Consider the parallels between Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, and Jesus of Nazareth. Both were said to have been born from a virgin mother, who was a mortal woman, but were fathered by the king of heaven; both allegedly returned from the dead, transformed water into wine, and introduced the idea of eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the creator, and both were said to have been liberator of mankind."

This is not to say that the authors of the New Testament consciously based Jesus on Dionysus. However, the divine concepts that were attributed to Dionysus likely existed in society at the time of Jesus, and through belief-dependent realism, distorted the perceptions and recollections of those who encountered and recorded the life of Jesus.

Belief: Deities come into this world by virgin birth.
Belief-dependent reality: "Jesus was divine. Mary (his mother) was probably a virgin!"

Was Jesus a revolutionary with a message that changed the world? Very likely. Was he born of a virgin mother? I'm skeptical. Perhaps it was meant to be interpreted in a more metaphorical sense, perhaps that he was born of a very pure and loving mother.

Time warp to present day. Is God now evolving into aliens?

Divine Intervention or Alien Encounter?

Shermer presents a mind-blowing question in his chapter on belief in God. "How could we distinguish an omnipotent and omniscient God or Intelligent Designer from an extremely powerful and really smart extraterrestrial intelligence?" He calls this "Shermer's last law: any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God."

I think of it like this: you are visited from a being so far intellectually and technologically superior as to seem, to the human mind, nearly all-knowing, how can you say if it is "God" or it is simply another product of evolution from another planet, or an "extraterrestrial". Unless that nearly omnipotent being chose to disclose this information, it would be nearly impossible to say. You could speculate one way or the other, but when it comes down to it, we would not know.

Perhaps the first being we encounter with omniscience may be a product of our own creation.

"Science and technology have changed our world more in the past century than it changed in the previous hundred centuries - it took ten thousand years to get from the cart to the airplane, but only sixty-six years to get from powered flight to a lunar landing. Moore's law of computer power doubling every eighteen months continues unabated and is now down to about a year. Computer scientists calculate that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II, and that as early as 2030 we may encounter the singularity - the point at which computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything we can imagine that they will appear nearly infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience. When this happens the world will change more in a decade than it did in the previous thousand decades."

"If today we can engineer genes, clone mammals, and manipulate stem cells with science and technologies developed in only the past half century, think of what an [alien] could do with fifty thousand years of equivalent powers of progress in science and technology. For an [alien] who is a million years more advanced than we are, engineering the creation of planets and stars may be entirely possible. And if universes are created out of collapsing black holes - which some cosmologists think is probable - it is not inconceivable that a sufficiently advanced [alien] could even create a universe by triggering the collapse of a star into a black hole."

"What would we call an intelligent being capable of engineering life, planets, stars, and even universes? If we knew the underlying science and technology used to do the engineering, we would call it an extraterrestrial intelligence; if we did not know the underlying science and technology, we would call it God."

But those of us who have already encountered aliens are likely just confusing the encounter with an out-of-body experience. The experience was likely generated in one part of our brain, and subsequently interpreted by another part of our brain as coming from an external source. Susan Clancy, a leading researcher on the study of alien abductees, gave the following conclusion for these encounters:

"Alien-abduction beliefs can be considered a type of religious creed, based on faith. Indeed, a vast body of scientific data indicates that the believers are psychologically benefitting: they're happier, healthier, and more optimistic about theirs lives than people who lack such beliefs. We live in an age when science and technology prevail and traditional religions are under fire. Doesn't it make sense to wrap our angels and gods in space suits and repackage them as aliens?"

Indeed it does make sense. But let's return to the topic of God for a moment and explore a realistic take on Her from the most famous scientist of our day, Albert Einstein.

Einstein's God

Arguably the most brilliant theoretical physicist to date, Einstein is a name that is now synonymous with genius. As a man of science, what was his take on God?

"The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws."

He later elaborated on his concept of God:

"I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals or would sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend about the knowable world. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."

And lastly, he allows his stance a label:

"You may call me an agnostic...I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."