Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 23, 2008
Scientists who use evolutionary psychology to explain religion are ignoring facts and missing the point.
Dec 24, 1999 | Just in case you were wondering, Purgatory is very much alive. As part of the Catholic Church's jubilee celebrations, Pope John Paul II announced this year that any Christian who gives up drinking or smoking in 2000 will have his or her time in Purgatory lessened. The pontiff's power over the souls in Purgatory was affirmed in medieval times, though very few popes have exercised this right. One who did was Boniface VIII, who in celebration of the 1300 jubilee granted complete pardon from all Purgatorial torment to anyone who died while on pilgrimage to Rome that year. Not everyone approved of such terrestrial dabbling in the hereafter; for some Christians, Boniface's action was a dangerous and illegitimate abuse of power. John Paul II apparently has no such qualms.
As an ex-Catholic girl I was thrilled to hear that the "Middle Kingdom" was still rocking -- it's one of those things that Reformation leaders quickly struck off the register. Yet even in overwhelmingly Protestant America, Purgatory remains a significant feature of our religious landscape. According to a 1997 Yankelovich survey for Time/CNN, three-quarters of Americans (76 percent) believe they are bound for heaven: Most (61 percent) expect to go there directly, but 15 percent expect a sojourn in Purgatory. Only 4 percent see themselves headed for hell.
At the start of this century, many intellectuals believed that by the year 2000 religion would have died off. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. According to polls, 95 percent of Americans believe in God. 59 percent say that religion is very important in their lives, and another 29 percent rate it as fairly important. Only 4 percent identify themselves as agnostics or atheists. Sixty-eight percent belong to a church or synagogue and nearly half of our populace, 46 percent, describe themselves as born-again. Why, in this post-Enlightenment age -- an era supposedly dominated by secular reason and science -- have religious beliefs not only survived, but flourished?
Why people believe in God is the central question of Michael Shermer's new book "How We Believe." Director of the Skeptics Society and an ex-born-again Christian himself, Shermer has a general fascination with belief; this book might be seen as a companion to his previous "Why People Believe Weird Things," a portmanteau study of "weird" beliefs from ESP to Holocaust denial. Though Shermer abandoned religion in his own life, he retains, he says, a deep appreciation of its role in other peoples' lives. But despite that appreciation, like many contemporary scientists who try to explain religion, he's leaving out evidence and missing a really critical point.
In 1998, along with MIT social scientist Frank Sulloway, Shermer set out to conduct a survey on why people believe in God. The results were both intriguing and surprising. The number one reason given (29 percent of respondents) was the apparently good design of nature or the universe. The number two reason was a feeling of God being present in everyday life (21 percent). In third place (at just 10 percent) was the answer that belief in God is comforting, consoling or relieving. The fourth place answer (another 10 percent) was that the Bible says so.
One unexpected result here is that only one in 10 people gave the consolation response. That is significant because so many secular intellectuals, particularly those opposed to religion, seem to assume that the desire for psychological comfort is the primary engine of religious faith. Over the past decade we have witnessed a boomlet in books by scientists decrying the rise of fundamentalist and New Age religious beliefs (along with other "irrationalisms" such as belief in ESP, psychic powers and past lives). At the core of these books -- see Nicholas Humphrey's "Leaps of Faith," Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" and Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow" -- can usually be found the view that all such beliefs are childish searches for consolation in the face of death and life's injustice. This condescending view is what I call the "child clutching at teddy in the dark" theory of religion.
The latest addition to this line is Wendy Kaminer's "Sleeping with Extraterrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety," a well-intentioned though curmudgeonly tirade against various forms of "irrational" belief currently sweeping our nation. Halfway through her book, Kaminer trots out the view that "people believe in deities because they would find life unbearable without them." But as Shermer's study reveals, consolation is not the driving force of many Americans' faith.
Get Salon in your mailbox!