The Belief Instinct (Jesse Bering)

OVERVIEW

“The Belief Instinct” contains so much information that it was hard to know where to start from a summary perspective. One could approach this book from a dozen angles: as a militant atheist eager to disprove god, as an aspiring child psychologist, an armchair evolutionist, an anthropologist, or even as a curious agnostic atheist/theist. I’m approaching it as an atheist interested in how the mechanics of belief pertain to mortality and meaning in life. Accordingly, this summary will be filtered through that lens.

From my vantage point, “The Belief Instinct” helps answer the following questions, which are compelling to me:

·         Why do we feel that our lives should have meaning and purpose?

·         How did we come to believe in a god that oversees our lives and sends us signs when we stray from our path?

·         Why do so many of us believe in souls and the afterlife?

Jesse Bering posits that there are evolutionary mechanics behind these beliefs – cognitive programming and adaptive illusions that spill over into the supernatural by blind design.

Teleo-functional reasoning

Here’s something I’m stunned I never knew: if you ask kids what mountains are for, they’ll tell you things like “so that animals have something to climb on.” Up until about the fourth grade, children believe that things exist for a preconceived purpose. That’s teleo-functional reasoning, and it’s our baseline programming. We are born believing that people, animals, and inanimate objects exist for a purpose (you can see how inherent in this is the need for a supernatural creator). Further, unless one is provided with alternative explanations, we carry this purpose-driven framework into adulthood. Our brains are wired to seek out meaning – to over-attribute purpose to the world.

Here’s a fun little add-on, consider the question “what’s the purpose of flies?” You might say: the purpose of flies is to eat rotting carcasses. Even the word “purpose” suggests an intentional creator, but forget about that for a second and instead consider how bizarre it would be to ask what is that fly for – that particular fly on my dinner plate? What is the purpose of that fly, vs. the one currently stuck in between the panes of glass in my bedroom window? You’d get the side eye for a question like that. But think of how we humans wonder all the time what our purpose is. Not the purpose of our species, but rather the purpose of me. We generally (even the non-believers among us) feel intuitively that our lives are meant to have a meaning – we’re meant to be a teacher, or a mother, or an entrepreneur. You can teach kids that tectonic plate movement creates mountains, but teleo-functional reasoning spills over into other areas, including why we’re here and our place in the universe. The answer of course is there is no reason outside of happenstance evolution, but this feels deeply unsatisfying, and teleo-functional reasoning helps explain why. Even for someone who rationally accepts that there is no inherent purpose in the universe, that doesn’t necessarily stop our wanting there to be one, or for searching one out.

Theory of mind

So teleo-functional reasoning helps drive our inner philosopher (and our belief in meaning, destiny, and fate), but what about our belief in god? For that, we turn to “theory of mind.” Simply put, theory of mind is our ability to contemplate the minds of others. Our brains evolved to theorize about the beliefs, intentions, mental states, and emotions of other humans. When you see someone wearing a bizarre outfit and you wonder “What were they thinking when they put that on?” that’s your theory of mind at work. Having a theory of mind was key to the development of Homo sapiens as a social species because it allowed us to make sense of the behaviour of others. And that’s the crux – theory of mind is activated by events or behaviours that require explanation. Anything unexpected triggers this cognitive processing. Why is my friend crouching in the bushes? Why is everyone pointing at Fred? Why is my wife ignoring me?

The thing is, this cognitive architecture, this theory of mind, is completely pervasive – it floods our brains. We overshoot our attribution of intentionality to everything. Consider how your first instinct when you stub your toe may be to shout at your coffee table, or to curse at your printer when it jams the paper. That somehow an inanimate object could appear morally culpable, even for a second, speaks to the ingrained nature of this cognition. It’s easy then to see how this programming, provoked especially by the unexplained (by a violation of our expectations), would also set to work searching for the intent behind natural disasters, the unexpected death of a loved one, the drought that destroyed our crops, a soon-to-be fatal illness. And because only a thinking agent can intend, what we’re really asking is “what is the nature of the mind behind this?” Bering postulates that it is our overactive theory of mind that conjures belief in god and that predisposes us to interpret unexplained events as “signs” from some unseen uber-mind (and for lesser phenomena, spirits trying to “send us messages” from beyond the grave). From a theory of mind perspective, it’s a short leap to understanding why god so often seems to agree with the beliefs, politics, and intuitions of his believers; if we project our own mind out into the world as a way to make sense of it, it’s understandable that we’d find a supersized version of our own staring back.

Asking “what is the intent behind anything?” is much the same as asking what is the meaning of this? To search for intent is to search for meaning. We evolved to refute a meaningless world; purpose must always be attributed to that which can’t be explained. We are all born believers.

(There is a fun tangent that Bering catapults along regarding how god was also an adaptive illusion to protect ourselves from gossip – but I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself if you give this book a read).

Person permanence and other cognitive quirks

Finally, we can ponder why we are prone to illusions of immortality – the soul and an afterlife. To start, it’s impossible to imagine your consciousness not existing, which Bering thinks may contribute to the belief that our minds are immortal, or that we have some continuing mental life after death. We simply can’t conceptualize our psychological inexistence. In studying children, researchers have shown that the belief that our mental capabilities survive death is innate; the belief in continuity of mind after death has to be unlearned. Person permanence is another cognitive hurdle that we must overcome to dispel notions of an afterlife; person permanence is our learned reality that people continue to exist even when we don’t see them. For Bering, all this cognitive architecture primes us for belief in souls and the afterlife. For him, it’s not mere wish fulfillment. After all, you may wish fervently to ride a unicorn – but it would be absurd to imagine it can happen; yet the idea that our mental life survives the destruction of our physical brains is just as bizarre, and that appears to come quite naturally. Others have theorized that fear of death drives the illusion of immortality, but for Bering these fail to address why there is an illusion in the first place.

So, teleo-logical reasoning tells us that our lives have purpose/destiny, our theory of mind imbues us with the sense that there is some intentional, supernatural agent behind the events in our lives, and we are further imbued with the intuition that some essence of ourselves and others survives death, due in part to person permanence and the cognitive impossibility of imagining non-existence. Because this cognitive programming is borne from our evolutionary trajectory, Bering considers these beliefs to be adaptive illusions. Our overactive cognitive architecture is what prepares us to readily endorse religion, prayer, heaven, hell, god, souls, ghosts, and destiny.

If you read “The Belief Instinct,” you’ll find a great deal of overlap between the categories and linkage between the different types of cognitive programming (for example, teleo-functional reasoning can’t even arise unless we have a theory of mind, which is a prerequisite to reflecting on purpose). This to say, I made the decision to sort beliefs into one of the three different cognitive categories to simplify the narrative. You’ll find more diffusion and interconnectivity in the book.

WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)

As an atheist, it’s comforting to consider that my innate cognitive processing predisposes me to be unsatisfied with strictly scientific explanations of life and death – that it’s perhaps expected that I would wonder about origins, and that I would search for meaning in life (and therefore a meaningful story for death). Rationally, I accept the nihilist’s perspective – that there is no inherent meaning in life, only the meaning that we create for ourselves. Perhaps this book helps quell what feels like innate dissatisfaction with that reality. It’s also a gentle reminder that to search for meaning or purpose inherently presupposes a thinking mind – and that for atheists, it’s obvious that mind will have to be their own mind. “What is the meaning behind this?” becomes “what meaning will I create from this?” “What is the purpose of my life?” becomes “what are my values, and what will I decide to spend my time doing?” In the absence of god, the search for meaning and purpose is a self-directed endeavour, not a supernatural predestination.

IN SUM:

Is this book entirely secular? Yes.

If you had to describe the book in one sentence? It is our evolved, cognitive programs that encourage belief in the supernatural.

Who should read this book? Anyone interested in evolutionary psychology and the mechanics of belief.