Religions > Atheism > Is God Nothing More Than An Attempt To Explain Order and Good Fortune?
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Harry Lime harrylime at harrylime dot teevee" |
| Date: |
30 Sep 2005 11:08:04 PM |
| Object: |
Is God Nothing More Than An Attempt To Explain Order and Good Fortune? |
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert05/gilbert05_index.html
Courtesy of www.harrylime.biz
Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good
fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the
principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind?
When the study I just described was accepted for publication, I recall
asking one of my collaborators, who is a deeply religious man, how he felt
about having demonstrated that people can misattribute the products of their
own minds to powerful external agents. He said, "I feel fine. After all, God
doesn't want us to confuse our miracles with his."
That's fair enough. Science rules out the most cartoonish versions of
God by debunking specific claims about ancient civilizations in North
America or the creatio ex nihilo of human life. But it cannot tell us
whether there is a force or entity or idea beyond our ken that deserves to
be known as God. What we can say is that the universe is a complex place,
that events within it often seem to turn out for the best, and that neither
of these facts requires an explanation beyond our own skins.
THE VAGARIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE [9.28.05]
By Daniel Gilbert
DANIEL GILBERT is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and
Director of the Social Cognition and Emotion Lab.
Daniel Gilbert 's Edge Bio Page
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE VAGARIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
[DANIEL GILBERT:] Some religious people regard scientists as foul
heathens, which is terribly unfair. We aren't all that foul. On the other
hand, we do tend to be heathens. The most fundamental principle of science
is that beliefs must be predicated on empirical evidence - things that
everyone can see, touch, taste, and measure - and in more than two thousand
years of recorded history, no one has yet produced a shred of empirical
evidence for the existence of God. That hasn't kept most people from
believing. For as long as pollsters have been asking the question, roughly
90% of Americans have been claiming to believe in God, and a sizeable
majority believes that God takes a personal interest in their lives and
intervenes to help them. When President Bush said, "God told me to strike at
al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam,
which I did," most Americans were not alarmed to learn that their leader was
receiving orders that no one else could hear. America is an unusually
religious nation, but even in the world's least religious nations the
majority of people claim to believe in God.
Scientists understand all this piety and faith by assuming that belief
in God is one of the many primitive superstitions that human beings are in
the process of shedding. God is a myth that has been handed down from one
generation of innocents to the next, and science is slowly teaching them to
cultivate their skepticism and shed their credulity. As Albert Einstein
wrote:
"(I had) a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending
at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon
reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be
true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled
with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state
through lies. It was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of
authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the
convictions which were alive in any specific social environment - an
attitude which has never again left me." (Autobiographical Notes, 1949)
Einstein's orgy of freethinking forever changed our understanding of
space and time, and the phrase "Religion for Dummies" became, in the view of
many scientists, a redundancy.
But this conceptualization of religious belief misses an important
point, namely, that people don't believe in God simply because they are told
to by their elders, but because they are compelled to by their own
experience. William James understood that religious belief grows out of
human experience, and he urged scientists to investigate the experiences
that spawned it:
"I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer (whose)...
religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition,
determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would
profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make
search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to
all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct." (The Varieties of
Religious Experience, 1902)
If belief in God is compelled by experience, then what sorts of
experiences compel it?
Curious Order and Empty Form
Nobody needs God to explain why orgasms feel good and root canals
don't. God's job is to provide an explanation for experiences that are
otherwise baffling and inexplicable. These curious experiences need not
involve seeing angels or speaking in tongues, but may instead be of the
garden variety. Consider the ordinary experience of order. The naturalist,
William Paley, laid the groundwork for the modern notion of intelligent
design when he asked us to imagine what we would conclude were we to come
across a watch lying on the ground.
"The inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had
a maker - that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or
other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we
find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed
its use." (Natural Theology, 1802)
In other words, a watch is not a random assemblage of parts, but a
structured, ordered, obviously non-random assemblage of parts - and
non-random assemblages require explanations. The existence of an intelligent
assembler is a tempting explanation if only because it is at once so
familiar and so complete. For most people, the material universe, biological
life, and human consciousness are the kinds of curious, complex,
well-ordered phenomena that require explanation, and an intelligent designer
seems to provide just that.
But there are at least two problems with this explanation. First,
explanations that rely on the inexplicable are not explanations at all. They
have the form of explanations, but they do not have the content. Yet,
psychology experiments reveal that people are often satisfied by empty form.
For instance, when experimenters approached people who were standing in line
at a photocopy machine and said, "Can I get ahead of you?" the typical
answer was no. But when they added to the end of this request the words
"because I need to make some copies," the typical answer was yes. The second
request used the word "because" and hence sounded like an explanation, and
the fact that this explanation told them nothing that they didn't already
know was oddly irrelevant.
In another study, experimenters approached people in a library, handed
them a card with a $1 coin attached, and then walked away. Some people
received the card on the top, and some received the card on the bottom.
Although the two extra questions on the bottom card - "Who are we?" and "Why
do we do this?" - provide no information whatsoever, they do give one the
sense that puzzling questions have been posed and then answered. The results
of the study showed that the people who received the bottom card were, in
fact, less curious and less delighted twenty minutes after receiving it than
were people who received the top card because only the latter felt that
something wonderful and inexplicable had happened. In short, what William
Paley did not realize is that statements such as "God made it" can satiate
the appetite for explanation without providing any nutritional value.
The second problem with Paley's argument is that highly ordered phenomena
can and do emerge from random processes. If we toss a coin for long enough,
we eventually observe some highly ordered strings such as "head, head, head,
head, head, head" or "head, tail, head, tail, head, tail." Statisticians
have sophisticated techniques that can help determine whether a particular
pattern of coin flips is so unlikely that it (like Paley's watch) can only
be explained by a non-random process. But research in psychology has shown
that people have rather poor intuitions in this regard, and that they tend
to mistake the products of random processes for the products of non-random
processes but not the other way around. For example, if we tossed a coin and
it came up heads five times in a row, many of us would suspect that the
outcome of these flips was non-random and we would search for an explanation
("Maybe one side of the coin has been worn away" or "Perhaps there is a
magnet hidden in the ceiling").
That's a mistake. Because while the odds of tossing five heads in a row by
random chance are not tremendous, they are not slight. In fact, they are
roughly three in a hundred, which are greater than the odds of being killed
by a terrorist or infected by HIV - and those odds strike most of us as
great enough to justify unusual preventative measures, such as military
tribunals, extraordinary rendition, and monogamy. When people look out on
the natural world and declare that there must be a God because all of this
could surely not have happened by chance, they are not overestimating the
orderly complexity of nature. Rather, they are underestimating the power of
chance to produce it.
The Illusion of External Agency
Our tendency to underestimate the power of random processes to create order
leads us to seek explanations where none are needed. Our tendency to be
satisfied by well-formed utterances that are devoid of content compels us to
accept explanations when none are provided. Psychological research has
uncovered a third tendency that may also play a powerful role in creating
the kinds of experiences that compel people to believe in God. If we glance
at a Necker cube (named after the Swiss crystallographer who discovered it
in 1832) we have the sense that we are looking across at a box that has a
dot on its left inside corner. But if we stare for a few moments, the cube
suddenly shifts, and we have the sense that we are looking down at a box
that has a dot sitting on its lower left edge. (If you have any trouble
seeing this illusion, you'll find a more riveting version at
dogfeathers.com/java/necker.html). A Necker cube is an ambiguous object,
which is to say that there is more than one way to see it, and our brains
happily jump between these different views, trying one and then switching to
another. But experiments show that if we are rewarded for seeing the cube
one way rather than the other - rewarded with a jellybean, a dollar bill, or
a friendly pat on the back - our brains begin to hold on to the rewarding
view, and the cube stops changing. The lesson here is that things can be
viewed in many ways, but human brains like the most rewarding view and thus
they search for and hold on to that view whenever they can.
Objects may be somewhat ambiguous, but events are thoroughly ambiguous. If
there are two ways to see a Necker cube, then there are dozens of ways to
see a marriage, a promotion, an illness, or a bankruptcy. When Shakespeare
wrote "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,"
he was reminding us that events can be thought of in many different ways,
and that the way we think of them - identify them, construe them, name them,
explain them - determines whether or not we find them rewarding. When we
hear "Don't forget to take your umbrella!" as a nagging indictment, we feel
annoyed; but when we hear it as a loving reminder, we feel valued. Luckily
for us, the human brain tends to search for and hold onto the most rewarding
view of events, much as it does of objects.
Our ability to find and embrace the most rewarding view of the circumstances
that befall us is nothing short of remarkable, which is why people adapt so
quickly and so well to almost every form of tragedy and trauma. When people
lose someone they love, they feel sad - but research shows that very few
become chronically depressed, and most experience only low levels of
short-lived distress. More than half of all Americans experience a traumatic
event such as rape, physical assault, or natural disaster, but very few ever
require professional assistance. As a leading group of trauma researchers
recently noted, "Resilience is often the most commonly observed outcome
trajectory following exposure to a potentially traumatic event." Indeed, a
significant portion of those who survive major traumas not only do well, but
claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience.
Fine. But what does any of this have to do with belief in God? As it turns
out, most people do not know that their brains are designed to find and hold
on to the most rewarding view of things. Most of the business brains do they
do quietly, in the background, offstage, where we can't observe it. As such,
we are surprised when experiences we once feared and avoided turn out to be
much less awful than we had anticipated, and we are deeply surprised when
they turn out to be blessings in disguise. Who knew that widowhood or
divorce would be an opportunity to meet the partner of our dreams? Who knew
that a heart attack or a prison sentence would lead us to refocus our lives
and concentrate on the things that matter? And who knew - when we were
making that agonizing decision between the Honda and the Mazda, between
Cincinnati and Chicago, between the ballpark and the ballet or the asparagus
and the artichoke - that this one would turn out be so obviously better than
that?
Surprises such as these are curious events, and curious events beg for
explanation. The proper explanation is that we have brains that avidly
pursue the most rewarding view of things. The other explanation is
providence. If there is a God who watches over us, who guides our hand when
we are uncertain, who leads us to places we might not otherwise go, then
unanticipated good fortune makes perfect sense. Things turn out for the best
because someone who knows what is best for us is making them turn out that
way.
Research suggests that people may mistakenly attribute the good fortune that
is the natural product of a helpful brain to the intervention of a helpful
agent. For instance, in a study done in my laboratory, female volunteers
were told that they would be working on a two-person task that required them
to have a teammate whom they liked and trusted. The volunteers were shown
four folders, each of which contained the biography of a potential teammate.
They were told that before reading the biographies they must choose a folder
randomly, and that the person whose biography was in the chosen folder would
be their teammate. The volunteers looked at the four folders, chose one
randomly, and then read the biography they found inside. What the volunteers
did not know was that the experimenter had put the same biography in all
four folders, and that it was the biography of someone who was not
particularly likeable or trustworthy.
So what happened? As the volunteers read the biography, their brains
naturally did what brains do best: They searched for, found, and held on to
the best possible view of the teammate ("Her bio says that she doesn't like
people all that much, but I bet she's just an exceptionally discerning
person"). When volunteers finished reading their new teammate's biography,
they were given three other biographies to read, and they were then asked to
rate all four of the biographies. Not surprisingly, the volunteers rated
their teammate as superior to the others. The volunteers liked their
teammates best because they had brains that knew how to find the most
rewarding view of their current circumstances.
Now comes the interesting part. After the volunteers read and rated the
biographies, the experimenter took the volunteer aside and made a
confession. The experimenter explained that while the volunteer had been
"randomly choosing" a folder, the experimenter had been using a subliminal
message to try to make the volunteer choose the best possible partner. This
wasn't true, of course, but the volunteers believed it. Then the volunteers
were asked the critical question: "Do you think the subliminal message had
any effect on your choice of folders?" The results showed that, by and
large, volunteers thought the subliminal message had guided their choice of
folders. Although they had been given a relatively dislikeable teammate,
their brains had managed to find a rewarding view of that teammate; but
because they did not know that their brains deserved the credit for their
good fortune, they gave the credit to a subliminal message. After all, they
clearly chose the best possible teammate, and there had to be some
explanation for their extraordinary luck!
This study wasn't about subliminal messages, of course. Like many
psychological studies, this one was meant to be an allegory. It suggests
that under some circumstances people can misattribute the uplifting work
that their brains have done to a fictitious external source. Brains strive
to provide the best view of things, but because the owners of those brains
don't know this, they are surprised when things seem to turn out for the
best. To explain this surprising fact, people sometimes invoke an external
source - a subliminal message in the laboratory, God in everyday life.
Coda
Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good fortune by
those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the principles of
self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind? When the study
I just described was accepted for publication, I recall asking one of my
collaborators, who is a deeply religious man, how he felt about having
demonstrated that people can misattribute the products of their own minds to
powerful external agents. He said, "I feel fine. After all, God doesn't want
us to confuse our miracles with his."
That's fair enough. Science rules out the most cartoonish versions of God by
debunking specific claims about ancient civilizations in North America or
the creatio ex nihilo of human life. But it cannot tell us whether there is
a force or entity or idea beyond our ken that deserves to be known as God.
What we can say is that the universe is a complex place, that events within
it often seem to turn out for the best, and that neither of these facts
requires an explanation beyond our own skins.
[Note: The experiments described in this essay are drawn from the following
papers: Gilbert, D. T., Brown, R. P., Pinel, E. C., & Wilson, T. D. (2000).
The illusion of external agency. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 79, 690-700; Langer, E. J., Blank, A., & Chanowitz, B. (1978).
The mindlessness of ostensibly thoughtful action: The role of "placebic"
information in interpersonal interaction. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 36, 635-642; Wilson, T. D., Centerbar, D. B., Kermer, D. A., &
Gilbert, D. T. (2005). The pleasures of uncertainty: Prolonging positive
moods in ways people do not anticipate. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 88, 5-21. ']
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end
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| User: "Denis Loubet" |
|
| Title: Re: Is God Nothing More Than An Attempt To Explain Order and Good Fortune? |
01 Oct 2005 02:08:51 AM |
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"Harry Lime" <harrylime (at) harrylime (dot) teevee> wrote in message
news:75mdnZrHXZo4lqPeRVn-2w@comcast.com...
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert05/gilbert05_index.html
Courtesy of www.harrylime.biz
Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good
fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the
principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human
mind?
That's my pet theory. The concept of god is on the same level as the concept
of a "lucky shirt".
--
Denis Loubet
dloubet@io.com
http://www.io.com/~dloubet
http://www.ashenempires.com
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| User: "Witziges Rätsel" |
|
| Title: Re: Is God Nothing More Than An Attempt To Explain Order and Good Fortune? |
01 Oct 2005 07:49:50 AM |
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|
Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good
fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the
principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human
mind? When the study I just described was accepted for publication, I
recall asking one of my collaborators, who is a deeply religious man, how
he felt about having demonstrated that people can misattribute the
products of their own minds to powerful external agents. He said, "I feel
fine. After all, God doesn't want us to confuse our miracles with his."
<snip>
Coincidences might be more frequent than people think they should
be. After all, a coincidence only "exists" when someone notices it.
For instance, people are often amazed when two or more events, which
they consider unconnected, occur at the same time and attribute a
relationship to that. Such events actually might be taking place
unnoticed all the time.
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