| Why do people believe in gods? The cognitive science of religion does not pretend to be able to explain why any given individual believes in their God or gods. Rather, the cognitive science of religion attempts to identify numerous factors that contribute to the general tendency for people to believe in gods generally and God specifically. Though research in this area is still young and claims must be tentative, some answers to why people—throughout history and across cultures—have generally believed in gods. Why is belief in supernatural beings so common?
Because of the natural design of human minds. Human minds, under normal developmental conditions, have a strong receptivity to belief in gods, in the afterlife, in moral absolutes, and in other ideas commonly associated with ‘religion'. Further, our natural endowment goes a long way toward making religious rituals and other practices a nearly inevitable feature of human sociality. In a real sense, religiousness is the natural state of affairs. Unbelief is relatively unusual and unnatural.
Why do people believe in God? We cannot hope to identify all of these factors that account for a given individual's beliefs. Nevertheless, some scientific research on young children suggests people are naturally biased to see the world as full of purposeful design and we know that humans aren't responsible for this design. If a creator-God is suggested, children find such a being as a reasonable, intuitively-satisfying explanation for the design of the natural world. Children also appear to be biased to think of intelligent beings as super-knowing, super-perceiving, and super-powerful. Rather than start with a limited, human-like being in mind and painstakingly learn that God has super-abilities, just the opposite seems to happen. Children begin by assuming others – God, their mother, and even animals—have super-abilities and have to learn human limitations. On some types of reasoning tasks children have been shown to reason accurately about God (theologically speaking) two years before reasoning accurately about other people. Justin Barrett and his collaborators have conducted some of these experiments with North American children from Christian families. Maya children participated in a study in Mexico by Nicola Knight and his collaborators.
Does the naturalness of religious beliefs mean that they've been explained away and you shouldn't believe in God? One element of the current project is to develop philosophical and theological treatments of what the findings from cognitive science of religion means for various theological positions. So far, there is no clear reason to think that a scientific explanation of a belief means that you should not believe it anymore. One element of the project is scientifically explaining not just belief in gods but why some people become atheists. If scientists can explain why people tend to believe in gods and also why other people tend to believe there are no gods, then surely the presence of a scientific explanation cannot mean that you should not believe one way or the other just on the presence or possibility of such an explanation.
Non-believers might find satisfaction in a sound scientific explanation of why people tend to believe in God because they can now account for why people persist in believing in a fictitious being. The believer might find satisfaction in the scientific documentation of how human nature predisposes people to believe in God because it could reinforce the idea that people were divinely designed to know and believe in God. Both believers and non-believers can agree on the scientific findings.
Relevant books in this area by the research team:
Why Would Anyone Believe in God? - Justin Barrett
This
summarises much of this research demonstrating the naturalness of religious belief.
Born Believers - Justin Barrett
Justin Barrett is currently writing a second book focussing more closely on how children acquire religious beliefs.
Articles by Justin Barrett on this subject (pdf files):
i) Cognitive Science of Religion: What is it, and Why is it?
ii) Is the Spell really broken? Bio-Psychological Explanations of Religion and Theistic Belief
The Mind Possessed - Emma Cohen
This ecent Oxford University Press volume uses insights from the cognitive science of religion to explain why Afro-Brazilian religionists think about spirit possession the way they do. Contrary to what 'common-sense' might tell you, people do not simply believe what authority-figures tell them. Rather, natural mental structures push people into holding certain ideas about the relationship between minds and bodies and what happens when a spirit “mind” takes over a human body—ideas that their theological experts do not teach. Consequently, these ideas populate spirit possession cults, and even modern popular culture, well beyond Brazil.
Roger Trigg's latest book is Religion in Public Life: Must Faith be Privatized?
Project Summary page
Main Cognition, Religion and Theology Project page |
